he llegado. i have arrived

it's true, i have finally arrived in santiago. after plane troubles in chicago on thursday, the girls i was traveling with and i missed our connecting flight to santiago. thinking we would be spending a night in the miami international airport, we were pleasantly surprised to be put up in the miami marriot by the airline. we ended up spending a day galavanting around miami, and caught the same flight the next day. this got us into santiago this morning around 11 am, santiago time.
therefore, i am exhauasted and will be crashing soon. but, i thought everyone should know that i made it.

overall excitements/highlights thus far:

i have met some truly amazing people already. the airline worker in miami was a man from haiti that played football for northwestern and briefly for the kansas city chiefs. there was a guy on the chicago to miami flight with us that missed his connecting flight to bolivia, where he his returning to his peace corps site, so we ended up spending significant time with him on friday around the hotel. then, we met an elderly couple in the terminal for the flight to santiago and they shared with us their stories of post-retirement world travel (they were heading for an antartic cruise).

and the kindest, most amazing people--my familia en chile. they are truly as amazing as they seemed in correspondence beforehand. the parents picked me up from the airport and were graciously kind and affectionate and visibly excited. then, the son and daughter sat around and talked with me for a while in the porch (i'll post pics soon.) then, the son, camilo, took me around to get some necessary errands done, such as buying a metro card and buying a cell phone. i would not have been able to do those things without him. or if i had, i'd a gotten swindled. his spanish is pretty hard to understand, but he is very kind.

also, the food's been great. my first chilean meal: fresh chilean salmon. delicious.


you may have noticed (probably not) that i changed the quote at the top of this blog. i just finished reading slaughterhouse-five by kurt vonnegut, and this quote really stood out to me. i wrote in my journal during the first flight and decided that this would really be my focus for this trip. i'm not going to live in the past or the future. i want to simply take in the present. to understand it's depth, width, and capacity to be kept.

hasta pronto.
peace.
kait