Some pictures

In case you didn't know this is an American cartoon, "Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends", that I happen to love. Funny to see it in Chile.

This is the river that runs through Santiago. mmmmmm

(But the rest of the city is super beautiful, promise)

Did I mention I found a climbing gym here? I haven't been going much because there is so much else to do, but its pretty legit. Still looking to go outside before winter!

Sometime next week a package should arrive for me containing a functioning camera (Mine broke due to a faulty waterbottle) and then I promise a blog post of epic proportions, but until then, this is all I've got.

Officially official

Got my Chilean "RUT" (ID #) and Carnet (ID Card) today, finally! I can officially.. I don't know.. Do anything that requires a RUT. Really I'm not sure, but they make a big deal out of getting it. I needed it once to book bus tickets online, so I guess now I can book ALL THE BUS TICKETS I WANT. 

Awesome.

Temblors & Germans & Beaches

Haha so I'm not sure what's going on, but we've had two earthquakes, "temblors" to Chileans (which means tremor- because they were small, chump change in comparison to what they are used to here) in the last 24 hours. I think they were 5.4 & 7.1 in magnitude, so nothing to panic about, and the epicenters were far away. Cristobal is really freaked out, rightfully so since he is old enough to remember the one from 2 years ago, but I am cool beans, so don't worry. Anyway, very exciting.

Also I went to the beach yesterday in Vina del Mar (literally "Vineyard of the Sea") and 1) swam in the ocean for the first time... still not sold on the whole idea. Sharks abound!! (Not really..) Anyway, obviously 2) I got super sunburned. Also I totally left my wallet on the bus like an idiot. When I went to a different bus to try to find the number of the bus depot or something the driver looked at me like I was a crazy gringa. His words just said "uh no, there isn't a number" but his face said "stupid gringa, did you think the bus was some sort of wallet storage place and you could just come back for it later?" So apparently buses are so cheap here because there is no one sitting at a phone somewhere guarding the items that people left on the buses. Bummer. Fortunately I only lost my debit card, $25, and my Colorado ID. All pretty replaceable.

But anyway one really cool thing about Vina del Mar is the Reloj de Flores, literally the Clock of Flowers. This is a picture I found on Google:

So you can imagine that I was pretty excited to see this masterpiece. Unfortunately when we got there it looked like this:

"Under Maintenance" 

But we still took a picture by it anyway. Silly gringos. 

Anyway then we went to the beach and stuff. When they learned that i had never buried anyone in the sand before they declared that I never had a childhood and we promptly buried Jess to make up for it. haha so this is Jess buried in sand:

So thus concludes my trip to the beach. No actual evidence of me swimming (in the form of pictures), sorry!

But yeah, I didn't do hardly anything this week because I was sick and felt like garbage, so I just slept a lot, but I feel pretty good now.


The highlight of the week was seeing my good friend Lukas Hugle, the German. (Depending on who "you" are, you may or may not recall that Lukas was a foreign exchange student at EHS my junior year.) It was so great to see him and he introduced me to several of his crazy German and Chilean friends on Friday night. It was so great to catch up with him and see that he is doing well. He has been touring South America for the past 6 months, volunteering and working and what not. I had a great time hearing about his travels. He looks like a homeless person right now because I'm not so sure he's shaved or gotten a haircut in the past 6 months, haha. When I first saw him, my first thought was "Who is this homeless man beaming at me?" Anyway we had a great time.

Cristobal, mi hermanito

I wish I could follow Cristobal, my host brother, around with a camera all the time. He does the most hilarious things. For example, I guess he was too tired to make it to bed one night and this was all the energy he could muster. He also likes to sing "Everybody dance now" all the time, and sometimes Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber in the shower, although he will never admit it. He also thinks its really funny to swear in English. He teaches me tons of funny words like "ñoño" which means 'geek'. He taught me this by pulling his pants up as high as he could and walking around like a crazy person. (I still had to look up exactly what it meant.) 

Week in Review

Sorry again that its been awhile! I've been super busy doing some pretty awesome stuff. Let's see, my week.. 2 days of class, 5 days of weekend.
Monday and Tuesday I finalized my schedule and attended all my classes for the first time. My classes are:
20th Century European History (Pretty sure I am the only non-Chilean in this class)
Human Rights in Chile
Political and Economic Development in Latin America
& Sociocultural movements in Latin America

Should be interesting! I have a lot of readings to do, in Spanish, which take forever. But all my classes except Human Rights transfer back as pass/fail so I'm not too worried about them.

On Wednesday I skipped school to go to Paseo a la Playa, which is a tradition at La Catolica, the Catholic university, where most kids skip class and go to the beach ("la playa") for the day instead. It was a lot of fun, and also really crazy. I went with my Chilean friend, Cami, and some of her friends and it was great. There was live music and tons of people.

Thursday was my day of rest, homework, and cleaning. And preparing for Friday.

Friday I went to an exhibit about India that was super interesting. Afterwards Jess, Mimi, and I explored the city. Friday night I went to a going away surprise party for Cami. She's going to Europe for 3 months, which sucks for me because she has been so nice to me! Her friends are really nice too though so hopefully they will still invite me to hang out with them. The surprise party was really awesome and she had no idea so that was cool. I got home at 4:30AM.

Cami's goin away party

They think its funny to take pictures with me. I am kind of a toy to them.

And then on Saturday I woke up at 8 to go for a hike with Mimi, Jess, and Karl, my gringo friends. It was a lot of fun. We went to Cajon de Maipo which is about 45 minutes from town. The bus ride there and back cost around $5 (Transportation in Chile is really, really good and cheap.) The hike was great, with the sad exception that Karl sliced his finger pretty good (on the same hand that he will be getting the stitches out of tomorrow!), Jess lost her wallet, and I twisted my ankle pretty good (its all swollen and I can hardly walk, which is a bummer.)
Saturday 2 of my gringa friends turned 21 and, of course, it was St. Patrick's Day so we went to a bar and then a discoteque (club). I'm sure I looked pretty ridiculous dancing with my ankle all swollen. And I went to bed at probably 5:30AM.

Thus today, Sunday I woke up at noon to make up for my crazy Friday/Saturday. I am currently bedridden with a bag of ice on my ankle. Oh and also my camera broke so I have to wait for my friends to put their pictures on Facebook and then I will steal them and put them on here. So check back for pictures later.

Well that's all for now! Having an amazing time, even if I am a little bit incapacitated for the time being.

Procrastinating

Well I have a paper due tomorrow, so naturally its time for a blog update instead!! (i've also helped clean the house and done laundry).

So classes started last week but they really don't get underway until this week. (I know, I forgot I was here to take classes :/) So I'm taking (all in Spanish, with mostly only Chileans): 20th Century European History (the closest I could get to US History), Human Rights in Chile, Political and Economic Development in Latin America, and Social Movements & Globalization. Should be interesting, but lets be honest, I don't care about that part so much. So my weekend, which starts Thursday night because I don't have class on Friday. Thursday we went dancing at a 'discoteca' (spelled something like that) basically a club. And.. I'm still bad at it.. so that was pretty uneventful really. On Friday I did another hike. Mmm look at that smog:

Me and Jess and all that smog

Yesterday me and some of the gringas (and one Australian.. who I guess is technically still a gringo) went to Santa Cruz, about 3 hours south of Santiago by bus, to explore and do a wine tour. It was probably the classiest thing I've ever done. We tried 7 different types of wine and they were super delicious. If you didn't know, Chile is known for its wine. According to some Chileans, 'you can't buy bad wine from Chile, there is just good, better, and phenomenal' haha.

Just so classy!! 

Me being super classy AND multicultural (drinking wine in Chile with an Australian)

Rows and rows of grapes! This is my friend Ruth.

And last night we watched Pulp Fiction with Spanish subtitles.. which are NOT the same. 

Okay thats all for now.

Oh one more quick thing. Friday night for dinner my mom served an ensaladita (a salad.. that was actually just lettuce,) and pasta sin salsa (plain pasta, without any form of sauce or anything) and instead of being grossed out like I should have been I just put some salt on the pasta and the salad and chowed down (salt is like a combination of every other topping that we have in the US.. pasta sauce, salad dressing, steak sauce, everything.) I even drank the juice (juice here is like cheap tang.. YES CHEAPERTHAN TANG. It rarely actually contains the fruit in question, and water and sugar are always the first 2 ingredients. Thus I usually just drink water.) I didn't even realize it was happening until after I had eaten everything. So I guess I'm adjusting?!? Not sure if that's good or bad in this case.

Yup, I'm having a blast! :)

So its been a while, sorry! I had a fantastic but super busy weekend so here you go:

Friday we hiked up to Cerro San Cristobal.. which is a like Cerro Santa Lucia except its way bigger (Cerro Santa Lucia is in an older blog post, and also in the picture below it is that tiny clump of trees surrounded by buildings.)

The top of Cerro San Cristobal.. 

Me and my amiga Jess @ the top!

Then Friday  night I took a free salsa class with the other Gringos (sorry no pics of that) which turned out to actually be pretty fun, even though I was obviously terrible.

On Saturday, 3 of my American friends and I decided to go on a hike that we found on Google. Turned out to be pretty challenging but also super amazingly awesome. We want to go back before winter. 

The beginning. It took us 4 hours to hike to the waterfall, including our pitstop for lunch. Also it was the hottest part of the day for some of it, so we had to take frequent rests in the shade.

Photo op. Me. Mimi. Jess. Mejores amigas! (haha, "best friends")

Claire, Jess, and I on a rock.

Me being very Louis and Clark like

Its difficult to explain the emotion in this picture. We had been hiking for about 3.5 hours and were pretty certain we were never going to find the waterfall.. This was the first time that we actually heard it/could see it (although its very tiny, if you look closely its like right above Jess's hand.)

And then we still had 30 more minutes to hike and it was super steep!

Thirty minutes later we were at the waterfall! It was so awesome!! The water was freezing but it felt amazing. 

The waterfall was freaking gorgeous though!

But very cold!

And afterwards, I obviously got burned in really awkward places.. even though I applied SPF 70 like four times! The watch tan is the least of my worries though, the backpack strap tan on my shoulders is pretty disturbing.

Early Sunday morning (around 3am) my good friend Karl drastically overestimated his ability to climb fences. Thus I spent the better part of Sunday morning watching Karl struggle to communicate with telephone operators in Spanish trying to figure out which places our insurance worked at, while Googling nearby hospitals and such. Fortunately he wasn't in much pain (as far as he would admit,) but he did end up having to get stitches. His analysis of Chilean healthcare: decent, but expensive.

Approximately 2.5 hours of sleep later I woke up early to go rock climbing with my newly found Austrailian friend, Tom, which was great fun and I learned all sorts of hilarious things about Australia/U.S. perception. Probably the best was that in Australia "jelly" is "jell-o" so when he was little and he heard that Americans liked peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, he and his friends were super confused. In his words, "how do they get the jelly to stay on the bread?!" Haha that cracked me up. After climbing Tom and I went to a Chinese restaurant and we learned the difficulties of trying to communicate in a second language with another person who is also speaking in a second language. I ended up ordering Pollo con Dientes de Dragon (literally Chicken with Dragon Teeth) because it sounded badass but it turns out Dientes de Dragon is BEAN SPROUTS. I was so disappointed. But okay that's all for now!! I'll try to update this more frequently so I don't have such long entries!! :D