Blogs from Ñuñoa, Santiago Region, Chile, South America

Yet again, over 2 months have passed without me writing a word here. Once you boil it down, my life here is just like my life at home. I go to work, I eat, I sleep, and I do some things in between all of those. So really during much of the past 10 weeks, there hasn't been too much exciting stuff going on to write about, but now that I sit here and actually think of it, I suppose there are some pretty cool things about living here that you should know about. First, my new apartment/community that I moved to at the beginning of October continues to charm me everyday. Despite my initial fears that it would be too far from things, it's turned out to be exactly what I wanted. Close enough to ... read more

It's been a long week, capped off with classes, and a lot of them, field trips, but also some birthdays and some fun. Needless to say, I'm pretty grateful it's Friday night. The week started off Saturday, with a trip to Via Grimaldi, a torture camp during the Pinochet era. Our tour guide was one of the survivors, who showed us around and told us some stories of his time there. Pedro, our aforementioned tour guide, then took us to the Santiago General Cemetery, where Salvador Allende was buried. I have very few pictures of these sites, out of respect to Pedro, I didn't want to be occupied taking pictures as opposed to listening to what he had to say. Monday was a little bit of madness in mid-town, I just had to run some errands ... read more

Hola everyone! I know my previous India blog trailed off towards the end, but I am eager to start blogging again about my next adventure here in Chile! I left Canada at 2:40 on February 28th, and reached Santiago the next morning, bright and early! My actual flying experience was pretty interesting in itself, I opted for the pat-down twice instead of going into those over-invasive and kind of scary scanner machines that they've now started using in airports, and even had to go through a random chemical swab. What exactly they're looking for with a chemical swab, I have no idea, but it was a weird/interesting experience showing the growth of global security (latching onto people's fears to make money if I may add). Anyways we're not here to talk about that, but it's something ... read more

Okay, so I took a 24 hour bus ride from Puerto Madryn to Mendoza. Unfortunately I couldnt spend any time there to look around because I had to catch a bus across the border to Santiago. So maybe I was tired or maybe I was just dumb but I really didn,t think about how to cross the border between argentina and chile you need to go through the Andes. So I took a nap on the bus and when I woke up instead of green vineyards and mountains in the background, there was literally snow flying through the window and landing on my face!! That was quite a shock but a cool one because we were at the border then and everybody had to get out and go through a ridiculous 10 million hour long process ... read more

As predicted, it's been a frustrating two weeks. I arrived in Santiago on Sunday, February 13 after an uncomfortable flight (American Airlines apparently puts their oldest, most crowded planes on the South American routes). For the first two weeks here, I've been taking intensive language classes and staying with a teacher from the school. Meanwhile, I've been frantically looking for a place to live for the rest of the year, which is far easier said than done. I don't love Santiago yet. There is a lot of good and a lot of bad. In short, the jury is still out. Here is the short list... SANTIAGO: The Good - It's a cool city! There is art, music, culture, etc. It's pretty here, more or less. Think sort of European Architecture with a weird Mexican influence. The ... read more