Hostel, a Only Slightly Milder Version of the Movie

The check-in desk

Having never stayed in a hostel, I had this romantic notion of sitting and drinking tea, carrying on a boisterous conversation in perfect Chilean Spanish with people from all over the world late into the night. Unfortunately, rolling into a hostel in Santiago, Chile at 9:30 a.m. after a ten hour international flight, with only shaky Spanish skills at best, does not make for a notion come true. Rachel and I booked ourselves a two person suite with a shared bathroom (for around 19,800 pesos, or $40—not bad) in the Bellavista Hostel located in the Providencia barrio (or neighborhood) of Santiago. The hostel is a hipster’s paradise, with brightly painted walls, a purple exterior, tons of art, and more graffiti than wall space—with surprisingly few genitalia, if you can believe it.

Flying High

I am so grateful to have the Cherrington Global ScholarsProgram--the study abroad program at DU that allows students to study abroad at no additional cost to their regular Denver tuition, meaning all financial aid carries over and extra expenses, like visa fees, are covered by the school. This also means that DU will spring for your round trip plane ticket, but unfortunately they will not spring for you to fly first class—trust me, I tried.

Student Visas, A Lesson in Bureaucracy

To study abroad in Chile, you need a student visa. To get a student visa, you are going to need to:

1. Go to Denver police headquarters and obtain fingerprints from a scary woman while trying to avoid eye contact with the girl handcuffed to the bench next to you. Also, avoid filling out your fingerprint form at the table under the giant sign that says “Sex Offender Registration”
2. Use obtained fingerprints to apply for FBI Background Check—find that it is not as CSI like as expected
3. Wait. And get used to waiting.
4. Call the nearest consulate—Houston—several times to try and understand exactly what they need from you. Then call again to double check. 

Goodbye Northern Hemisphere

Here is the scene:

It is the night before my grand departure to Chile and I am sitting in a sea of my own clothes, mixed with toiletries, electronics, and multiple nonsensical items that I can’t imagine spending five months without. What am I doing here? Let me explain:

To put it simply, I am heading off to Valparaiso, Chile to study abroad for five months. I will be there until December 18^th as part of the Institute for Study Abroad-Butler’s Chilean Universities Program,Valparaiso, and in that time I will attend classes at the Chilean university Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso (PUCV), or at the Universidad de Santa Maria (USM). The other 17 students and I will stay with different host families in the town just outside of Valparaiso called Viña del Mar.

So, You Have Decided to Keep a Blog

Having never before kept a personal blog, this is going to be an experiment for my communication skills, which are, admittedly, pretty poor. So, I turned to my good friend Google for advice, and went to where you can find all the best, original tips: page 10 and beyond (you forgot that there were results after the first page, didn’t you?). Here are some sound words of wisdom from tried and true bloggers: