New Home, New Friend!

As I mentioned in my last post, I have a new apartment! I've been here since Thursday night and am pretty much settled in. This has been in the works since about the first week that I was here when I had the opportunity to meet other Chilean student trying to earn "reverse" Fulbright grants to the United States to get their Doctorate. In this group I met a girl named Karina who is a professor of Public Policy at one of the universities in Santiago and we got to talking about my living situation. Once she found out how expensive the hostel was, she offered me her extra room which is only six blocks away from where I work! It's so perfect and I love having my own bathroom, kitchen, and living room. I was getting fairly tired of sharing one kitchen with 68 other people.

I feel incredibly lucky to have met Karina and we've been having a great time getting to know each other. As a professor she works really really hard and is gone almost all day, but at night we get a chance to chit chat and hang out. Part of her scholarship is contingent on her score on the TOEFL exam (an English proficiency assessment) so we've also been practicing her English too. I'm impressed by her dedication because she only started studying English in December but is already doing a great job! We also talked last night about the possibility of me tutoring in an all-girls school right around the corner from our apartment. Apparently she knows someone who works there and may be able to help me arrange a meeting with the director. Lately, I've been missing teaching and I think this will help with that.

The apartment itself is even more in the heart of Santiago than the hostel and is close to just about everything....including some of my other Fulbright friends. I'm excited about being able to walk to work and with all of the money I'm saving on rent and transportation I decided to join a gym! It's three blocks away and the monthly fee includes all of the classes I could possibly want. This morning I went to a spin class (my first one ever!) and tomorrow I'm going to try out pilates.

Research is slowly but surely coming along and I have four more filmings to do this week with my other colleagues. The students are incredibly fascinated by my ability to speak English and my blond hair, so it's pretty entertaining. Plus they call me tia (aunt) and I find it absolutely endearing. It looks like I'll be working in a variety of schools for the filmings and I'm hoping this will give me an accurate picture of the Chilean education system. I'm going to save my observations for the next blog though because I'm going to some new schools this week and want to compare experiences before I share them with you.

In the meantime, here are some pictures of my new place. I haven't finished decorating the walls though because I'm still working on my master plan.

I bought the black cubes at a store called Home Center which looked identical to Home Depot.

Karina has English words and rules posted all over the walls to help her study!

One month down, can you believe it?! I'm so looking forward to the next nine. Especially since Austin and I just booked his tickets to visit me in June. :) I hope that you are all happy and healthy!

Love, Krista