So, funny story...

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Oh boy. So many things to tell. This is going to be a super long entry, just warning you in advance. But I'm going to attempt to explain everything that I remember in regards to the earthquake and what happened to me and stuff, so I think it'll be interesting? I hope so. If not, there are going to be amazing pictures of my trip to the south, so hopefully that still hold yall's interest. Anyway, I'm going to start from the beginning, which would be last Monday, Feb 22.
So yea, last week was midterms for me, like I said in my previous entry. I had a paper to turn in and three tests that happened throughout the week, and I think they all went fine. I'm assuming we'll be getting our grades back for all of them on Monday when we go back to class, but after what happened with the earthquake and stuff I'm not sure and I haven't really thought about it, so who knows. But anyway the midterms were why I hadn't updated my travel blog for a few weeks before this, because nothing was really happening because I was studying and/or writing my paper so I didn't really have time to do other things. Anyway, I was pretty much studying or taking tests last week and nothing important happened last weekend, so I'll start with the good stuff, aka Friday morning at 6:45 a.m.
Which is when I had to be at the metro station Tobalaba (an irrelevant fact, but I didn't know what else to say) to meet the other 30 people from my program who were going on the Southern trip with me. That was not a good morning for me...I woke up at like 5:45 to make sure I had everything I needed to take with me and get ready and make it over there and such...I haven't woken up that early in a loooong time. So that was sad. But anyway I was still excited to get away from Santiago and school and such for awhile. The flight and everything was uneventful, and actually going through Chilean airport 'security' was the best airport experience I've had thus far...I was all nervous about having like 8 oz. of sunscreen on my carry-on instead of the 3 oz. that I'm used to having in the U.S. but apparently only the U.S. has all these crazy airport regulations and restrictions about stuff like that. We all just got our boarding passes and walked through the metal detector and sent our carry-on bags through the scanner and it took approximately five seconds to go through security, and the flight took an hour and a half and then we were in the south!
We flew into Puerto Montt, which is a port city on the very most southern part of Chile that is still considered part of the continent...from there Chile breaks into little islands and fragments of land, and then the land continues down to Patagonia and Antarctica, and I definitely didn't want to go any farther south than we went on this trip. Anyway, then we took a ferry to the island of Chiloe, which kind of reminded me of Pelee Island (for those of you non-Ohioans, it's an island in Lake Erie...but don't worry, pictures of my trip are forthcoming anyway) but it's this darling little island with all these quaint suburbs and we spent the day there walking around and going to museums and churches. The landscape is beautiful and it reminded me of how I picture Ireland is (I haven't actually been to Ireland, I'm just projecting, but again, yall will be able to judge for yourselves when I put the pictures up) and it really helped that the weather was beautiful for about 85% of the trip...it was sunny and breezy and it set off the landscape really well.
Anyway, we stayed in Chiloe Friday night, which is when stuff started getting serious. At 3:30 a.m. on Saturday morning (February 27th) an 8.8 magnitude earthquake hit Concepcion, Chile, and in Santiago it was a 7.5. I didn't even feel anything, but I woke up at 6:30 to go to the bathroom and saw that I had a text message from Anna at 4:30 in the morning that said something about a big earthquake hitting Chile and asking me if I was okay. Which made me really confused because I hadn't felt anything, and also because it was really early, and also because it didn't seem like my hotel room had power because I couldn't turn on any of the lights to go to the bathroom...but I disregarded everything and went back to sleep for a bit, before getting up to run with one of the other girls in the program who's training for the marathon that's happening in Santiago for a few weeks, in which I am decidedly not participating. But I digress. I heard another one of the guests in the hotel talking to the concierge about what happened and the concierge said there was a big earthquake that hit Concepcion and that there wasn't power in the hotel rooms, but no one knew any information besides that. So I didn't really think any more about it and went running. When we got back all of the students on the trip were debriefed about what happened during breakfast and everyone started to worry about their parents and friends and people who were coming to visit and other plans for spring break, etc. because we found out it was a 7.5 magnitude in Santiago. So we spent the rest of the day in a different part of Chiloe, alternately going to open-air markets and freaking out and discussing what happened and alerting everyone that we weren't even in Santiago and were, in fact, alive. That was a weird day, to say the least.
And then the earthquake, as a whole, proceeded to mess up the rest of our vacation. Well, kind of. That's pretty much the only thing everyone talked about for the next six days we were all together and everyone’s plans were ruined/rearranged/changed. We continued on with our scheduled itinerary though—we went to a few national parks and saw lakes and volcanoes and hot springs and drove through these beautiful rolling hills and it was sunny and relaxing…again, the pictures will display what I saw better than I can describe it, so I’ll stick to more earthquake business.
So all of us kept watching the news and seeing all of these horrible pictures of Concepcion and Santiago and hearing all this news about 700 deaths and tsunami warnings and aftershocks and entire areas of cities being destroyed, and it was absolutely bizarre being in the south for the entirety of the aftermath and chaos of the earthquake…like, I was absolutely fine and had no idea about how anything was in Santiago because I wasn’t there, but people kept asking what was going on and thinking I was involved and possibly hurt when in reality I was hundreds of miles south of any danger…it was odd. But apparently Santiago’s international airport (the one I flew into exactly two months ago, ironically) had suffered some pretty serious damage and flights into/out of that airport were at first shut down, then operating at like 15%, then 20%, etc…so we were supposed to have a flight going out of Puerto Montt on Tuesday evening and arrive in Santiago later that night, and then Julie and I had planned to fly to Buenos Aires the next day (Wednesday) and spend the rest of the vacation there. However, we ended up being stranded in Puerto Varas (another port city about 20 minutes away from Puerto Montt) for two extra nights. Needless to say, I did not catch my flight out of Santiago to Buenos Aires on Wednesday because I was in the south, but I still had to deal with that nightmare of cancelling my flight through Expedia while I wasn’t even in Santiago with no international calling capabilities and limited internet access…I ended up calling my mom about 2 hours before I needed to cancel my flight and essentially forcing her to take care of everything (thank you mom…I appreciate your taking care of it for me  ) and I can reschedule it for a different week or weekend and I didn’t lose any money, so I’m just glad that part turned out fine.
But we were pretty much stranded in Puerto Varas, waiting for a flight to open up so the 30 of us could fly together back to Santiago. First we were told we would be able to fly back on Tuesday like we had originally planned. Then we were told we might be able to fly back Wednesday morning. Then we were told we would definitely be going back ‘sometime’ Thursday. We finally flew back yesterday afternoon and arrived in Santiago yesterday night …Anna had already been in the apartment for a day because she had different spring break plans and ended up driving back (which, even though being a full two-day trip, put her back in the apartment a day ahead of me…irony) and everything was working: we had electricity and water and gas and my computer wasn’t broken like I was expecting it to be and there was no structural damage to the apartment.
All in all, it’s been an interesting experience. This entry doesn’t really do justice to everything that’s happened in the past week, but it’s already twenty times longer than all of my other entries, but just as boring, so I feel like that’s not a good ratio and I’m going to end it here. I’ll put the pictures up tomorrow because it took me like an hour to write this and I’m tired of blogging, haha. But I wanted to thank everyone who emailed/facebooked/tried to call me to see how I was…I feel like it’s happenings like these that let one know who really cares, so thanks to yall who care  I’ll put the pictures up tomorrow, and I hope everyone’s spring break goes well! (At least better than mine, haha)

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Photos

southern trip
I really don't feel like adding tags to 100 photos, so I'm going to summarize: all of these were taken during my trip to the south and are either in chiloe, puerto montt, or puerto varas. if you really really really want to know the specific place of one, ask plz