First Days in Chile- ´´English Opens Doors´´

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Hello everyone and anyone.
Verred and I have been in Chile now for 9 days. We spent the first week doing an orientation with over 100 other volunteers in Santiago. The orientation consisted of 5 days of compact work shops covering everything from Chilean culture to Teaching English to the Chilean governement and school system, to daily spanish classes. These were very long days that at times were very boring but at least provided us with a large resource of information that should prove to be helpful over the next four months.

Most of the highlights from this week invovled just sharing cheap wine with the other volunteers we became friends with and trying to figure out together what the next four months was going to be like. The sad part about this week was that even though we made some really good friends we are going to be no where near any of them for the next four months.

Thoughts on Santiago---i didn´t really spend that much time exploring santiago. like i said i spent most of my time in the hostal all us volunteers were holed up in. but what i did do was one day of exploring on foot. we went to this park in the center of the city called San Cristobol, there was also some other name and a large statue of the virgen mary at the top. what you do at this park is ride a tram car straight up the side of a hill to the top where the statue is. at this point you can walk around and see all of santiago. which from this view is a mix of old spanish colonial city, attempts at modern achitecture, condo bulidings in every direction and a ever present layer of smog with the snow peaked andes in the back drop. verred has some pretty decent photos from this week. which we will try and upload later.

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