First week in Santiago

A few things about my first week in Santiago !

Spanish lessons : After 5 days of  lessons, I can’t have a proper conversation, but I start to understand a bit more, and I can make sentences !

The house I leave in : we are 12 people, from Mexico, USA, France, Germany, Chile… and everybody speaks spanish, so it is way better for me, I will learn faster ! Even if at the end of the day I feel like my brain is gonna explode 🙂

Santiago / a huge city : 7 millions people live here ! It looks really crawded in the main streets, but in general nobody is really pushing you or too stressed to not look around to the others… It looks pretty relaxed in general. And there are some parks, with lawns where it is possible to lay on 🙂

The Chilean food has nothing really special, except the fast-food : empanadas, completos… and a lot of other stuffs that I didnt try yet. I tried the empanadas, we can find them everywhere, it is a dough filled with meat, vegetables, pretty much anything… they are baked or fried. So I had few of them this week, it is easy to get for lunch, pretty cheap, and taste good if I dont chose some spicy ones 🙂 I did not try the completos yet, they are kind of hot dogs, because I am waiting a bit that my stomach get use to eat this kind of food pretty slowly…

I wanted to see a bit more of the Andes this week end but unfortunately it is really grey, cold and rainy… so we will see next week to go to the hill (cerro san cristobal) in the middle of the city and have the view…

But we went to cerro santa Lucia, which is a monument in the city, and from the top we can see a part of the Andes.

Waiting for more pictures and adventures, I can tell you a few funny things about Chileans…

The first is in the toilets : yea, of course, everywhere in the world I go I will have something to say about toilets… 😉 They don’t put the toilet paper in the toilets, but in a bin placed next to the toilets. At home, as we are  a lot of people, the bin is bigger than the toilet !

Second thing, funny but not really… Electricity… the sockets, the leads, the plugs… every thing looks burned, melted, fixed with tape, bended…. yea, I hesitate a bit everytime i have to turn on a light. I just have to forget my profession for a few months I guess…

After, we have the crossing of streets… Of course there are traffic lights, they are red and green, and they mean the same than everywhere : red we stop, green we go. BUT nobody really cares about it here… when you are a pedestrian, you cross when you can, between cars… and in the bus I just covered my eyes with my hands when the driver went through the crossing at a red light… So, the rule is to not really trust the lights, especially the green ones if you are a pedestrian… you should just check really carefully before crossing…

The last point for this week : the alarms of cars… everywhere, at any time, there are cars with alarms on… 4 or 5 different sounds, always in the same order… really loud, any they are turning on pretty randomly… and this is a bit annoying… but I start getting use to it !

It is a different way of leaving ! 🙂 But I like it so far !