I'm home?

My long journey is finally at an end! I'm now all settled in to my temporary accommodation in Concepción, a really nice apartment with a view of the river and the city which I will have for two weeks.

That 'random' search that happened at Heathrow did turn out to be a recurring theme... I got searched at every single opportunity there was and had to empty out my hand luggage on three separate occasions at security for random checks. Oh well it's all done now. The journey actually wasn't too bad, the flights were all quite comfortable and I even got a lesson in Chilean slang from one of the passengers I was sat with on my final flight. It was once I landed in Santiago that things became a little more confusing. Everybody here seems to know exactly where they're going so they just don't bother putting up signs properly, unfortunately for me this meant I had to ask somebody every 10 minutes to get directions to bus stations, coach terminals, taxi ranks and my apartment! Eventually I made it to my accommodation at around 5pm local time.

The Plaza de armas in the centre of the city

I met up with the previous language assistant who's role I'll be stepping into and she was kind enough to give me a tour of some of the city. I have to admit that when I arrived I wasn't that enamoured by Concepción but when I was taken to the heart of the city I really started to like the place. It's very lively here, there is live music on every corner and the local people are really friendly. Tomorrow I'm off to see the uni that I'll be working at and probably try to get some boring stuff like sorting phone contracts out of the way, A lady who I was speaking to on the coach said I should expect three things in my first week here: earthquake tremors, a student protest and a power cut, let's see how right she was...