After making it through customs in the Santiago airport, we students participating in the Middlebury program said hello to Spanish and goodbye to English. Middlebury observes a very strict language pledge, which all of its students studying abroad are obligated to sign, stating that the student will only converse in the target language for the duration of their studies, except to communicate with family and friends back home. From the time we left the airport, all of our communication was in Spanish. Upon arriving, we were greeted by the program directors and taken across the street to the Holiday Inn (a true Chilean experience). After a night tossing and turning in airplane seats, everyone was looking forward to a nap in the hotel while we waited for the other students to arrive. Unfortunately, fate had a different plan in mind, and we were all shuttled into a conference room and handed orientation packets. We spent the next five hours sitting in the room as other students gradually trickled in. Let’s just say: the conversation among a room-full of exhausted students thrown together and expected to speak in a language they haven’t practiced in several months is not much to brag about.

Once everyone had arrived, we were packed into a bus to drive two hours north to Valparaíso – Chile’s famous port city, where the majority of people in the program had chosen to study. I was torn between the need to sleep and the desire to sight-see and, though I was able to see a bit of the landscape, I (as well as the majority of the other students) ended up napping more than watching.

The next two days were spent primarily in a basement room as we went through tons of information about cultural differences between the U.S. and Chile, safety procedures, what to do when an earthquake strikes, what to do when the university goes on strike, and how to avoid ending up in jail. All the information was very relevant and interesting, but everyone was having a hard time sitting for so long in one room. One piece of cultural information that I found particularly interesting is that Chileans hate to say “no” to anything. If you invite someone to lunch and they don’t want to come, they’ll tell you that they already ate, or that they have an appointment, or that it’s their great-aunt’s birthday—anything to avoid a straight “no”…definitely my kind of country =).

The final day of orientation, the owner of our restaurant/conference room took us on a tour of part of the city. The man is an American living in Valpo and is working to develop its potential as a travel destination. The city has a long, though poorly-preserved history, and Todd Temkin and his foundation work to purchase historic buildings, restore them to their former grandeur, and use the sites to draw foreigners to the city. And it is an amazing city–built along a series of incredibly steep hills that slope down into the Pacific Ocean. Our first day in Valpo, our bus drove up into the hills to deliver us to our hostels. The road was so steep that many of us doubted it would be able to make it. The Chileans were impressed too, and one man came by to ask the driver if he could take a picture of the bus, since it was so rare to see them driving such steep roads. The city was never founded, and for this reason its growth was never developed according to a specific plan. Instead, the city is a labyrinth of roads and pathways winding up and down the hills with houses wedged into the spaces in between. The barrios (neighborhoods) of the city are defined by the valleys and ridges that divide the different hills instead of their location around the city center. Valpo also has “acensores” which are a kind of short, incredibly steep elevator/train used move people up and down the hills. When the acensores are broken, you take the stairs…hundreds of them.

In the evening of the final day of orientation, the six of us heading south were put onto an overnight bus for our 12-hour drive Valdivia. All of us were dreading the drive, but when we got onto the bus, we realized that it wasn’t going to be so bad. Our seats were called “salon camas” – meaning that they are about 50% wider than airplane seats, have plenty of leg-room and a foot rest, and recline almost completely. It felt more like riding in a lounge chair than on a bus! Before the bus left the station, we students were all having fun reclining the chairs, throwing pillows at each other, and marveling at the level of comfort—until we realized that the entire bus station was laughing and pointing at the six gringos who had never seen a nice bus before =).