El Kiwi en Sudamérica

Visa queues and rugby...

These have been the longest days in my life-i´m speaking in a possitive way- it feels as if i´ve been here for at least a few... After my last post Omar gave me a tour of the central city- including the central square, plaza de armas and he took me to a castle on a hill over looking the city (I forgot the name) and we saw heaps of other stuff.
In the evening Omar´s fiance Consuelo came for tea, and I went to bed way too late.

On Saturday morning I met up with Becka (An american friend of some Aussie missionaries that i´ve had email contact with) and she showed me a vacant room in her friend Jessenia´s apartment on 11 de septembrie avenue. It´s in a good central location, very close to the metro and the ¨flatmates¨ are nice (and it´s good value too, with cable to watch the rugby...now you know why I like it) so i´ll be moving in fairly soon. The other flatmate is this Chileno guy (Jessenia is a chilena) . It´s on the sixth floor, so naturally i thought that was pretty cool (there´s about 20ish all up, and I feel like 6 is high enough)

Jessenia had her last touch game of the season in teh afternoon so I went with her to The Prince of Wales Country Club to watch. It was good fun watching and chilling out, talking to some expats, watching jessys team win, getting possible job contacts and being invited to join the team next season (in september). It was almost a NZ fix. It also was good to pratice my spanish as well, because jessy doesn´t know much. We communicated with a bit of both- so it´ll be real good living there for practice (with a dictionary and friends helping for backup)

On sunday I went to Comunidad de la Gracia (omar´s church) for both Sunday school and the service afterwards. Everyone who came was super friendly and it felt like a big family. For sunday school I sat with the adult class, and we were looking at the esto creemos, confesion bautista de fe de 1689. In paticular the part dealing with the trinidad (trinity in english). The service itself was great as well, I recognized all the tunes and most of them seemed to be translations of the songs i know (except for a song sung to the english national anthem). Im planning on playing futbol this saturday with some of the church.
Ater church I went with Omar and Waldo to Consuelo´s place where she lives with her family (father, mother and sister) for comida, or lunch. They live in a house on the eastern side of the city a nice little drive away. For comida we had empandanas (I think thats the name) a comida typica of chile. after that and a mad crazy drive in the hills we went home- to watch lost in espanol- great for practice. Waldo is teaching me some new words every day´- I thought i wa doing well untill today...

If you want a working holiday visa (or something similar) you have to go thought the process of registrering the paperwork. So this moring I went to the policia something-or-rather to start the process off. but when I arrived I had no idea were to go in the building. fourntunatly there was a nice dude there who helped me out... It was hard enough for him to find out. But eventually i found out were i was supposed to line up. then it was pretty simple for the rest of step one.
I thought that was bad, but it was all going to get even worse...

With the paper work I jhad just recieved it was time to get a chilean id. card. I eventually found it. but once again i had no idea were to line up. After going to the help desk the lady behind it said something about photocoping and pointed somewhere- but I got the impresionthey were in the buildings. But suprise suprise I couldn´t find it. So I asked the help desk guy and e made a little bit more sense- it was outside and a la derecha (to the right) so i found that easily. Then i asked the guy again were to line up... unfourtunatly it was the biggest one there (yay!) so after watching the last 70 minutes of some world cup action and some other stuff afterwards i made it though the line. so i eventually got there, finished the paper work and somehow gathered I had to get my fingerprints taken somewhere. after arrivng in the office the old lady there didn´t seem to get what i wanted for a while, but at least she knew a little english. I then went to a place I was supposed to pick up my card- but no one was there... so after talking to some staff I found out I had t go there early next month. I have alot to learn (sorry for that huge boring commentary, I had to get it out my system) so currently i´m in the E-cafe under the apartment I will move into writing this.

P.S I will fix the blogs graphics soon, i´ll pout some photos on when I get a cable for my laptop and i´ll soon have the details for my cellphone available on request

posted by Nathan Sinclair @ 5:03 PM