Oh dear, we arrived in Chile over a week ago and are only just negotiating leaving. Santiago already feels like home and we are very sad to be going. To begin with we stayed in a little Chilean hostel which was basically a family home with extra rooms. This was fun but we spoke no spanish, they spoke little english and they were charging through the roof (ok they were charging all of 7 pounds 50p per night but it is all relative!). We instead moved to Hostal de Sammy, run by an American who also had a deal with the language school in Bella Vista (a goregous district in Santiago renowned for its little restaurants where of course we tried out the menu del dias, it would be rude not to!) Here we set up home and became permenant fixtures. This hostal was great offering fun, games, BBQs and above all else 24 hour free webcam! Yey! We don't want to think about the hours Cheryl and I sat glued to the computer in hope of more amusing interludes with friends and family at home. It was worth it though and who would have thought that the first place we would be able to skype people in 7 whole months would be in South America?! Anyway we did do some other things like learn spanish for example. We got ourselves onto a 5 day, 6 hours a day intensive spanish course and spent 5 days feeling absolutely exhausted with the effort. Now though we are proud to say we can say all sorts of things (ok very slowly and not necessarily gramatically correctly) but nonetheless 2 times out of 3 people actually understand us. This means that they start blabbing a lot of things back at us which is posing a new problem altogether but we are working on it! One evening the language school put on an evening at a salsateque. We were disproportionately excited about this. We had read about salsateques in our phrase book and so the chance to actually go to one was beyond our wildest dreams! Ok so maybe we had hyped it up a bit too much but it was still good fun. We ate cuban food, drank the local speciality drink, Pisco Sours and danced salsa into the wee hours. There was even a live salsa band and a tiny lady in an even tinier skirt who came out to teach everyone some moves around midnight. We were all salsa and more to the point spanished out by about 4am but by leaving 'so early' we managed to really offend our host because our premature exit (leaving before 8am) meant we hadn't enjoyed ourselves! We are now on our way to Argentina in a bus that leaves this afternoon and it is lunchtime so must dash Hasta luego xxx