My first night in my new home.

The good news is that I have an apartment. And a cell phone. (The main goal for this week is: get a bicycle, get to know my local grocery situation, catch up on sleep, and explore...) I live on the 19th floor of a giant building and every room has giant windows with beautiful views of the city.

I can't understand my three Chilean roommates por nada, but I am trying nonetheless. We watched Flight 93 tonight, which was a crazy experience in which I was asked to explain what Americans "think" about 9/11. I said it was a heavy question, and that I was not a normal American. They all expressed their doubt about who the authors of the act were, particularly after having seen Fahrenheit 9-11 and various things about the controversial discrepancies between the actual events, the results, and the official government story of what happened.

I struggled in my awful Spanish to say that I don't think we will ever know, because the entire country doesn't care enough to research things on their own and that unless some media group like Fox (who has a blatant political agenda) were to radically change....the public is never going to be fully informed because they don't care to. Even if it were not terrorists from the Middle East, American people are happy to accept that story because it fits within the polarized cultural notions we have of us vs. them and are complacent with the political agenda that the government has long had but is just couched in terms of "anti-terrorism" that we use to advance our own geopolitics. I tried to say that I felt sorry for everyone's losses. And that the whole situation was awful, particularly as we as a country threw away in less than three years all the positive sentiment we had from the rest of the world, and that I had a hard time separating the actual events of 9-11 from the politics and awful foreign and domestic policy backlashes from it.

What actually came out of my mouth was complete nonsensical blabber in poor poor Spanish that made no sense. I have a long ways to go. The Chilean accent is difficult, and my ability to speak is still woefully inadequate. But, I am here safe and sound!