***This article was taken from my personal blog, with a few edits, welshboymeetschile.weebly.com***
Apologies, but I realise that I haven’t written a post in a while! Lately I’ve been so busy moving into my new house, going to Uni, meeting new people and generally just settling in! Now however, I have adopted a routine lifestyle and so things have calmed down enough for me to be able to write again!
So this one is all about the new house! I’m now living in 501 Pascual Baburizza, Nuñoa, if anyone wants to look it up on google maps, send me fan-mail because you love my blog so much or send me some money (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). I found the house on a website called Comparto Depto (short for Shared Apartments), which is literally for anyone who wants to share a flat with random people you come across on the website to make sure that you aren’t alone when you arrive in the country!
On the website, I came across an awesome advert which sounded ideal for me. A mini-university residence, in a safe and secure area, near to the metro and sharing with other students. So I went to see this house, and what I did not expect was that the house was shared between 30 people! Only the website, I could have sworn it only said 7, probably because you don’t tend to see houses with many more rooms than that, but damn this place is big! And so far, I’m loving it!
Ok the room might be a bit small, but I really don’t care. I’m paying nearly half the price of what I would have back in Britain, and the room is about the same size as what I had during my 1st year in Southampton! It’s got some shelves, some funky curtains, a bedside table, a desk, and 4 white walls reminiscent of a flashy jail cell, but I put some posters around to give the room some character! The bed also has an electric blanket, something I am definitely going to invest in when I’m back in Britain, these things are amazing! I can look forward now to getting into a toasty-warm, comfortable bed every night! Whoever invented these things deserves to have a plaque on a bench or something of the sort!
So besides the room and my clear obsession for electric blankets, the house is actually awesome! The people I am living with are cool and are from all over the world! There’s one from Guatemala, a few from Brazil, there was one from Switzerland, a German, a couple of Spaniards, an Italian, and I still haven’t even met everyone! The thing about this house is that it is a residence, meaning that it serves a purpose as both a house and a hostel. There are people like me, who have signed contracts to live here for 5 months or more, because we are studying in University, but then there are others who only sign up to stay for a week or two while they get their bearings on the city and look for a less crowded place! So far this has been pretty cool, with new people coming in all the time, you get to meet a lot more! I’ve already made a great group of friends here who I went trekking through the Andes with, and I’m sure there’s still a load of awesome stuff we’re going to do together before the year is over!
You would expect that a house of 30 is crazy, and that you would never be able to use the kitchen, the washing machines, etc. In truth, it’s not actually that bad! For the most part, the house is dead during the day. People have to go to University at different times, there are older people here who are working, and have to go at varying times each day. There is a guy here who works for the Chilean national football team doing marketing, who also knows a famous dude called Daddy Yankee. We have a running joke that we have to go out of our way to impress him so that we get the chance to meet this rap-god with about one song that I have ever heard of! But moving away from that tangent, it is pretty easy to use the kitchen and the other facilities whenever you want, or at least, I’ve never had any problems!
This is just an image of me with 2 of my housemates, one Brazilian (left) and one Guatemalan (centre) in the middle of the Andes!
Now, let me tell you about my commute into University every day! So there is no direct route to get to my campus, so I have to go south about 9 metro stations, which takes about 20-30 minutes, just to go about 5 stops back up north on a different line to get to the campus, so it can be a bit of a trek! Most days, classes start for me at 8:30, which is a horrible time for the tube. You get absolutely crushed, but people don’t care. Their faces will be pressed up against the filthy, cold and hard doors, but as long as people get where they need too, they don’t care! It’s a pain in the butt though, I’ve had to learn to be a lot more assertive, because that is the only way of getting on the tube over everyone else in the raging, restless crowd which I have to face every morning on the metro platform! I get to push people out of the way, which is actually quite fun, and it’s not considered rude, it’s just considered the normal thing to do. It’s an every man for himself situation, and the people willing to be the most careless are the ones who get on! It’s actually quite an entertaining way of getting into uni every morning, apart from when you try to get off. I have almost missed my stop a few times trying to climb over everyone blocking the door. I knew being lanky as hell would come in handy one day! I can pretty much slip through the crowd with ease!
Around the house, there is a massive mall (yes I said mall, get over it, I know it’s American but that’s what it’s called out here, OK?), 2 cinemas, a metro station and a lot of stray dogs! I have a very upsetting story about dogs, which I will come to in a second, but let me start on a more uplifting note of how awesome the cinema and mall are! I saw Guardianes de La Galaxia (Guardians of the Galaxy) the other day, and it was brilliant. I’venever seen people applaude a film after it finishes in the cinema, so I was genuinely surprised when I found that Chileans do it, so I thought, why the hell not, the film was awesome so I joined in the applause. It’s so cheap out here to buy a cinema ticket! And buying popcorn and drinks wasn’t nearly as extortionate! So with a massive bucket of popcorn in hand, as well as a bar of chocolate and a large coke, I headed in! They don’t tell you when the film is about to start over here, instead they just played it after a random advert, so it took a while to register that I was watching the film and not an advert! The film was in English, with Spanish subtitles, so I actually learnt quite a bit!
Now for the dog story! The final part of this article! I mentioned in an earlier post that there are so many stray dogs out here. Just yesterday walking to the metro station I came across 2 dogs in the street, one which was sleeping in the middle of the road, and another who was walking very slowly around on 3 legs, because his 4th was injured and he seemed in a lot of pain. However, that is not the story. Last week, I was walking back from the mall with some housemates. As we were crossing the road, a stray dog came towards us, and crossed it with us, and then started walking in the same direction as us. At first I thought this was coincidence, but then he started following us all the way home, sniffing all of our legs on the way. Maybe he could smell the food in our shopping bags, I’m not sure. But when we got back to our house, the dog was ahead of us a tiny bit, and decided to defecate outside the neighbours house, which was not a nice thing to see. But when it turned around, and saw us opening our gate, he sprinted towards us barking as if to say “wait for me!”. We managed to close the gate before it could get in, but then it started howling and crying like mad for us to let him in. You could tell he was lost, wanted people to look after him, and for some reason he chose us, and by letting him follow us home, he must have thought we were going to adopt him. He was howling for the good part of 20 minutes while we were all unpacking our shopping. He sure as hell knew how to make us feel guilty, I wanted to give him some food, but he would only come back expecting more. Something needs to be done about the dog situation out here, and that’s for sure! But Chile isn’t the richest country in the world, and it’s possible that it isn’t in a position right now where it can do anything about it.
That’s it for this post, there will be another one about my first impressions of Uni coming up very soon, hopefully later today! Thanks for reading!
