Bienvenidos a Chile!

Greetings from Santiago! After six peripatetic weeks in the US, we arrived in Santiago on Tuesday. I'm experiencing a very pleasant culture shock--it's so strange to have a foreign service posting in such a developed country! Although of course it will take time for us to learn the city, become familiar with Chilean culture, know where to go for dry cleaning/internet/clothes/groceries/etc., at first glance this just seems like a really easy place to get around in. Our Spanish from Mexico is coming back to us, and it is exciting to feel like we are more self-sufficient here than we were in our first few days in other posts.

We packed our home leave with tons of visits to family and friends, so we didn't get a chance to do as much blogging as we had hoped. We'll try to catch up on posting photos from that soon. In the meantime, here are some pics from our first few days in Chile.

Here's the view from our apartment. Our permanent housing--a house in the 'burbs--won't be ready for a month, so we are staying in a nice apartment downtown (in the Las Condes neighborhood) about a 15 minute walk from the embassy. You can see how modern Santiago is with all the big buildings surrounding the little Catholic church.

The kids are enjoying the cold. To Nathan and me, this feels less like winter and more like fall, with daytime temps in the 40s to 60s.

In our first few days here, Nathan and the kids found two great playgrounds within walking distance of our apartment--that's two more nice playgrounds than there were in all of Cambodia for most of our time there.

The embassy is a nice, modern building.

Ambassador Paul Simons and Deputy Chief of Mission (ie #2 at the embassy) Carol Urban watch the flag raising ceremony at the embassy on July 4.

A Chilean military band played American patriotic songs at the flag raising.

Well, the kids are starting to tear apart the Starbucks where we are, so I need to go. One note for all our friends and family is that we will have trouble staying in touch for our first few weeks here. We can't set up internet or long distance access until we are in our permanent housing and have Chilean national IDs, which basically means that we can't even start that process for another month. In the meantime, our internet access will be limited to periodic visits to Starbucks and other shops with wi-fi (and Jen squeezing in a few minutes to check personal messages from work), and the only way we can call the US is to make a special trip to the embassy on the weekends. But we'll do our best to stay in touch despite these limitations!