From ‘pé’ to ‘pó’

Or, from Peru to Chile. Crossing the border, so many things change. Peru and Chile are really so different: not only the accent (and words they use), also the cities, the atmosphere – it’s clear that Chile is a lot wealthier. Little title explanation: ‘pe’ is the Peruvian way of saying ‘pues’ (means ‘so’), which here they have made into ‘po’. After getting used to Peruvian Spanish, which is really easy to understand, in Chile they speak very fast and sometimes unintelligible (and they have about a million chilenismos, words they only use here).

So I am writing to you from my new house in Santiago. I arrived on Saturday, got picked up by my cousin Bas and his Chilean girlfriend Pamela. It was very nice to arrive in such a huge and unknown city with known people – the two of them were great, I stayed in an apartment they hired for a few days (cause Pamela is from a city near Santiago) and they helped me look for a house and everything.

After seeing one very shitty place, an overly pretty one, a full residence, another nice house – I almost immediately liked the last house most. It’s a nice neighborhood, quite green, but the people and atmosphere are actually why I liked it (and keep liking it more). It’s a total of 8 people living here: Felipe and Ricardo (both Chilean), Katy (Felipe’s Australian girlfriend), Cisco and Marine (a French couple, 19 and 20), Arielle (from New York), Joaquín (really Joachim, also Yoyo, Belgian). And we have three cats! It’s a house of 2 floors, with a garden, pretty spacey. My room is not so big, but since I don’t have a lot of stuff anyway so it’s fine.

Next week my classes start, till now I’ve had two info meetings but actually things are still pretty chaotic. I am now trying to subscribe to my courses online but the ones I want don’t appear on the website, and the ones that do don’t appear in the book with the course descriptions. Not so clear, everything, but it’s Chilean way of things and I will get used to that soon enough!