Night One: A Bunch of Gringos

It is Easter morning in Santiago, 2010. My hope is to find a church to, at the very least, observe mass in Spanish. However, I searched around my barrio last night and the only church I found had been destroyed in the earthquakes and was vacant. I will range further today.

Last night was an interesting experience, as nearly all the volunteers present in the hostel came together in one big group that turned the hostel courtyard into a veritable beer garden. The beer of the Chilean common man is an awful fluid with the apparent misnomer of "Cristal." It is brewed in Chile, and is cheap and prevalent and thus was the drink of choice for most of the group in light of our mutual lack of expendable income. They sell it in litre glass bottles that if you return to the tienda, you receive back a part of the price you paid. It's an interesting system.

I managed to meet nearly everyone, at least in a cursory fashion. The big three questions were, "who are you?", "where are you from?", and "what is your region." I am John, from Atlanta, going to Antofagasta. There are quite a few of us going to the Antofagasta region, one of them being the first guy I met here, Mike the surfer from New York, who is currently also my roommate. As for fellow Southerners, there is a cute girl from Alabama and a gent who grew up in Atlanta but has since lived all over the place, and he claims to have been to 50 some odd countries.

After a while, we all decided it was better to go be Gringos out amongst the Chileans, and thus the entire group marched out of the hostel and down to the Avenida Brasil where all the cafes were open. Of course, because there was more than twenty of us, we couldn't find a place to fit us all. Eventually, we comprised and some people left and our group fragmented. As we sat and chatted, and the women drank the national Chilean cocktail known as a pisco sour (more on that later) were we accosted by extremely precocious Chilean children hawking trinkets and stealing kisses on the the cheeks of the Gringas.

Oh, and stray dogs are everywhere, which of course means that stray-dog-crap is everywhere. They aren't mangy though, and the people look out for them so they are friendly.