We're Here!

After a long few days of travel, we are finally in Chile! The flights were not bad at all, although the plane we took to Miami was the smallest plane I’ve ever been in. Fortunately, the eight hours to Santiago went by pretty quickly and we were finally in Chile!! We had a lot of laughs and really got to know each other. Going through customs was a bit of a struggle because the money we had to pay the entry fee was not up to par with the employees’ standards. They wanted the crispest and newest bills possible, which we were not prepared for. The language barrier also contributed to our problems because we did not understand what was wrong with the money at first. The Canadian Handball team that was in line with us laughed at us silly Americans because we couldn't just pay the simple fee. One of the coaches asked us what the problem so hopefully they changed their mind of us living up to that American stereotype. We are staying at the Hotel del America, which will probably bring as much stories as the actual trip. We ate lunch at Tiki Taco by our hotel and I learned pretty quickly that I don’t remember a lot of vocabulary words from Spanish class.  Hopefully, I’ll start to pick up on everything again and the language barrier won’t be too much of an issue. Kirsten and I split chicken fajitas, and a lot of people got definitely interesting, but a lot, of food. After lunch we went to the futbol (soccer) game. I personally love soccer, so it was amazing to see it played in a country where it is more popular. Another thing that was very impressive was the fan section. The fan section was jumping up and down and chanting the entire game and was very enthusiastic. We found out later that most of the chants were protests about new laws that made it illegal for them to chant and make banners, but during the game we thought it was great team spirit. The Vina del Mar home team won the game 3-2 to San Marco, which got intense towards the end. I've never seen so many players go down in one game. It was pretty easy to tell it was for show, but I thought it was pretty shocking that it was in just about every play. The players got pretty heated over those supposed fouls and the ref even got escorted off by police officers as if that was customary. Another thing that was shocking was the amount of stray dogs. My friend who had done the Plus3 Chile trip last year had told me about them, but I was still not prepared. It was weird to see a bunch of dogs on the sidewalk taking a nap and following us around. One in particular followed us the whole way to the stadium, and we named him Howard, partially because its odd for us to see an unclaimed and unnamed dog around. Tomorrow we're going to the University and also learning salsa.