First Week (ish) in CHILE!

So I've been in Chile for almost a week now...and what a week it has been! Who would have thought that I would be welcomed to my study abroad experience by an 8.8 earthquake! In fact, the fifth largest earthquake ever recorded in the world! Bienvenido a Chile! lol. So I got to Santiago on Thursday after a really long flight during which I definitely couldn't sleep and I met up with the ISA staff and the other students in the program. The ISA staff members are so amazing and nice and patient with us, they are great! Our orientation was good for those first two days. We went on some tours around Santiago; we went in a funicular, which is like a train that goes up a hill (there are apparently a lot of them in Valpo as well but I haven't really seen any yet), saw views of the city, went out to a bunch of restaurants, and even went out to a bar. It was fun to get to know the city a little bit and also to get to know the other students in the ISA program.

But on Friday night, or I guess it was Saturday morning, the fun really began. We had just gotten back from going out to a bar (by the way, pisco sour is my new friend) about an hour earlier and were asleep in bed when all of a sudden the beds start shaking violently and hey there's an earthquake! We were on the sixth floor of the hotel so it was pretty strong and it went on for a long time. It was definitely the strongest earthquake I've ever experienced, even living in So Cal. The funny part about the whole situation, however, was mine and my roommates' reactions to the "terremoto." Ironically, that same day our ISA staff told us in orientation that there are tremors all the time in Chile that can be up to like a 6 or 7 magnitude but they still aren't considered earthquakes because they happen like twice a day. She specificlaly told us that we would think it was an earthquake but it really was just a tremor. So when the 8.8 hit on Saturday, I definitely thought it was one of those tremors--which is wasn't. So me and my roommate Abigail (also from Willamette) just stayed in bed and didn't even go to the doorway because we thought it was something we were going to have to get used to happening every day. Then after it was over we decided we should just go back to sleep and not worry about evacuating or anything (so smart, right?). About ten minutes later an ISA staff member came to our room and told us that it had in fact been a real earthquake and we needed to grab our valuables and a jacket and go oustide and that we might be there for the whole night. So that was definitely interesting and made me feel pretty stupid.

The next day we had to leave Santiago and go to a city called Olmue because the hotel building we were in wasn't structurally sound (which is funny because they definitely let us sleep there for the rest of the night). We were going to go to our host families one day early and just settle in on Saturday, but because of the earthquake there were tsunami threats on the coast, which is where Vina and Valpo are located. So we spent two nights in a fancy resort in Olmue which wasn't too bad, although we didn't have internet for a while and we didn't really have much information about what was happening in Chile or with our program or anything so it was kind of stressful. I definitely felt isolated from my family/friends in the US and also from the rest of Chile. It felt kind of weird to be eating amazing food and relaxing by the pool at a fancy resort when there were at least 700 people dead and many more suffering from the earhquake all throughout the country. It was also really strange to look on facebook that same day and see an ad asking for help for Chile....the country that I was in. Crazy!

Yesterday we got to leave Olmue and finally meet our host families. My host family is one mom, Tere, and two sons, Franco (16) and Mauro (22). They are all really nice and I am getting along with them well so far--although I have trouble understanding them talking really fast but I'm getting better. They told me my Spanish is good though which is exciting! Well I better finish this up since it's getting pretty long but I just thought I'd update everyone on my situation. It's funny because this was really hard for me to write in English. I kept wanting to write things in Spanish or like do weird grammatical constructions, haha. Muy interesante. Entonces, hasta luego!