Santiago, the first day

Well, well, well... it´s a Wednesday afternoon and I thought I´d take a break from my homework to talk a little about Santiago so far.

Flying into Chile was long, arduous and beautiful. The first 22 hours were dull, and I was extremely tired yet unable to sleep. But somewhere over Chile I awoke from one of my painful catnaps and opened the airplane window purely from boredom, expecting to see nothing. What I saw was an amazing dawn breaking over the Andes´mountains, which were probably 100 miles to the east, and seeing the sun stretch over miles and miles of bare, blue desert. I´ve never seen anything like it.

But after five minutes, the place was as dark as night again as an enormous sandstorm blew in at amazing speeds. And ten to fifteen minutes later, the sandstorm blew away to show us that we were no longer over a desert but over the mountains themselves. The Andes´are by far the tallest mountains I´ve seen. The entire range is full of peaks and crests, but somewhere along the flight, off in the distance, was a single peak, a single mountain, that towered over all the others. It was basked in cloud and red light, and it seemed to go on forever skyward as the clouds hid from us its secrets and its end. The mountain, I believe, is Cerro Tupungato, elevation 22,310 ft. The picture, I believe, captures the raw Purgatory that I saw that day. I was reminded of a story in the Biblical book of Deuteronomy when Moses approaches the mountain of judgment that ¨burns¨and that not even the animals can touch, and that even Moses cried, Í am trembling with fear!`

After the show, we soon landed in Santiago. From the plane, I could see Santiago was situated in a large valley with one access point. I have mixed feelings about the city. You don´t get a second chance to make a first impression, and most first impressions are more accurate than we might like to admit. Santiago is bathed in smog more than any other city I have ever been to. Words cannot do it justice, but believe me when I say the smog slightly obscures anything as close as a city block away. When I arrived, the smog was not as bad as per usual - but I didn´t know that - and the temperature was pretty good. The relationship between temperatures and smog is a virtuous cyle. If a warm front comes in and the temperature gets to a certain point (I´m not sure what), the smog heats up enough to rise, which allows sunlight, which in turn dissapates more smog and the place gets better and better.

The family is really nice and really funny. They told me they had a grandma named Rosa - they lied to get a tax break. I thought that was hilarious. They also have one more son than they let out, a 26 year old named Corke. Corke and I get along the best. He´s pretty dang cool. But I didn´t meet Corke the first day, so that is for another time.

In terms of describing the first day, there is only one more thing that happened. The father, Jorge, took me to a ¨Mercado de la calle¨, a street market for pirated and super-cheap stuff. We bought twenty dvds that day for two dollars. Everything here is really cheap except for two things: food is just as, if not more expensive, and the internet is about two dollars for half an hour.

After visiting the market, I crashed for the rest of the day and night in my room (a very tiny room about seven by four feet). It´s also extremely cold in their house because there is no central heating (and they´re considered upper middle class!). Suffice it to say, that is what happened on the first day. And I say it was good.