Settling In

Welcome back!

Quite a lot has happened since Todd and I arrived at our hotel apartment in La Serena three weeks ago. To start with, we only spent nine days at the hotel before moving into our new house. During that time, we had figured out how to purchase food at the grocery store so we didn’t have to eat out for lunch every day (yeah!), how to navigate the confusing one-way streets of La Serena (yikes!), how to eat in a restaurant (sort of), how to get around the awful Internet connection at the hotel (we tethered our laptops to our phones), and how to rent a house (whew!) We had also tried Pisco Sour, the local drink, for the first time (yum!) and had gotten extremely tired of the never-changing, but filling, breakfast at the hotel (ugh).

Very early on, the Human Resources department of AURA (the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy) connected us with a realtor they work with who speaks a little English. We expected to tour a few houses with her over a week or two before choosing where to live for the next year. However, it turned out there was a grand total of one house available that met our needs. This is the height of tourist season, so beggars can’t be choosers. So, we toured it, then rented it.

Fortunately, the benefits of the house (three bedrooms, lots of fruit trees, great location) outweighed the definitely quirky nature of the place. Plus our landlords and their extended family all live in neighboring houses and have invited us into their lives. The landlords, Isabel and Vladimir, have three adult children, each with two or three young children of their own, ages 3 through 15. All three adult children speak some English as well as Vladimir and one of the grandchildren. They’ve been extremely kind and patient with us. Several of them are enjoying helping us learn to speak and understand Chileno.

Actually renting the house was an interesting process. I spent a couple of sleepless nights (who me?) , worrying about how to set up electrical, water, gas, etc. in Spanish or even how to pay for everything when we couldn’t understand a word anyone was saying and didn’t have either a RUT or a Chilean bank account/credit card. Our US credit cards work fine in person, but they don’t work at all online.

(Side note: The RUT is the Unique Tax Registry, which is sort of like the US Social Security Number. Everyone in Chile has a distinct RUT. They use it for practically everything, so it’s difficult to do a lot of things without it. Like getting a bank account or credit card, putting utilities in your own name, buying a car, etc. Today, February 15, we received our diplomatic visa and our RUTs. Yeah! So, next we’ll apply for the bank account and credit cards. Life here will be a lot easier with those.)

However, despite my worries, there’s a benefit to working for an organization that has moved a foreigner or two. AURA and the realtor already knew how to deal with all these issues. They suggested leaving all the utilities, plus the soon-to-be-purchased internet, in the landlord’s name. We’ll pay them for those services every month when we pay our rent. So, no trying to set up services without the proper paperwork! The realtor also suggested paying the rent in cash for the first few months. That was fun… Taking out 2.5 million pesos and carrying it around!

CHILEAN HOUSES

Speaking of houses, one major difference that was immediately noticeable was the fact that every house is behind a locked iron fence and many have iron bars over their windows and doors. The newer houses are skipping the bars on the house itself, but even so, they still have the iron fence. It looks and feels rather protective and cold; however, the people themselves have been very nice.

We spent an afternoon putting chicken wire over the bars of the windows and doors of our house to keep our cat, Smudge, from escaping when the windows are open. There aren’t any screens, so he could just walk out between the bars. Sorry, Smudge!

We also had to have internet installed from scratch. It’s a much longer process when then wiring has to come down the street and across the yard before it can be installed. However, the installer did a very nice job and now we have even faster internet than we had in Bellingham!

UPDATE ON THE C19 FIASCO

So, remember the difficulty Todd had with his C19 affidavit at the airport? When we last left off, the agents at the airport had done a “manual fix” to approve his entry into Chile and sent us on our way. They agreed that his vaccines were all validated and told us that whatever they had done was sufficient for entry into Chile. Everything was set and Todd was free to go.

Well… not quite.

Currently because of COVID, when you enter Chile, whether you’re Chilean or a foreigner, you are required to self report to the Ministry of Health for 10 days. It’s just a simple online form that asks a bunch of questions about whether you have any COVID symptoms. Takes about 30 seconds to complete each day. But at the bottom of the page, it asks where you’re staying until the end of your mandatory quarantine time. If your C19 is approved, you only have to stay at that residence until the negative PCR test, which is usually about 9-12 hours. However, if your C19 isn’t approved, you’re supposed to stay at that residence for the entire 10 day self-reporting period. In our case, this residence was our hotel in Santiago.

Needless to say, once we had our negative PCR tests, we hopped a plane to La Serena and went to our hotel apartment to start our new lives. We were no longer quarantining because, as far as we were concerned, we had fulfilled all of the requirements. We both just needed to self report for 10 days.

Except…

Whatever the agents did at the airport, it didn’t change anything online. Todd still only had two vaccines listed and his C19 still said “not valid for entry into Chile”. So, according to the Ministry of Health, Todd was supposed to be quarantining in the Santiago hotel for 10 days. And, they went to check on him…

Needless to say, they sent him an email, letting him know that he had broken quarantine and giving him 9 days to submit his defense of his actions. Yikes! Fortunately, by this time, we had become part of a What’s App group of expats living in La Serena and working for one of the three or four observatories based here. Someone from that group helped Todd get in touch with the AURA department that works directly with the Chilean government. Through them Todd was able to write an extremely detailed account of his actions leading up to our landing in La Serena, get it translated into Spanish, and get it submitted to the Ministry before the deadline. That was 8 days ago and we haven’t heard anything since… Fingers crossed that it resolved the situation!

Stay tuned next time for some interesting differences we’ve noted between La Serena (or Chile, in general) and the Pacific Northwest (or the U.S., in general).