Things have been pretty great here in Chile. Let's start with the most exciting news. I EXPERIENCED MY FIRST EARTHQUAKE!!! Ok well it wasn't really a full-blown earthquake. But it actually happened twice this past week. Here they call them 'temblores.' I guess that would translate to something like tremors. It was actually pretty exciting. The first one happened at like 4:30 AM and I woke up to find that my bed was shaking. I think it lasted for somewhere between 5 and 15 seconds. The second one happened when we were teaching a lesson to an investigator. We were sitting down on her couch when everthing just started to shake again. Oh and in the first one, there was a really loud rumbling beforehand. I was actually just really excited to finally experience my first temblor. Apparently, some Chileans got pretty scared, which is I guess what happens after you experience a pretty devasting earthquake. I heard that they were both above 5.0 on the Richter scale here where I live. I also heard that there was an earthquake in Puebla, Mex. So Curtis may have had some seizmic action as well from my understanding.
Ok second cool thing for the week, I got to go up to Santiago this week to do stuff for my visa and such. It was pretty neat to go up into the city. It was my first time being in the metro (I'm guessing that's just the name for the subway here). But I though it was pretty cool. The public transportation here, especially in the city is really neat. I really enjoyed the opportunity to see it all. It really didn't seem too terribly huge to me, but I guess it really just kept going on forever which is what makes it big. One thing that was really neat was we got to get a tour of the old congress building here. It is a really awesome old building that was built over 200 years ago. It just so happens that the person who was in charge of security when we passed by is a member of the church, so he invited us to come in and gave us a free tour. I was pretty excited to be able to see everything. Afterwards, we were able to go to the temple to see it, which was really neat.
Also, I decided that for my Chilean culture lesson of the week I would send home some pictures of Chilean money. So first of all the money is very colorful. To convert to dollars, 500 Chilean pesos is about equivalent to $1. It is also pretty neat that the money gets bigger for larger amounts of money. The smallest amount is 1 peso (the silver coin) is essentially worth a fifth of a penny. It is therefore pretty much the most useless thing ever. Otherwise, the coin amounts are 500, 100, 50, 10, 5, and 1 pesos.
There you go, now you know all about Chilean money.
Have a great week,
Elder Stollenwerk
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