Navigating the City

P.S. (Pre Script) I added to last time's post. There is now a Sunday update.


Bueno. I got up on time, got ready, made breakfast and instant coffee and left for the metro. I figured that if must have taken Arturo and me 45 minutes to get to the school yesterday, so I should leave at 8:15 if I wanted to be there at 8:45. I left at 8:25. I got there at 9:10. But I ran into two fellow IFSA-ers headed the wrong way, so maybe I was supposed to be late so I could catch them and show them the way. Or perhaps divine power sent them the wrong way so that I wouldn't show up late by myself. Either way, the meeting didn't even start until almost 9:30. I love Chilean time. Oh, and I followed a dog almost the whole way to the metro. I swear the dogs here know street crossing safety rules. And there are soooo many of them. Connor, if we lived in Santiago instead of Duncanville, we would come home with like, multiple dogs a day.

We discussed some of the courses and class adding procedure in the orientation at Universidad Catolica and then had snack. There were lots of other schools from the US and other programs also. When we returned they had set the room up into different sections of classes, like education, math, science, philosophy....etc. and we were supposed to go ask current students questions about possible classes and such. I was following along with the answers to my questions pretty well, until I realized that I was following along so well, at which point I so impressed myself with my own ability to keep up with the student's fast spanish that I distracted myself, and my ability to translate stumbled, crashed and burned. So I pretended that I had got all I wanted from her and found other people from my group that were done as well.

And and I needed money and went on our way to find a bank that would exchange travel checks. So we walked for a while until we came to a bank and went in. They told us that we couldn't do that at this specific bank and pointed us in the direction of somewhere else. We walked in that direction for a while until we saw a street with like 4 banks. We picked one and entered. Couldn't do it there either, however. Wrong bank. Down the street was the place that we figured was bound to be the bank that we kept getting closer and closer to. It was not, and we were redirected once again. So we followed the street a little more until it came to a plaza with like, 6 banks. No joke. Picked one that looked good and tried to exchange. Finally found the place that would exchange them, but said we had to have our passports on us, which we obviously didn't. Ticked off and getting hot, we decided to just go have lunch somewhere and figure out our next plan of action.

We went back to the metro in the direction of Ana's to get swim suits, and then we walked for about 20 minutes to Ansel and Lee's apartment building. Water was ice cold. So there wasn't much swimming. But we hung around the pool for a while anyway. We decided that one really slows oneself down when in Chile. Walking everywhere, being late for things, eating for hours at a time. It is a very enjoyable lifestyle. Instead of getting a taxi to their apartment building, we had a really great walk. We passed parks, ate watermelon and had various metaphysical discussions. People really should walk more.

We left their building a few hours later to make it back to Ana's before sunset. After so long outside in the sun and walking so far, we were starving. Her host mom served us each spaghetti that was fabulous and could probably have fed at least two people. But I almost finished it. We planned on showering and hanging out with some people, but I fell asleep while Ana was getting ready and then she decided that she was tired too. So I called a radio taxi and got home around 11. Pretty much it. I have to be at the school at 8 tomorrow so its bed time.

<3