General Observations

Some of the general things I have noticed -

-Chileans love sweets and bread. We have bread at or for every meal. Cake is also very popular and we have it at least once a day. Mainly gelato but icecream in general is also huge. There are little gelato shops everywhere, and walking around downtown I would wager 1/2 of the people are eating icecream.

-Public transportation is common. Although many people drive and have their own cars, the public buses are not associated with lack of money or social standing. They are clean and efficient (bus lanes), but the schedule varies within a 15 min window.

-Chileans use strange words. They have a ton of idiomatic phrases and slang words. As it has been explained to me, the colloquialisms come from being physically isolated by the andes. They also do this weird thing where instead of using the ch sound, they make a ts sound. so, i´m currently staying in Concepción Tsile, not Chile. As I have started to get used to that, it has made understanding them a lot easier. They also add 'po' to the ends of words, like sipo and nopo. It's kinda cute I guess.

-PDA - holy cow, out of control. part of it i think is becuase there are so many people out all the time, so you see more of everything. but you can not walk one black downtown with out seeing a couple kissing. you go through the parks and they are all over each other. and nobody seems to care. i dont mean little smooches, holding hands. I mean tongue down each others throats, straddling each other on the gound, get a room. it still shocks me.

-Chileans are super active. When you go anywhere, there are people. everyone is out and about doing something. Everywhere is somewhat crowded, especially the parks and downtown area. Sure, it's somewhat large (about 900,000 with all the suburbs counted) but not huge. On sunday when we went to the laguna and the U of C campus, there were people all over running, playing with their dogs, picnicking, couples canoodling (excessively), bicyclists, etc. I really like that about here.

-Stray dogs are everywhere. This is the craziest thing i have ever seen. I would say there are 2 stray dogs every block. it's really sad since most are starving, ill, injured or all three. many are missing legs. They are not aggressive at all, they just roam the streets, sometimes in packs.