We're here!

Hello all!
This is my first post here on The Traveling Teacher.
For some background, I'm Dee, and I flew 12 hours yesterday to come down to Santiago, Chile and teach English for 6 months. I'm here with my best friend Jess, whom you'll hear a lot about in the future. We arrived in the airport this morning at about 9am Santiago time, and since then have already been going going gone!

First we grabbed some lunch and a short walk before we could check in to our hostel rooms. Lunch for us was barro luca (basically a melted cheese steak sandwich) and barro jarga (ham and cheese). The national dish of Chile is lomo a lo pobre, which is a dish of beef, onions, and french fries, topped with two fried eggs* (from what I've seen so far, anyway). Now I'm getting settled into the largest hostel room I've ever stayed in (above) and later on will attend a barbeque hosted by the hostel. Tomorrow is orientation and 
Some things I've noticed so far:
-You have to be very alert and careful when walking across the street, but if you're at a crosswalk, they almost always stop for you.
-Water, when asked for in a restaurant, is automatically assumed to be bottled water. A bother back home in America, where I hate to waste what I don't need, but since I'm new here, I'll follow along for a while.
-Stray dogs are everywhere! and I just want to play with them all!!
I'll try to post more later, including some new Chilean vocabulary. Ttyl!