Durante muchos días

So, after the second day of Santiago I made a personal decision to discontinue this blog permanently. However, after seeing the large number of blogs currently being written by my friends, I thought that I might should give this whole blog thing a second thought. Once I arrived in Arequipa, all I wanted to was sleep, but now that I've moved into my host family's house. It's time to get started. I'll have to say that it'll be much easier to write a blog this year because I have my laptop and my host family has wireless internet and they know the password unlike my last host family.

Anyways, "I Will Rise" hasn't really made much sense as a good title for this blog so far. "I Will Rise" is actually a song by Chris Tomlin. You should check out on iTunes. It's a great song and basically the theme or message of the song is that as a Christian we will rise when God calls our name in the book of life. I think that's it. I may have totally missed the message, but that's what I got from it. Now, after actually listening to the song and telling you it's theme I've just realized that the title of my blog is not actually related in the song at all. I got the term "I will rise" from the song, but in the case I meant for the title to mean something different, more like I will rise to the occasion if God presents it to me.

Ironically enough the occasion has arisen twice since I have been in Arequipa, and there'll be more to come on that later. Right now I thought it'd be good for me to leave you with some thoughts that I've been having over the past few days mixed in with random sentences to describe events that I've been apart of...

Santiago Airport
In Starbucks at the Lima airport enjoying free wireless internet.
Meeting GVI in Arequipa.
A little bit of altitude sickness. (I'm not in good shape anymore)
Barbecue with GVI. It's actually a cookout, but they call it a barbecue.
Occasion 1
Upset Stomach, diarrhea Go Pepto Bismol. (Sorry, you probably didn't need to hear that, but hey, it's life, and I'm still suffering)
Occasion 2
Blogging again!!

Santiago o Nueva York

After getting out of the Santiago International Airport, things started to look a lot better. In this instance, better happens to coincide with the word familiar. I know that seems like a strange word to use to describe a city you've never been to during previous travels, but that's exactly what Santiago was: familiar. At first, I just thought that it seemed very similar to the United States. As we got closer and closer to the city center, I realized that my general comparison could be made much specific. Santiago was almost exactly like another city that I had recently had the pleasure of visiting in the early spring with Cornerstone. Simply put, Santiago is New York City in Latin America. There are some basic differences. Santiago has the iconic look of a Latin American city. There are cobblestone streets, sleazy food venders, and a host Chileans walking around aimlessly. However, Santiago does sport quite a few skyscrapers and many of them are styled in modern architecture not too unlike those of the New York City skyline. The streets are all organized in a similar manner. There are tons of basement parking lots for those who drive their cars in and around the city and the highways are good quality roads. For a few seconds, I thought that I wasn't in Latin America anymore.

Santiago is a little hotspot of its own and I'm glad. Although, I will say that the internet here is not really star quality. It tends to drop a lot of Skype calls and even instant message conversations. You win some you lose some.

Los Vuelos

There are certain things that you'll never want to do twice. Some of them are common to all people. For example, I doubt anyone would want to break the same arm twice. It's just not fun. Most people probably wouldn't want to get a speeding ticket twice in one month either. On the other hand, there's often plenty of things that most of my friends (myself included) would love to do twice. I'm sure that all my friends would love to win the lottery twice, or watch their school win a national championship in basketball twice in fours years. Sadly, it's a little harder to do the last two and a lot easier to do the first two. Funny how things work out. Last week, I got a chance to do something for the second time, and since you can only do something for the second time once I thought I'd share my story with you, just for the heck of it:

So, after taking what feels like a thousand Spanish classes and spending a million hours studying for midterms and perfecting my skills in the language, so that I can appear semi-inteligent to my professors, I've come to like Español and I don't actually mind learning little tidbits about Spanish American culture as I travel throughout South America. The same cannot be said about traveling. I have yet to enjoy sitting alone in an airport with a crowd of people I don't know speaking a language that is not my first and most comfortable. Over the past three days, I've probably sat in the airport for about ten hours. Out of those ten hours most of them were spent in the airports of foreign countries, and of those two airports one did not have heat. I'll have to say that although I haven't really enjoyed my stays in ATL, LIM, and SCL, the second time around wasn't nearly as bad as the first. It's much like the numbers -2 (second) and -7 (first). Both are negative, but -2 is greater than -7.

I had a lot of worries going into the day. Luckily, most of the problems that I thought I was going to have ended up not being problems at all. My connection in Lima was probably one of the simplest things I've ever done. I literally walked off the plane, went through a door, took a left and was at the counter to get my tickets for my next two flights. Customs was a breeze at Santiago and there was a nice man named Francisco who greeted me at the airport. My response to my smooth travels was and continues to be the same as my mom's response when she received an email from me later that morning letting her know everything went well: "Hallelujah"

Going back to the first sentence, traveling to South America was something I never thought I would do again, or at least not in the near future. I guess you just never know what someone might be willing to do twice.

More to come on Santiago, and the businesses we toured today (Tuesday)...