My One-Month Anniversary in Santiago

As of 3am tomorrow morning, I will have been in Santiago for a month. Terrifyingly, this means I have completed 10% of my year abroad.

This time a month ago I was sat on a plane, my stomach clenched tightly in an un-tangleable knot of anxiety as I dipped lower and lower towards Santiago airport, the city’s millions of lights blinking intimidatingly up at me.

Cities are strange to me anyway – they overflow with people and pavements but seem barren for their lack of green. Santiago, however, was even stranger. At first I found the city a little oppressive – smog and skyscrapers mixed with the thick Chilean accent to create an incomprehensible, overwhelming atmosphere.

How wrong I was. The Andes tower far higher than any skyscraper here, and my breath still slips away from me each time I turn a corner and la Cordillera appears; poised and beautiful and reassuringly confident of her own immortality.

And the accent is strong, but spoken by kind people who patiently ask me where I’ve come from whenever I stutter out a sentence in my very British Spanish accent. Santaguinos who will unfailingly give money to the bus musicians regardless of how early it is in the morning, or how terrible the performance may have been. People who have coated their city in so much art and colour, I’ve forgotten to miss the countryside.

Somehow – with the help of my wonderful, hippy hostess, patient co-workers, a collection of other disorientated and confused Brits, and the Uber driver who returned my lost phone – I have pulled through this first month.