La Diferencia

(The Difference)

Some of you might have been wondering, besides the language, what's the difference between Chile and the U.S.? Well, there are some minor things and some major things. For example, when people greet each other here, if it's two girls or a girl and a guy, the "kiss" each other on the cheek (guy to guy you just shake hands... unless you're in Argentina). I say "kiss" because you really just touch cheeks and make a kissing noise without actually touching them with your lips. It doesn't matter if you're related or not related, friends or perfect strangers. Chileans do this to say hello and goodbye. And, in case you ever get put into a situation where this kind of greeting is appropriate, here's a tip: They always go to the left.

Light switches

Weird flushing mechanism

There are also plenty of not-so-major differences. Their meal times are a little later than ours. They eat lunch between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. and between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. for dinner. They light switches are horizontal and a different kind of switch than ours. Some of the toilets have knobs on the top that you pull up instead of pushing a handle. They never walk around barefoot! They always wear shoes, even inside. They try to always keep the doors shut because of earthquakes. They try to always keep the windows open, because they don't have heating and cooling systems. Then, some of you may or may not consider this a difference, but they drive CRAZY over here. People honk their horns constantly. We also here car alarms a lot, but they sound more like sirens than car alarms. 

They build things up here as opposed to out, which may not seem different compared to some U.S. cities, but take it from me, they build more things up than we do. My legs are sore from all the stairs I've had to climb lately. Imagine the Shelby steps plus going up to the third floor (if you're from Auburn, if you're not just take my word for it that it's a lot of stairs)... Now multiply that by by two. That's probably close to how many steps I walk up to get to class in the morning (which is on the first floor). If I have to go to the International Students Office, that's on the sixth floor. We've gone up six flights of stairs to the rooftop of a building for lunch/studying the past two days. Yesterday, we went on a tour of a company where we went to the third floor for a presentation, then to the roof top of a different building (at least four flights of stairs) to see what the company actually does. Plus, our tour of campus and Valparaíso took us up more hills and stairs than I care to estimate. Have I mentioned my room's on the second floor? So, I'll probably be in the best shape of my life when I get home.

The money here is also different, which you probably would have guessed. They use pesos. Chilean pesos and Mexican pesos aren't equal. The actual conversion is four hundred something pesos equals $1, but for ease of calculation, everyone thinks of it as 500 pesos is $1 instead. 1.000 (1,000-they use decimals where we use commas and vice versa) pesos (or 1 mil) is about $2, so you take the price in pesos, divide by 1000 and multiply by 2 to think about how much something would cost in dollars. It can be a little confusing at first, but we've all gotten the hang of it. We're still working on communicating in Spanish though. It's been quite an adventure trying to get Chilean cell phone for the ones who wanted them. One of the workers actually pulled up the translator app on their phone to communicate with Carli, so they typed back and forth. I'm sure their are adventures still to come. Till tomorrow!

Chilean pesos