Day 8

Hello,

Today is our one week anniversary of arriving in Valparaiso! Happy Anniversary Steve and Janet! Thank you, you too!

Sorry for the delay. The thing is we'd been staying in a hostel for a few days for like $10 a day which is not bad for a hostel, but then we found out from our Spanish teacher that a lot of people rent out rooms in their houses to university students for super cheap, so we spend all Thursday afternoon looking for a new place. It was pretty intense and stressful. At one point, we went into a hostel call Casa Liesel to ask about a room and the manager was German. Since I spoke German better than we spoke Spanish, I had to talk to him in German. It was pretty funny that the first time I've ever used my German was in Chile. Finally after about 5 hours running around the hills we found a place in a University professor and her son's house. I think we're going to like it a lot better because it's really close to the school and it's in a much cooler neighborhood called Cerro Allegre which is one of the more famous hills of Valparaiso. It's also close to our new favorite restaraunt called Empanadas Delicio (which serves delicious empanadas of course). Kareem, we hope you like it here. We don't have a computer availale at all times so our posts might be a little more sparse from now on. The professor keeps trying to speak Spanish to us, but we don't really understand everything. For example when we first got here, she was telling us about her hamsters. All we were able to pick out was that one is named Romeo and the other is Poroto. Another one was called Juliet, but we think she told us that Juliet is dead.

Other than that, school has been going... ok. We've learned how to roll our R's very well. We're trying to learn as fast as we can, but it's hard. Hopefully we'll start picking it up a little faster next week. We've decided on a good name for Kareem when he gets here though. He'll probably hate it, but it suits him.

Today, we decided to just take it easy. We studied a bit at the library we worked so hard to find and poke around Cerro Alegre a little. We had dinner at another cool little cafe we found where there were literally only two people running the whole place (mom and pop I presume). Tomorrow we're probably going to study a bit more or may go to Vina del Mar. We'll post again as soon as we can.

Oh, and Steve bought a hat. He thinks it makes him look even more Chilean than he already does.

Love, Janet and Steve