Gringos

In the past 6 days I have stayed in 6 different hostels in 5 different cities - oye! Keeping all the different places has been tricky especially when they all use the same street names like Diego Portales, O'Higgins, Baquedando etc.  But at last I am in Puerto Natales where I will be spending the next 4 nights.  During the day I will be heading out to the national Park Torres de Paine and also hopping over the border into Argentina to see a glacier - but that is all to come, not what I have been up to for the past several days.

So by the time I was back in Puerto Montt after Castro I was working on my 4th full day without having a conversation longer than 5minutes in English (with my parents to verify that I was alive), entonces I was starting to get a little antsy.  There were 2 gringas speaking in English on my bus ride from Castro to Puerto Montt and I was soooo tempted to just go up to them and say Hi, I have not been in the presence of people who speak English in 4 days can I just talk with you for a while?  In effect I was perilously close to becoming the guy in the plaza de armas who litterally did ask if he could speak to my friends and I in English that´s how bad his withdrawl was!  Luckily when I arrived at my hostel that evening there was a large group of American students who had been traveling through Argentina for a semester and had just crossed over to Chile for the first time.  They were interested to trade stories about the two countries and I ended up watching American movies with them for the rest of the night!  I think if I hadn´t met them I would have started to go crazy, but luckily all my social needs were met.

The following morning I hopped on a plane to Punta Arenas, at the very bottom of Chile.  Another girl, from Germany (who of course is fluent in Spanish and English!), arrived to my hostel at the same time and we spent the afternoon together exploring the town.  We walked down to the coast and looked out at the Strait of Magellan, which is nothing special to look at but still it´s the Strait of Magellan!  We also ventured into the town cemetary which is like a less grandiouse but better maintained Recolleta (in Buenos Aires).  We didn´t have time to do much else but we were able to figure out how to see the penguins off the coast! So when I return to Punta Arenas on Sunday I will definitly be seeing them! 

It was nice to explore a town with someone else for a change instead of just by myself - tomorrow I am going trecking with 2 other people from my hostel and hopefully they will be just as fun as the other people I have met during my travels so far!  People in the south of Chile in general have been very nice, they will bend over backwards to help you.  Maybe they are just used to tourists more than people in Santiago, I have never seen more gringos here than I have anywhere else in Chile and that includes Easter Island!  Today I was in a cafe and there was not a single Chileno in the entire place, I doubt there was even another person from South America in the cafe either!  So wierd that you can speak English all the way down here and be understood almost anywhere but if you were to try to do that in the capital of the country you would probably run into trouble.  Crazy!

****Lo siento, no spell check again. Also its getting dark so I need to head back to my hostel so I am not even doing an eye check on my spelling, yeah I know it is really bad, again lo siento!