...Everything Was New

There's a lot of little things that make living in a new country such a big transition.  So I'm going to look some of the little things I've noticed since we got here.

Firstly, the new SOUNDS:

Music and voices from the neighbours and the swimming pool across the road at ALL hours of the day.  The music is reggaeton (?) and it was cool to begin with, but now we've had just about enough of it thank you very much!  It's 10x worse when there's a party going on (woke up at 4:30am the other night to sound of the music blaring), which is quite often at the minute, as it's the summer holidays.  I don't think it helps that we're used to having dinner at 7:30ish and going to bed around 11, which is when the Chileans are having dinner!

Animals- Dogs, dogs and more dogs!  Happy dogs, bored dogs, angry dogs, sad dogs, lonely dogs, excited dogs, defensive dogs, stray dogs, owned dogs!  I feel like I'm writing a Dr Seuss book! 

And there's the cockerel in the morning, the flies everywhere in the morning, afternoon and evening and the birds outside the window.

Cars on the gravel drive up to the home, the track over our hedge and the main road beyond that.

The leaves on the trees rustling in the wind.  I've never lived RIGHT next to so many trees before.

Every noise any of the girls makes in our house, it's compact and open plan!

Chileno (Chilean Spanish).  I'm already used to not understanding most of the conversations that are going on around me.  Hopefully it won't be long before I can catch more of what's going on.  I can already understand loads more than when we arrived and can say most things I need to to the kids.

At the hogar (home):   “Tia! Tia! Tia!”,  “Hola Tia!”,  “Bueno Dia!” (Chilean accent often leaves off S's), “Como esta?”, “Ciao Tia!”,  “Mañana!”, “Hasta Mañana Tia!” 

(Occasionally all these phrases one after the other!)

And of course lots of shouts and cries and laughter from the 200ish residents.

Wolf whistles and horn beeps.  Yup, it was inevitable. 4 white girls walking/cycling around a small Latin American town.  I can ignore it when it comes from cars driving past, as it's not all that different from home in the summer!  But I have to bite my tongue when it's a bunch of kids, usually younger than us, standing on a street corner and doing it as we go past, every time.  Aaaaarrrrgh!  Drives me nuts.  I think we all expected it to some degree, but we were expecting the local girls to get a bit of it too and we weren't really prepared for it to happen literally every couple of minutes when we're outside the school compound!  Oh well, I guess I'll just have to keep biting my tongue and maybe even learn to take it as a compliment.  Or maybe I'll just learn some really nasty Chileno slang :)

Still loving (just about) every minute of it!  And already thinking how impossible it's going to be to tear myself away from this place when our 7 months are up. <3

Please note the beginnings of a tan :)