Hola de Chile!!!!

Well, I made it and now I’m in the far South once again! The best Hemisphere (even though it’s winter here)!

The flight from LA was a long one, but luckily the flight from Dallas to Santiago wasn’t full so I had two seats to myself! The flight was good, even though there was A LOT of turbulence…but when coming in to land at the airport, the sun was just coming up over the Andes! It was INCREDIBLE! Though, there wasn’t enough light to take lovely pictures: - (

Chile doesn’t want you to bring fresh fruit into the country (like several other countries), so you have to declare anything that’s fresh and throw it away. I had dried mango with me so I thought it wise to declare this…so when they put all my luggage through the x-ray machine, I was stopped because I had an apple in my bag! I had completely forgotten about it! Oops! I was so lucky that I had declared the dried mangos so they knew I didn’t do it on purpose….otherwise I would have been given a fine!

Palo picked me up and at first I really struggled to speak Spanish…but by the end of the day, I felt like I had been speaking it forever once again! Thank God for that! So far I’ve been exploring the capital city, Santiago, with Paola. I’ve gone to a park that has a castle on top of this hill, with a lovely view of the city and the Andes, went to a shopping centre (Chilean people love them!), have driven in really old buses around the city, seen the main building of the main University and have already tried several different sweet Chilean sweets… they have a real sweet tooth here!

Yesterday many of Paola’s friends came over to come and meet me and we ended up staying up till 4:30 this morning! It was really cool to meet these people and hear different Spanish accents because two of her friends are from Columbia. Though what was REALLY EXCITING was the TREMOR that we felt yesterday evening. Talk about ironic, since yesterday I had just told Paola’s mother that I had never in my life experienced an earthquake, and they said that they have them here all the time and most of the time you don’t even feel them….And then yesterday we had one!! I was a bit confused because I didn’t understand why all the dogs in the neighbourhood started barking like mad and why the plant next to me was shaking! Lol! At the moment we’re trying to find out how strong the tremor was, but since they happen so often, they hardly ever report them in the news….coincidently, Chile has the highest recorded reading on the Richter scale in the whole world at 9.5!

...Just found out the "tremor" had a magnitude of 4.6! Quite high...almost an eathquake!

So, the view from my room is incredible…if there’s no fog or smog, you can see the Andes. Wanted to upload a photo, but it's too big for this connection...