My South America Apartment

Greetings from Santiago. I have already managed to get a sunburn! You gotta love summer.

Today was the first day in the office and oh my but there is a lot to do. A whole lot. A mess. To be fair most of it is the client's responsibility as they keep giving us bits and pieces of information, all of it incomplete, and therefore it's kind of hard to keep it all straight. No wonder they hired us. I think they must have gotten it so screwed up they figured it was better to hire us than to try to sort it out themselves.

So all in all a headache. But today Sam and I were driving back to the hood and bitching and moaning and I looked into the distance and told him that no matter how lousy a day can be you drive home with the Andes staring you in the face. This picture doesn't do it justice because there is another layer of taller ones behind what is visible here. With the heavy pollution here, especially at this time of year, the Andes look like a theatrical backdrop that has faded over many years. You kind of see them faded out and they are HUGE and still pretty far away so you know they have to be freaking ENORMOUS! I was looking and there were these low clouds and then I realized they were not clouds at all - it was snow on top of the mountains that were barely visible. The pollution is really horrible. I woke up with a sore throat which I had all day and sneezed and had watery eyes and multitudes of snot. And I'm not sick. I did that over Christmas. This is totally pollution related.

Getting on to my apartment. I told you it was tiny and that's the truth. It's about twice the size of my first Tokyo apartment and about 1/2 the size of my second Tokyo apartment. It is 100% perfect for my purposes. I can get up in the morning and brew a pot of coffee. I have a small fridge to make ice and keep water and sandwich stuff and milk for morning cereal and if I want to fix myself dinner there is a bit of equipment to be able to do so. I have "zones" unlike a hotel room. I can sit in the living room and read or blog or work and then go in the bedroom and be away from work. I have a small washer (it both washes and dries and I will experiment later and let you know how it works). It makes me feel like I have a home here and that might seem strange but when you have to be in one place working for a long time it makes all the difference. Anyway, here are some photos of my little home: The bedroom with huge sliding glass windows!

The living room looking out onto the balconey - more huge sliding glass windows!
And for some reason Blogger wants me to stop with the photos already because it won't let me load any more in tonight. I'll post more tomorrow.

FYI I am now doing a laod of laundry in my washer/dryer combo. There has been a lot of churning so far. I am so curious to see how it ends up. It's a very small machine and 1 pair of jeans, one flimsy summer skirt/blouse combo, 2 pair underwear and 1 pair socks filled it up to the max. So officially I can say I miss my high capacity washer back home where the above load would have constituted a "very small" setting.

Santiago is so great and this is mostly due to the fact that I am in a place where I feel comfortable going out by myself. Independence is a remarkable thing. Makes all the difference in the world.