I wrote this on the plane...

Hey all,

Welcome to my blog. Here I will post self-indulgent, probably boring and wordy ramblings throughout the summer. Get excited! For two months I’m doing a study abroad program in Santiago, Chile and staying with a host family, and then for two weeks I’ll be playing with animals at a refuge in Ecuador. Right now I’m on a very long plane ride. It’s 1 am…I left Detroit around 7pm, and I won’t be getting to Santiago until 7:30 am. It’s a really friggin long plane ride…so it makes me understandably disappointed that I’m not even leaving the Eastern Standard timezone. Another interesting consequence of traveling straight south: it’s WINTER below the Ecuador. I feel like that should be in big letters on the wikipedia page for Chile, because I had no idea when I signed up for this program. So don’t expect me to come home beautifully tanned…unless I get UV exposure from the hole in the Ozone layer. Yum…

Since I might not have internet access until tomorrow, by the time I post this I’ll probably have much more interesting and Chilean stories to tell, but for now you’re stuck reading about my airport misadventures. Because I am bored and there’s 6 hours still to go. Or you can skip this entry and move on the exotic stuff, but that’d be rude so don’t. I’ll know if you have. I have spies. In your computer. (Just kidding…you can open the porn back up now).

Anyway. My travels began excitingly when I set off the metal detector…so I took off my earrings, necklace, headband, etc etc…but I kept setting it off. Finally I had to have a private pat down in which the metal-detecting culprit was discovered to be my bra. After being felt up by airport security, I made it to my gate. But I couldn’t get on the flight because it appeared that someone else had already boarded with my seat number. It turned out the dude had gotten on the wrong plane, he was supposed to be in seat 22E on a different airline’s flight to Atlanta. It was a truly sad experience having to take a seat from that poor confused guy. The woman sitting next to me seemed to blame me for his misfortune and gave me really mean looks the whole plane ride. Also I think she stole my pretzels. Then the girl sitting behind me peed her pants during landing because she was scared to use the airplane bathroom. It was adorable.

Now I’m on the international leg of my flight, and have discovered very quickly that I’m entirely incapable of understanding Chilean Spanish. I tried to converse with plane neighbor guy, and he had to repeat everything three times muuuuy lento…and it still sounded like he was very quickly repeating the same two consonants and three vowels over and over. Oh dear. Plane neighbor guy also repeated at least seven times that I should be prepared for it to be “muy muy frio” in Chile. Apparently I’m not the only one who makes that mistake about the whole hemisphere-season issue.

One final note: To all my friends, please keep in mind that my parents and grandparents are reading this blog. Don’t post anything that you don’t want them to read.