Barefoot on the West Coast of South America

My study abroad program officially kicked off today after my professor, my fellow students, and I arrived at the Santiago airport today a little after 8 a.m. after having left ATL shortly before 11 p.m. the night before. The flight was long, but that was ok because we each had our own personal touch screen TVs in the seat in front of us with free movies, music, tv shows, and other kinds of entertainment.

I arrived at the home of my host family today in Viña del Mar, Chile, around what we in the United States consider lunch time (here it's more like 1 or 2 p.m.) after having gone through customs and riding in a van for two hours from the airport.

Here is the home we are staying at.

This house is currently the residence of an extremely nice Chilean couple and their eight year old daughter, as well as FIVE other students, not including Carli, Emily, and myself. One of the other students, Jeneka or "Jenny" as the family calls her, showed us around today. And by showed us around, I mean lead us a couple of blocks over to the beach. That's right. Chile shares its western border with the Pacific Ocean, and I'm in walking distance of it. How cool is that? Plus, the weather was really nice today. We anticipated it being cooler, and it probably will get fairly cold here before we leave in three weeks. Chile is in the Southern Hemisphere, so their seasons are backwards from our Northern Hemisphere seasons.

Me, Carli, and Emily

Me and Jenny

We have class starting tomorrow at 9:30 a.m. in Valparaíso at Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, which is about a twenty minute ride. I'm going to try to put an entry every day since this is what my grandmother requested as her souvenir. We'll see how that goes. Till tomorrow!