day one

Hello all!

I woke up this morning to my airplane neighbor asking me to open the window to see if we could see land yet. I was sitting right over the wing and to my sleepy little eyes it looked like there was ocean and clouds to our left and mountains and clouds to the right. Very confusing. Turns out we were right over the shoreline! And sure enough, where we were flying over, the mountains fall straight into the ocean. No beach, no flatland. Mountains... ocean.

So we went on a little drive from Santiago to reach the beautiful beach city of Vina del Mar. We had lunch as a group and after sitting and chatting for quite a while, I stood up and said "I'm going to the beach if anyone else wants to come." Can you believe I am living within a walk from the beach?! Our director very promptly said "Advice first. First, do NOT wear your name tags or everyone will know you're a tourist and try to take you money. Second, wear lots of sunscreen. We are right under a hole in the ozone layer and you will get very sunburnt (no idea if this is true or not but I reapplied lots). Third, because Jill is leading, she is responsible if anything goes wrong."

Luckily nothing went wrong and we got to spend our first day "studying abroad" lying on the beach, tanning, dipping our toes in the very cold water and chit chatting in Spanish with the very very friendly Chileans.

Orientation begins tomorrow along with our Spanish placement test but in the meantime, I could get used to this. I didn't bring my camera to the beach but did take a few pictures when we were checking out town and walking around the neighborhood.