If I could see this view every day, I would consider never showering again.

Hello! Or should I say hola y bienvenidos a Santiago! After a painful 12 hours of traveling, I have finally reached Santiago. At 4:30 p.m. (2:30 Ohio time) I am finally relaxing for the first time today. We have been running around like crazy and it's only day one. Once we got off the plane, we headed straight to our hotel, Hotel Neruda. We were all looking forward to a quick nap and a shower since we smelled and had an average of 3 hours of sleep. Unfortunately, neither or those were a possibility. We arrived at the hotel at 9:30, which was 3.5 hours before we were allowed to check in. Even though we smelled like airplane food, could knock out half of Santiago with our breath, and were wearing sweats, we had no choice but to hit the town and wait for our rooms to be ready.

After exchanging our money for Chilean pesos, we were feeling pretty confident and ready to take on everything that Santiago had to offer. Sure, we were exhausted, but we were in Santiago, a moment we have been waiting months for. The confidence quickly faded, though, as we faced our first challenge: ordering food. Really, it shouldn't have been that hard. We knew how to say words like hamburger and pizza in Spanish. Yet, the mixture of having to use Spanish and pay with a currency we didn't understand caused several problems. One of my friends was trying to explain what ranch dressing was to a lady at a sandwich shop. The lady was baffled by the request and Penni didn't get her ranch dressing. Meanwhile, I was with Amanda, Riley, and Anna. We decided to order pizzas because we knew they wouldn't make us sick and we knew how to order them in Spanish. The first time we tried to order, we stared at the menu, became overwhelmed (which we still don't know the Spanish word for) and walked away. Eventually, we gave ourselves a pep talk and went back. Since we didn't understand how the money worked, we just gave them the biggest bill we had and let them figure out how to give us change. After getting our change and our pizza, we finally felt better. We had accomplished the first step to living in another culture. As we were walking away, we noticed the people behind the counter whispering and laughing at us. Who can blame them? I would have laughed at a group of greasy, panic-stricken tourists if I were them too.

At this point, we were thinking we might be able to head back to the hotel and do the only things we really cared about doing: showering and napping. Once again, we were denied. Instead we picked up a peppy tour guide named Bernardo (pictured below) who would stay with us for the rest of the day. He dragged us all around the city, explaining the history of the Chilean government. At this point, we were less than thrilled. Our first stop was to an old camp where government officials tortured people in the 70's. We happened to show up right during a banquet for the survivors of the horrendous ordeal and were actually able to talk to one man about his time in the camp. It amazes me what people can live through.

We saw a number of other buildings, monuments, plazas, and churches on our tour, including the president of Chile's palace. In the last part of our tour, we drove up one of the mountains surrounding Santiago. Below is the view of the city from the mountain. This view changed my mind about sight seeing without showering. If I could see this view every day, I would consider never showering again.