Atacama’s the new home
Our placement with English teaching program happened to be in Copiapo. This meant that the next few months of our lives will be in the middle of the driest desert on the planet.
The city
Not small by Chilean standards, Copiapo has a population of 200,000 (By Bangalore standards, I think that just means 2 Koramangalas) It is the capital of Atacama Region (Region III) in Chile. Surrounded by beautiful hills, the main occupation here is mining — lots of copper and silver out here!
While usually it doesn’t rain at all here, there was a devastating flood last year in March. Some of the damage is still notable and the recovery work is in progress.
Language
There’s nothing touristy about Copiapo. Well, there is the railway station now converted to a museum and probably one more museum but nothing great about them. In Chile, trains are almost extinct now (they used to connect the entire length of the country at a time). Who needs trains when the buses are so good (although a bit expensive)!
Given the lack of tourism, English is not spoken here at all. This makes things challenging for us but also forces us to learn Spanish even more, which is good.
Our apartment
The first thing we had to do was to find a place to live. This was almost impossible to do without the help of Paulina, our Regional rep with the volunteer program. She helped us check out a few places before we decided to be her neighbor. It’s a fully-furnished 1 bedroom apartment, which makes life simpler as buying a bunch of things for few months didn’t make sense.
I’ve also started taking snaps of the dinner everyday in the hope of making a yummy, colorful collage later. Here are a couple of pictures from the first week of cooking.
Distances
The entire city is not more than 4 km x 8 km and our apartment is in the center. This means that everything we care about is walkable — both our schools are roughly 1 km, the city center 500 m, couple of supermarkets 1.5 km etc.
There are a couple of downsides of Copiapo: it’s slightly more expensive than some other cities and English is almost not understood at all but overall, it works out well as we wanted the experience of living in a smaller town with a slower pace of life (unlike Santiago).
