Sun, 14 Oct 2001 15:36:06 -0700 (PDT)

Well, seeing as it has been a while since I have written a mas email to everyone, here it goes.

I arrived in chile almost three weeks ago. Santiago is a very modern city, and I like it a lot ... you really can´t tell the difference between it (the parts that I have seen anyway), and any modern canadian city. The subway system here kicks ass!

My first two weeks I spent living with a Chilean family, a 70 year old lady, her 40 year old daughter, and her 19 year old grandson. The food was good and the family was nice. They always fed me WAY too much food, but it is a good thing I can eat a lot. After that, I moved into a "student" apartment ... basically a furnished apartement that vagrants come to live in for short periods of time. There are 3 guys from ecuador (cool guys), and there was on guy from Jordan (a FREAK) ... the Jordanian guy moved out thursday, but there is a funny story about him ....

On Tuesday, I was having my daily siesta starting at about 3:00 ... at about 5:00 someone was knocking at my door, and I heard my room mate say "Alexander open the door, the Police are here" ... so I stood up in my underwear, and opened the door, and there was 8 huge cops and one of my room-mates standing outside my door .... I didn´t know what was going on, but I wasn´t scared because I haven´t done anytilng illegal here ... so, I came out of the room, and said "Quieran Cerbasas" (you guys want some beer), the one cop says in pretty stern engilsh " we can´t drink on the job". So I go to the living room, and 2 of my room mates and me are there, and we had to show our pasports etc, my passport went to three different cops, one with a video camera, and two other guys were writing information down from it... the Police it turns out were from INTERPOL, along with some local Santiago police. I asked them what was going on, and they said that they were investigating in relation to the Bombing of the World Trade Center ... (if that phrase doesn´t get this email picked up by the CIA snoops, nothing will) ... any way, they questioned us for an hour or so, but we all knew that they were really looking for the Jordanian guy. They didn´t give me much details of why they were in our apartement, but I assumed that someone had reported that there was some suspicious guy in th building or something.

Anyways, yesterday, my room-mate tells me that it was him who went to INTERPOL because he was scared of this guy .... the reason he was scared is because this Jordanian guy was always YELLING on the phone, and sounding like he was ordering someones death, of course it was all in Arabic, so none of us could understand him ... poor guy is just some freak (I think) ... altough after the police came, he shaved off his beard, and was gone the next day .... Hmmm.

On another note, I went white water rafting yesterday, the water was fucking COLD, and I was right in the front of the boat, so I got soaked the worst. However, it was a fun experience, and the mountains around here are really nice ... we drove by pinochets mansion on the way to rafting, but all we saw was the wall around his huge yard.

Not much else to report from here.