Here and Moved In

What a day.

Slept in until almost ten, since hey, we were at a resort and that's what you do at resorts. There were two highlights to the morning:

1. Madeline (aka "Chicago," for her home city) getting herself trapped in the bathroom and panicking before she realized she had simply locked the door.
2. A small Chilean child drinking her Earl Grey with five spoons of sugar and threatening to kill me if I told her mother.

I've decided that small children speaking Spanish is adorable. Just because they're small children, I suppose, with the added attraction in that they're actually speaking, at such a young age, this crazy language that I only know about from junior high and/or high school. You don't really consider other languages to be quite equal to your own until you hear little kids speak it and realize "hey, this is for real."
This particular kid was quite chatty.

We left the hotel at 1:30 (Chilean version of 12:00), and drove for about an hour on the bus before reaching Viña del Mar.
And what a city!
I don´t know what I was expecting, but it wasn´t this. My first view of it was hundreds of bright houses perched atop a dozen different hills, with modern skyscrapers, construction cranes, and huge billboards in the background. The bus stopped in front of a white mansion with pillars and surrounding gardens (also surrounded by caution tape, due to quake damage), and we all unloaded our luggage and stood around for a while to wait for our host families. Viña is much cleaner than Santiago-- you can actually breathe the air without wanting to scour your lungs with steel wool-- and I can see why they call it the Garden City. There´s the usual poor areas, sure, but even those are full of flowers and greenery and clever little windchime things made out of wood and bits of glass.

Totally off-topic yet pertinent: these aftershocks are getting annoying. That´s the third one today.

Anyway, eventually the ISA folks hooked me up with Myriam, the gal who runs my pensión with her husband Jeime. She was there with two boys, Cristobal, from northern Chile, and a fellow whose name starts with an R (Ricardo? Reduardo? Will make certain in the morning...), who is her son. All of them immediately started yakking away in Spanish, asking me where I´m from and what I think of the city and where I was during the terremoto, etc. etc. as we walk down the street towards the house.

The house is not what I expected at all. I thought it would be your normal two-story downtown townhouse-type thing. Maybe with a little garden or something.
Nope.
It´s perched on the third floor of a labyrinthine complex of stores and apartments, and is reached by walking down an alley in the middle of downtown, unlocking a high iron gate, and walking up three flights of rickety stairs after passing through another gate beneath a huge palm tree. It´s small, but it´s evident that they take very good care of it, and there´s a view across a sort of river to the city from the dining room (my room looks at the buildings beside, including the laundry hanging on lines between windows). There´s no water at the moment, given that parts of the city still need repair, so after I unpacked all of my stuff Myriam took all of us to a friend´s house for showers.

We took a taxi. A colectivo, rather, which is basically a taxi that is cheaper and carries groups. The streets are narrow and winding and in places almost vertical, and there were no seatbelts. Which was terrifying, I won´t lie, but no one died on the way there and for the most part speeds remain below 20 or 30 mph. Which... isn´t very reassuring, I´ll grant, and I´ll probably take buses or the metro more often, but I was told that that´s how it´s done in Chile as far as colectivos are concerned.

The friend was a quirky old woman in a massive apartment complex which had suffered minor cosmetic quake damage. We were over to run up her water bill and mess up her bathroom, but she acted like it was a birthday party and chatted it up and offered tea and cookies (at least they looked kind of like cookies-- huge, double-layered cookies coated with solid caramel) and turkey on bread while one by one five people used her shower.

(Seriously now, tremors, stop it-- I´m not kidding)


I could follow the conversation at the table, more or less (mostly less) and managed to get in a few comments of my own, but mostly just sat back and listened. Everyone here so far has been amazingly kind and curious, wanting to know all about Washington and what I think about Chile and whether or not I like the Backstreet Boys and why the Golden Gate is called the Golden Gate when it isn´t a gate, it´s a bridge...

After showers and once (Chilean teatime), which took more than three hours, we returned to the house via colectivo and I took the opportunity to set up wireless. Called Dad, arranged a brief videochat between him and my host family, and then sat down to write this.