A New Home

I'm finally at my host house! So far, everything here's great. My host mom, Veronica, is unbelievably sweet. Yesterday I had lunch with her and her good friend. Then for dinner she called a few of the kids from the program who live near me and invited them over for dinner. We had pizza and soda. It was so sweet and made the whole brand new experience much more comfortable. I live with her and her 25 year old son, Rafa. He's on vacation right now, but I'll be meeting him later tonight or tomorrow. If he's as nice as his mom, I'm going to have a great time.

I have a bedroom with a bed, desk, night table, and closet. I also get my own bathroom, which is great. I had a small hot water issue this morning in the shower, but that's getting fixed. I'm in between the kitchen and my host brother's room. There's also a living/dining room and my host mom's bedroom. There's a nice terrace with a barbeque, and I'm told when the weather gets nicer we'll have lots of meals asado (on the grill). We're in a really great neighborhood, and are really close to a lot of other people in the program.

Today we went to the supermarket, which proved to be quite an experience. Apparently every Chilean and his brother goes shopping on Sundays. We went to Jumbo, which is like Costco but the food is sold normally, not in bulk. I have never seen somewhere so crowded. And the Chileans are not exactly patient with their shopping carts. I got rear ended more than a few times. There were literally lanes of shopping carts like there are for cars. It was pretty amusing. So now I've learned not to shop on Sunday. But I did finally manage to get money from an ATM that works. However I got a little confused about the decimal point, comma difference and so took out a lot more than i meant to. Oh well, I guess it'll last me a while.

Speaking the language 24/7 is proving to be quite challenging. My "mom" speaks very quickly and quietly. When I met her yesterday, she slowed down a lot once she saw I couldn't understand her. But while she was talking to her friend yesterday, she picked it up again. I can understand a lot of it, but not all. Luckily, it seems to be getting better pretty quickly. After being here for a little over 24 hours, I'm already starting to figure out how to grasp the main concept without hearing all the words. And I'm definitely not alone in this...everyone I've talked to has the same experience.

Tomorrow we're meeting up again as a group to take a tour of the main campus where our classes will be. Then we're taking an oral spanish test so that our teacher knows what level to put our class at. Being all alone in a house has been really nice, but it makes me reappreciate the group I'm with. It'll be nice to see them again. And I'm hoping to see some of them tonight as well. It's odd being in college but living at home, or a home. But at least I'm in a really nice home, and my host mom has done this a lot of times before so she's being really great about helping me figure out what I need to know.