My days in Viña del Mar, Chile, though short, have been a whirlwind of adventure, confusion, and learning as I try to find my place in this unfamiliar land in an unfamiliar hemisphere.

Within the first few days, I managed to encounter gypsies, who read my palm and told me that money was unnecessary, at which point they mixed my Chilean peso bills with water and ground them up in the palm of their hand. I was livid, but learned it is best to stay away from gypsies.

The language here is a different Spanish than I have ever heard. Chilenos speak so fast that they are often quite indiscernible even to other native Spanish speakers. Because of this, I don’t feel so bad for not being able to understand them, but it is still causing problems in my daily interactions with them. I have picked up a bit of Chilean slang, which I find fascinating, and anyone who knows any Spanish will find equally so:

Here, instead of “novio” for boyfriend, they say “pololo”, instead of “bebe” for baby, they say “guagua,” and instead of “aburrido,” which means boring, they say something is “fome,” to name a few. I have learned that taking notice of the inner workings of a language is always a great invitation into the deeper meanings of a particular culture.

The transportation here is another story. Like a lot of the public transport in Latin America, the ones here in Viña are no different. Conductors drive fast, maneuvering around traffic and buses, during busy times of the day, are crowded beyond capacity, as people are piled practically one on top of another. In the United States, we would call this an invasion of space and maybe even unsanitary, but here, it is just the way life works.

I think the most interesting thing I have found here is the graffiti culture. I have yet to delve deeper into it, but from the looks of it, it deeply pervades life in this area of Chile. There are two sides to it that I have seen: In Viña and its sister city, Valparaíso, the graffiti differs immeasurably even though only the cities are only about 5 minutes away from each other. In Viña, the graffiti is mainly just phrases scrawled across the sides of buildings, but in Valpo, the graffiti is artwork with meaning behind it. The similarity that the two cities hold, however, is that both contain graffiti directed toward the controversial ‘man’ and dictatorship of Pinochet.

I know much more awaits me in the upcoming months, and good or bad, I can’t wait to find out what it is.

Emily Ramirez can be reached at [email protected].