LOS GRINGOS HAN LLEGADO

You would honestly think that bars don´t exist in the US or elsewhere. They are apparently a phenomenon available only in Chile. So 50+ students arrived the other day and the future was made clear to me: we will drink a lot. I was a lightweight for heading back to the hotel at 1 in the morning. A few of them kept it up until 7...and several surprisingly made it to breakfast at 8:30.

Regardless of a little drinking, having so many of Americans simply reinforced my desire to meet more Chileans. We have a very diverse group in at least experience and world travel. Several Scandinavians spice up the mix a bit, and the Canadian is adept in losing himself in almost any situation.

Oh, and it´s a tiny world. Ken is one of the guys on the trip and we got to talking about whitewater rafting, and he´s worked with several of the same people I have met over the past several years. We have rafted many of the same rivers and we now plan to hit a few down here when we get the opportunity-meaning it´s just a matter of time before I´m flying down a river with very little understanding of what´s going on around me. I can´t wait.

Everyone moved in with their families, and I returned to mine after the short break. Nico is 22, Berna is 31, and my parents are great. I live in Las Condes, which is east of the city center and takes roughly 45 minutes by micro(bus) and metro(subway) to reach. The house is great. In addition to my own toilet to experiment with I have my own room off of the kitchen. The lack of heat in the house makes me the opposite of the princess and the pea story. I have 700 plankets on top of me whilst she rested upon 700 mattresses. Other than the inability to breathe it´s not bad. I´ve been going to bed in a good mood though. Luckily my mom has taken it upon herself to introduce me to as many Chilean wines as possible. I´ll try to reference drinking as much as possible to frighten my father into worrying even more that I´m an alcoholic!

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I´m sorry that there aren´t any photos up yet, but you can´t imagine how much they´ve been like,"You´ll get robbed if you tie your shoe...or even blink." Oh and mom, there was a murder here last week. But don´t worry, I heard the guy had short hair, so I´ll be fine.
So I´ve been slightly timid about heading out with my camera before I know the lay of the land. But once that begins, and once I figure out all of the correct things to buy to get my computer working, I´ll be throwing up pictures that don´t even have anything to do with Chile. You won´t know what to do then.

EL FIN DE SEMANA
For the first weekend here a few of us have large plans. I think we´re heading to a discoteque tonight and then hopefully heading to the mountains to ski and snowboard before classes begin on Monday. I´ll be attending Universidad Andres Bello, which is a private univeristy. Apparently all of the public universities are much better and people only attend the private ones if they have money. So, damn straight everyone, that means for the first, maybe second time in the past 20 years...I am in the upper class.
But it doesn´t really feel like that when it takes me half an hour to understand what to make of a cell phone offer at the mall. I think I pay 20,000 pesos and receive a phone and 20,000 pesos worth of calls. But I could be way off. To put that into context...500 pesos = roughly $1 ( depending on the strength of the Czech Crown versus the Yen at any given time and place). Luckily tracking money has been very easy at this point - it leaves my bank account. Making me a little less on the well-off side of things.

So that should make for a decent weekend.

Here´s a little ditty: if you could name a currency, what would it be? Because I am feeling like the peso is used way too much overall. Maybe we could mock Europeans and combine all of ours into the Amero, but it would still probably be weaker. I think some like the WOW would be cooler, though. "Man, that car is only 7,000 WOW. I can´t believe it." Imagine the marketing schemes.