CHILE!!!

So, it´s day five now, and so far Chile has been amazing.

We flew all night thursday and landed fri morning in santiago. The head master from Thomas Jefferson School and his wife met us at the airport with our drivers. The headmaster arranged for us to have a tour of Santiago and Valparaiso.

From the airport we went to lunch at an outdoor mall and then went to see the city from the top. There is a giant monument to The Virgin overlooking Santiago with a garden and a great view. From there we went to an open air market where they sold mainly art and otehr handcrafted things. It is super hard to restrain myself from spending all my money. What makes it worse is that the conversion rate is 630 chilean pesos to $1 american. So, you lose a lot of your sense of value. We also went to an american-style mall which was INSANE. I know it was a friday night, but there were so many people there it was hard to move. Our drivers were awesome. they were really good about making sure we saw the best stuff, but didn`t waste our time.

Saturday we got up, loaded the vans and headed to Valpo. It was about 1:40 drive but totally worth it. We first went to Pablo Neruda`s house which was unilke anything I`ve ever seen. The walls are all different colors and wallpapers with all sorts of crazy art and fixtures on the wall. few of the rooms or hallways are square. his living room overlooks the city and the bay where you can see all the naval ships. After that we took a lift up to the top of the city for another great view. again, AMAZING. all the houses here are different colors, lots of pastels. Then we headed to a restaurant on the beach to eat lunch. The fish was incredible! Then we spent a couple hours laying on the beach. You were allowed to wade but not swim because the waves and undertow were so strong. another girl and I swam anyway, and almost drowned.