Primer día en Chile, 1st day in Chile

 The airport is quite small, but a 15 minute ride in a taxi and we made it to the hostel. As in ‘we’ I mean Lexi, and it just so happens our good friends are cousins, we had exchanged e-mails about 4 days beforehand and coincidently were we standing next to each in line for immigration.

The hostel we are staying at is called international hostelling in Santiago, Chile.  I have never stayed in a hostel and had no idea what to expect.  But in a 12 ft by 24 ft room there is 2 sets of bunk beds, and 4 locking closets.

Well me and Lexi decided and take another friend along and explore the city of Santiago. Visited some shops and bought a Towel(forgot to bring), and a restaurant. I ordered a Sandwich, which is basically a Mexican torta, however in Chile torta is a cake not a sandwich. And the word of Sandwich, well is Sandwich.

Visited Castillo de Hilldalo, here is a picture of it, since I did not bring my camera. It's on a hill where you can see most of Santiago. Another girl brought her camera, so I may upload pictures later.

It was really hot that day, about 65 degrees(different from the Chicago winter I have been getting used to), and walking a part of the city as well as walking up many steps to get to the top of Castillo de Hilldalo, I went back to the Hostel too take a shower and nap.  Apparently the warm water was getting worked on and I had to take a cold shower, however, today the hot water was turned back on.

Last night was pretty fun, some Chileans that work at the hostel had some friends over and I was chatting them up, because it was Saturday they were all drinking and dancing.  Most of the guys like rock, and bands such as Rage and Metallica(I even saw multiple iron maiden shirts while walking the city), however they play spanish/Mexican music all day, and at night we were listening to reggeton(?)  But after having a  few beers with them they convinced a group  of us to go to a bar.  The bar was a American version of Bourboun St on 115^th street.  There were 3 parts of the bar, one side was an actual bar, and the other side was a nightclub/disco.  The middle part of the bar was quite odd. To buy a drink you have to buy a ticket for which drink you want. Then after buying the ticket you went to the bar either on the disco side or the bar side to get a drink. So there is no opportunity for a spur of the moment shots of buying other people drinks unless you bought them at the cashier area beforehand.  Our group left a little early, because many of us arrived that day and were tired from dancing majority of the time.  The Chileans at the bar danced like many people around the around the world.  About 2 steps from each other moving to side to side.(at least in my experience in Spain). I didn’t see a lot of ‘grinding’ as we call it. And maybe it was this type of bar, but there was no salsa/traditional dancing).  After getting back to hostel from a taxi I stayed up pretty late talking to a few of the Chileans drinking and ‘partying’ at the hostel. The beer is cheap here, around 2 dollars for a liter (1000 thousand pesos, around 480 per dollar).

I was talking to a guy that wanted to become a lawyer. He said it is very hard for him, because in Latin American, you do not loose you mother’s last name. It is added to your father’s by a hypen. So in his case he had a ‘native american’ mother’s name, whose name was attached to his Spanish father’s name.  I will have to say am glad that there really isn’t much discrimination solely based on names in the US.  I am sorry, but I do not recall which part of Chile his mother was from(Mapuche I think), as it was getting late and after many drinks. However, on the Spanish side of everything, it is true that the Chilean's speak very fast and drop the s's and d's in many of their words. I can understand about 75% of what is going on, but a good thing is I can get the jist or meaning of what they are trying to say if I don't understand everything to keep the conversation going.

Today while I was writing this, there was a demonstration in the street that went outside our hostel.  Asking a few people what it was about, it seemed to be about, people against nuclear power plants here in chile, as well as Obama’s policies about Libya, as he arrived here today. 

I'll post a video in the next post, so you can get the true feeling.

On a side note, and my father will like this as he is a plumber, but they do not flush the toilet paper you use in the toilet.  You must throw it away in the small trash bin in front of the toilet. Kinda weird to get used to a first….

Apologize for the random order of things, Maybe I'll get better, but a lot is getting thrown at me at once and its hard to get it all down or sort it out for that matter...