Goodbye Santiago

Well I am finally moving on from Santiago and about to make my way to the bottom of the world (well nearly!!). All went well in Santiago. I managed to learn some spanish - although I´m hoping I will improve with practice. I finally managed to start communicating with the people I am staying with, but not because I spoke spanish to them. A Brazilian girl moved into the flat as she is also here to study spanish. She also just happens to know some English - yeah!! I was so happy to see her. So now whenever I have a problem I tell her and she goes off to translate to our host. It turns out Portuguese is pretty similar to Spanish and they can understand each other. We also went shopping and using her speaking skills I managed to buy myself a new pair of trainers in the right size - this would not have been possible if I had been on my own. Unfortunately she has a job back home in Brazil so cannot take time off to follow me around South America and be my translator - oh well!!

Other than that I have been out on a few nights, which have always been fun. The interesting bits have been when I wanted to get home. I always get a taxi, but the problem is trying to tell them where I live. I live on one of the main roads in Santiago - in fact it runs through about half of Santiago, so when I tell the taxi drive to take me to Avenida Providencia he is like which part. So I quickly found out that living above a stripjoint (it turns out the to be the most popular one in Santiago) is very useful. So now I just say take me to Passapoga and surprisingly enough all the taxi drivers know where that is!! So over the weekend, after a night out, I caught a taxi and said exactly that, and in reply the taxi driver asked (with a smile on his face) if I worked there!! I quickly said ´no no no no no no` and managed to tell him that I infact just lived in the apartments above - he wasn´t as impressed with that and his smile disapeared after that!! So I am pretty glad that I now know some spanish, as before whenever anyone used to speak to me I would just nod my head and say ´si` - this could have lead to a rather embarrasing situation!!

Anyway, I am off now to by a big, thick jacket as I still don´t own one and it is apparently very cold at the bottom of the world. Unfortunately I can´t drag the Brazilian girl with me as she is at spanish school this morning, so I am going to have to work this out myself - should be interesting!