We have arrived!

Just a quick note to say - WE MADE IT!

After a very long day of plane travel we arrived in Santiago at around 9:35 am, which was about 4:30 am to our tired West Coast bodies. We traveled by taxivan to Hostal de Sammy, and killed a few hours waiting for our rooms to be ready. The girls are staying in a 8-person and a 3-person dorm room, and the boys are in a 6-person dorm room. We explored for food this afternoon, finding a large supermarket and some smaller stores as well. I was incredibly tired and totally not used to the heat (it's a sunny 85-90F) so I hung out at the hostel with a couple folks and made dinner, while other folks went Downtown. Everyone is slowly acclimating to the summer climate, but we're all still tired. During Suzanne's presentation on climate change this evening it was funny to look around at the sea of tired faces.

The most exciting point of the day was an encounter that Gina had with a would-be camera snatcher. (This is a condensation of her narration to me - I wasn't there!) She was walking down the street with her small camera around her wrist, and a guy came out of nowhere and grabbed her camera, then took off! Gina started yelling at the top of her lungs and chased the guy, running at full clip, still yelling. Meanwhile two guys she didn't know started chasing the camera-snatcher as well! Eventually he dropped the camera and Gina retrieved it. Clearly he wasn't used to having his exploits challenged like that, and Gina can be quite fierce when she needs to be, I would probably have been intimidated too! All in all, a good cautionary tale about keeping your belongings close to you, and a funny anecdote because of the happy ending.

Tomorrow we head out to explore Santiago a little more, we're taking the old-style Funicular up the hill to view what Karen says are some of the most spectacular columnar basalts she's seen. Yay!

There probably won't be pictures uploaded to this blog until we return stateside, as I forgot my camera cable and Jon's camera is on the blink. But if anything changes, you'll see it here.

:)