Day 4

Family, Friends, and Lovers and Steve´s Family, Friends, and Lovers:

It´s just Janet today. Steve has sustained a mild injury to his knee which he rates as a 4 on a scale of 0-10. After extensive testing and a thorough history, we suspect it may be his Osgood-Schlatter Disease acting up again after many years of quiescence. Steve´s family, friends, and lovers will be proud to know that he is taking it like a man and I had no idea he was in almost constant pain today until he told me. Anyway, he´s resting in bed a bit. I so admire Steve´s stoicism that I´ve decided to stop complaining about walking an average of 7 hours a day unless something starts hurting more than a 5.

Ok, so it wasn´t really our first day of school today. We were up and at 'em at 7:30 today to get ready for school. (Oh by the way, we have a nice little ritual in which we start and end each day with a cup of tea which we drink on a little road over-looking the city and ocean a block away from the hostel. How awesome is that?) We talked to one of the teachers and worked out a loose schedule for classes in which we start tomorrow. The school is called Natalis and it´s based in Santiago. The Valparaiso branch is new, so there´s very few students (right now it´s just us) and only about 2 teachers, so it looks like it´s going to be very flexible and pretty much one-on-one. So we´re pretty excited about learning Spanish. Oh, one of the teachers told Steve that he looks very Chilean and Steve thinks this is pretty cool and tells me that he would be able to blend in except for the fact that he´s with me.

After that, we decided we were feeling ambitious enough to re-tackle our failed mission of finding the library which it turns out is way the heck all the way over by the Bus station at the other end of the city. It was kind of a cool little building but still pretty small. Still, it should be a nice little place to study Spanish later. We then walked to the ocean and found the pier where the cruise ships dock during Chilean summer (our winter).

By this time, it was about lunchtime, so we decided we were going to look for a cool little cafe and splurge a bit. Steve told me that I had to pick the place. Well, I´ve been told that I´m a wee-bit indecisive and that may be a wee-bit true, because I didn´t decide on a place for lunch until about 2pm. It was a really cool, hole-in-the-wall restaurant. For about $5 we got bread, soup, salad, a main course (fried fish or beef with potatoes), ice cream, coffee, a drink called pino sour (or something), and a shot of some sort of rum. Well, as you know I´m Asian and Asians typically have less alcohol dehydrogenase than other people. Plus I´m a girl (less fluid, more fat content) and I´m 5'1". Anyway, by the end of lunch, Steve swears that I was absolutely el drunko, but actually I was fine. We looked around a little bit more (I don´t really remember much) and then we went home for tea at our little lookout and rest. I think we may try going out to see what the city is like at night. More about that later if it happens.

Ok, I swear that tomorrow will be our first day of Spanish class. Really. I promise.

I wasn´t drunk.

Chiao!
Janet