My Chilean Apartment

This week has been very busy. We all started working this week and it's been exhausting, overwhelming, exciting... pretty much every emotion possible! I'll write more about it tomorrow, but first wanted to share about where I'm living in Chile.

So I am in an older apartment building about 2 blocks for the center of downtown Santiago. The building was just renovated so everything is nice and new, which is great for us!

I'm living with 6 other girls ( all VE volunteers) and some of them are sharing rooms, but I was lucky enough to get my own room. It's so nice to come back to my own space at the end of the day.

Our living room

Dining room

Drying rack for our clothes - we only have a washer right now. They swear a dryer will be coming soon, but until then everything is a bit stiff and wrinkled.

the Kitchen - this is HUGE for a Chilean kitchen. Most are like the size of a nice walk in closet.

My sweet little bedroom. Yep, that is a twin bed.

the view from my window

Overall, we really lucked out. The funny thing is that our landlord is this young guy who owns the hostal we first stayed in and this is his first venture in to apartments. So we get something new in our house everyday because everyday we're all like "Mario, don't you think we could use a cutting board or bowls or maybe some knives...." It's been interesting.

The most interesting thing is that Chileans apparently don't really worry about fires. There are no smoke detectors and when I asked about them he said "No, you don't need them. Just don't smoke."

So I have now bought 2 smoke detectors, a fire extinguisher and  will be buying a rope ladder. We are on the 5th floor and there's only one set of stairs down the middle. Most of my roomies think I'm crazy, but I just really don't want to die of a fire in Chile.