Finals

Quick story. (Disclaimer: I think finals week still went pretty well, even though this story might suggest otherwise)

After we got back from Argentina at 4am, I decided to skim Facebook quickly before bed. Lucky thing because the final that I was planning to take that day at 6pm got moved to 9am... approximately 5 hours away! In a panic I decided to drink some coffee (for the first time in my life) and get to studying. I could feel my heart beating in my throat from how much coffee I drank, but I got to the test and, thankfully, knew the answers. Barely over 24 hours later I had another final (an ORAL final!! Just cruel to do to exchange students, I think.) Needless to say I was so happy to be done with finals I just went home and slept pretty much the rest of the day.

Argentina!

Jess and I decided a long time ago that we wanted to do a trip to Cordoba and Buenos Aires in Argentina. The airport fee for Americans is $160, so we decided to bus to Cordoba and then we would fly back to Santiago (because we've already paid the airport fee in Santiago.) So Thursday morning we plan to meet up at 6:30am to catch our bus at 7:30am. Unfortunately, my alarm didn't wake me up so I didn't wake up until 8. I called Jess in a panic, but it turned out we had bigger problems, the pass between Chile and Argentina was closed because of snowfall! Jess couldn't believe it, but, having spent a winter now in Colorado, I understood perfectly that we were out of luck. They told us that the pass might open tomorrow, but Friday arrived and the pass was still closed. Jess talked to a woman who told us that the pass probably would open back up until Tuesday (our plane tickets back were for Thursday!) We were getting pretty desperate at this point, when a man told us that he was organizing a trip to Argentina through the south of Chile. The bus ride would take about 30 hours, but we had no choice.

We should have known something was wrong when the bus pulled up 45 minutes late and it was tiny and without a bathroom. (SPOILER ALERT) The bus ended up getting into Mendoza NINE HOURS LATE somehow and then we still had to get to Cordoba (another 11 hours) so all in all we spent 49 hours in bus. I decided to write little blurbs every few hours of our journey so here you go:

Hour Zero: 6pm

"Anything I say can and will be used against me on Piper's blog" -Jess

"I hate you and its only hour zero" -Jess

"What's a little more leg room? I don't think its going to make a difference." -Jess (famous last words)

"I'm already hungry and its only hour zero" -Piper (of course, its about food)

Okay hour zero. Still not on the road yet. Feeling good, feeling strong. The trunk ran out of space so Jess's bag is in our laps (Jess, forever the optimist, can only say "Lost luggage? Not a problem, its right here!") Also there are some people on this bus with really bad attitudes- they are not going to make it.  I've already eaten my dinner and broken into the reserve beef jerky, not a good start. Also no bathroom on this bus.

Hour :01

Turns out the emergency exit on this bus leaks, we know this because its raining outside. The poor boy in front of us is using an umbrella to shield himself from the downpour. Its going to be a long 40 hours. At least he's being good natured about it.

Hour :15 (they get more spaced out after this)

Fixed the leak. I found a waterproof cover for my backpack while I was packing (would have been useful in Patagonia!!) so I used my American ingenuity and fixed our leak problem:

11:20pm Hour 5 

Jess and I have just been chatting for the last 5 hours. She is a great travel companion. Probably gonna get some shut eye soon.

5:10am Hour 11 

Well this bus is just small enough for this to be really unpleasant. Can't sleep for more than an hour at a time.

9:10am Hour 14

Slept really well after last entry, feeling good. We stopped for a bathroom break and Jess and I were able to brush our teeth. Minor difficulties getting cleared to leave Chile because I lost my Chilean ID card, which I apparently needed, but thankfully I still know my Chilean ID number so everything worked out (they have a national database for ID's, not a bad idea!) Now time for breakfast- cereal with a fork. 

12:15pm Hour 17

Cleared through Argentinian customs.. 2.5 hours later!! We had to wait for the bus in front of us, then we had to unpack the entire bus (although neither my backpack nor the food bag-the one containing almost every illegal food item including fresh veggies and nuts- got unloaded.) The customs area was beautiful though!

A rainbow!

"Welcome to Argentina"
Little did we know this was only the beginning

Everyone having their bags inspected, ugh

 2:41pm Hour 19
So we just stopped so that people on the bus could have an HOUR LONG LUNCH (Editor's note: this still remains a mystery why we would stop for an hour lunch when we were already 2 hours behind schedule. One of the many mysteries of this journey.) I thought Jess was going to kill someone, good lesson in "Southern Cone Culture"/lack of importance of being on time.

"Wash me"
Jess and I are such pranksters

 6pm Hour 23
So I've just been napping and reading. We just stopped (AGAIN). Turns out we're lost. But it appears that we've only missed the turn by 15 blocks. However somehow our Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) has been pushed back between 2 and 5 hours. What I've concluded is that (1) No on has any idea what they are talking about and (2) if we ever actually get to Cordoba I'm going to be stoked.

7:20 Hour 24
We stopped again for either being lost or a mechanical problem. Communication skills are not strong in this country.

8:50 Hour 25
The passengers are directing the bus driver and I'm pretty sure no one knows where we're going. A direct quote is: "A la izquierda! A la izquierda. No. A la derecha!" ("To the left! To the left! No, to the right!") as we approached a fork in the road.

10:53 Hour 28
We stopped again. Allegedly the drivers have bought a map or at least know where we're going. Our new ETA is 6am, only 7 hours after the promised arrival.

8:45am Hour 37
We arrived in Mendoza ONLY 8 hours behind schedule. Fortunately we were able to jump on a bus immediately to Cordoba. This bus has WAY MORE leg room and we've managed to snag some front row seats. Jess and I feel like we're travelling first class! 

All that we got to see of Mendoza

Front row seats, best view in the house!

 12:40pm Hour 41
"I'm close to cracking" -Jess
We started roaming the aisles of our bus, just because its empty and we're starting to lose our minds a little bit. I'm sure the other passengers hate us, but we could not care less right now.

5pm Hour 46
Well, relatively, we're almost there. Only 3 more hours. Pretty sure I couldn't be more excited to NOT BE ON A BUS. Food supplies= low, spirits= medium. 138km to Cordoba.

7:15 Hour 49
Nearly there! I can see the city lights! 7 kilometers!!!

7:35 Hour 49.3
Entering the city we are greeted by a McDonald's. We think to ourselves, "49 hours.. just to see a McDonald's." Just kidding, we are still super excited to be here. :D

7:51pm Hour 49.5
SUCCESS!!



Hopefully you enjoyed that. After arriving we couldn't figure out how to leave the bus stop and we had to stay for another hour trying to figure out the directions to the house we'd be staying at. We decided (understandably) that we wanted to walk for a bit so we headed out in the direction of the house. We were dirty and frazzled, and we literally turned heads and stopped conversation when we paused to grab some pizza from a restaurant that we passed.
Finally we grabbed a cab and headed to Jess's friend, Emily's, house. We shared a twin mattress that night, but it didn't matter, it was heaven compared to the bus.
The next morning we woke up at 6am to go with Emily to her class. She dropped us off and we got to explore the city all morning and then meet up with her for a guided tour with her in the afternoon, she was an awesome tour guide.

A beautiful church in the center of town

Neat plaza thing

This beautiful building turned out to be a shopping mall. Who would have guessed?

A monument to the "Heros of the Malvinas"
Pretty much every statue is Argentina seems to be dedicated to that.
(Background: Argentina and the British went to war over the Malvinas and the area is still contested, thus it is a huge source of Argentinian pride)

"Legalize abortion to prevent death"

"Sexual education in order to decide" 

A cute river that runs through town

Such a beautiful city! I couldn't believe it!

We called our tour a "gastronomical excursion through Cordoba"
For breakfast, Jess and I spent about 75 cents each, and we got to sample all kinds of delicious pastries

A really fun park with rings for every year of Argentina's history, with a fun fact on each one.

1810

A McDonald's with stained-glass windows. Wow.

Emily gave us a tour through campus, it was really neat. Lots of student activism without the violence  (like in Chile)

We concluded that the fruit was neither as delicious nor as cheap as in Santiago.

We went with Emily to buy some mate. I couldn't believe the selection!! This grocery store was tiny but they still managed to dedicate nearly half an aisle to the stuff. (Mate is like tea that they drink in Argetina at addiction-level quantities. EVERYONE DRINKS IT! But Jess and I tried it and decided it was quite good.)

Emily's water heater had a mate setting, it heats the water to the perfect drinking temperature.

Me drinking mate!

To finish the day off, Emily took us to the top of a hill that overlooked the city so we got to see all the city lights. It was beautiful!

 We had originally planned to spend 2 days in Cordoba but because of the stupid bus we had to get going that night to make it to Buenos Aires. The last thing we did was eat some really delicious dinner and get some cheap ice cream and then head to the bus stop.

Jess and our wonderful tour guide, Emily

 We hopped on an overnight bus and headed to Buenos Aires. We arrived in the morning at 9am ready to explore. The bus stop dropped us off in La Boca a cute and colorful, but also very poor neighborhood.

Afterwards we made our way to the city center and saw a bored kid unsuccessfully trying to catch pidgeons.

We spent a few hours wandering the beautiful city

and then we met our host, Victoria, who was a super cool Argentinian girl about our age.

She showed us to our room, which was this one tiny mattress for both of us. Again, we didn't care, it was way better than a bus seat.

Afterwards we met up with another one of Jess's friend from school and for the next 2 days we explored the city. It was really beautiful. The metro is a lot more sketchy than in Santiago and there are noticeably more white people, we felt like we could blend in instead of standing out all the time like in Santiago, which was kind of nice. Also they have way more delicious pastries in Argetina I think, I'm glad I didn't study abroad there or it might have been bad for my health.

We went back and found the touristy section of La Boca, which had a lot of neat graffiti

"La Boca" in Spanish means "the mouth", so we thought this graffiti was very fitting.

Praying mantis holding a cross and praying. Apparently the joke is multilingual

The Boca Juniors soccer stadium. South Americans love their soccer.

Medialunas, the most delicious pastry ever.

La Casa Rosada
Literally "The Pink House" its like our equivalent to the White House except I don't think the president actually lives there.

More delicious pastries! I think all of this cost about $2 total.

All in all it was an amazing trip, even considering the 2 full days spent on bus. It was well worth it to see two beautiful cities.

Argentina or Bust!!

So Jess and I made plans a long time ago to visit Argentina for a week from August 28th to July 4th. You may, however, notice that today is the 29th and yet I am still in Santiago. Sadly, we planned to take a bus to Córdoba, Argentina, spend a few days there, bus down to Buenos Aires and then fly back to Santiago (to save a little dinero.) UNFORTUNATELY what we weren't told is that the mountain pass closes all the time between Chile and Argentina and guess what- a snow storm rolled in Wednesday night. Terrible luck! Especially because you'll notice how nice it has been all week (I wore shorts to the Equality March!!!) So yesterday Jess got to the train station at 7:30AM (as a side story, I would have missed the bus yesterday anyway because my alarm didn't go off and I didn't wake up til 8:30.. problematic when you were trying to make an 8AM bus. But it didn't turn out to be an issue.)  They told Jess that it was completely closed and we should try back tomorrow. Jess also went to the airport to see about stand by flights (pretty much nothing works online in this country) and the cheapest we could find was around $500, clearly out of the picture.
 So this morning we woke up at 6AM and went back to the train station only to find that, again, the pass was closed. Super disappointing and also frustrating because it seems, at least in the Santiago bus terminal, that nobody has any idea what is going on. We asked several people and we got answers ranging from "Yes definitely try again tomorrow." to "Well its looking like Monday or Tuesday at the earliest." We adopted the motto "we can trust nobody but eachother!!" haha.
So the plan now is that, LUCKILY, we found a company organizing a bus that is less direct and more pricey, but that leaves tonight that goes through a pass farther south. We figured this was our best bet since we, nor anyone else it seems, have any idea about when the pass will open. Fortunately I have experience with these kinds of things (Colorado, Utah;) Jess, on the other hand, seems a little bit frazzled, haha. But I am doing good, just cruising along for now. We'll see how I feel at the end of this long bus ride though!

What a weekend!

Alright, I'm hereby declaring that I'm going to start updating this more frequently!!
Well last weekend was great and a little bit crazy! Here's the break down (i'll add more pictures as they get put up on Facebook.) 


Thursday
I had class and then afterwards we went and got terremotos at La Piojera (if you remember they are very powerful Chilean beverages and La Piojera is the first place we all went and drank them when we first got to Chile) with a big group of my gringo friends. For some of them, it is probably the last time I'm going to see them! (So sad, can't believe it!!!) Afterwards Tom, Jess, Claire and I went and got pitas and talked til late.

Friday
During the day I procrastinated writing a paper for my Social Movements class. Then of course everything was rushed and panicked (why do I do this to myself??) and I had to write it, run, turn it in, and then show up for the "CIEE Re-Entry Workshop" which just means that most all of the gringos (except those with tests) met up at the Program Office and we talked about what its going to be like going back to the U.S. 
Turns out there is such a thing as reverse culture shock which occurs when you go back to your own country and its usually must worse than the actual culture shock of coming to the foreign country! Considering I don't think I experienced "culture shock" when I came to Chile.. I'd like to keep it that way for the way back! But basically what I learned is that there is a "honey moon period" where you come back and see everyone you've missed and eat cheeseburgers and your mom's cooking and everything is happy. But then eventually people will stop wanting to hear about your time in Chile and you'll start to miss Chile and you'll see how everyone has changed in the last 6 months, and also how you personally have changed from the experience.
Basically I'm hoping this doesn't happen to me, obvoiusly, but the workshop was actually really enjoyable and we talked about how this last semester has shaped our view of ourselves as Americans and of the American culture (suprisingly the concensus  was that it has made us more okay with being American, something that I would have betted against 5 months ago.) 
After the workshop we had our "Cena de Despedida" (Good-bye dinner) with the program, which was sad. They had a slideshow and everything. Afterwards they gave us each our own bottle of wine with a label that says (in spanish) "specially bottled for Piper" or whoever's name. So cute. Hopefully I can bring mine back through customs.

Haha, here is Anwesha trying to get a good photo at the good bye dinner and Mimi, Claire and Tatumn are in the background, photobombing. I made it large so you can really get a good look at Mimi's expression. Haha this is just to give you an idea of the group i'm working with here, haha, they are all clowns.

This is the adventure club! Jess, me, Mimi and Claire. These 3 girls are my favorite gringas/weones (weon(es)= Chilean phrase. it can be a really insulting swear word or it can be a term used between friends, depending on the context, haha)

So after the dinner Jess and I met up with our Chilean friend, Barbara, that we met on the flight back from Patagonia. She took us to a club with live music that was a band with tons of different instruments (drums, trumpets, trombones, clarient, etc) that played really cool dance music. After the band stopped playing, they just played music (we're talking 80's/09's music here: Nirvana, Jet, Rage Against the Machine, also, obviously, lots of Spanish bands that I didn't know.) Fun, but hard to dance to. Like typical Chileans, Barbara and her friends were still going strong at 4:30AM and Jess and I realized there was no way we were going to be able to keep up with them so we called it quits and headed for home. 


Also we met some other Gringa girls there (one from Colorado and one from New Jersey, just like jess and I!) and we swapped numbers.


Saturday
 would feel comfortable classifying Saturday as one of my favorite, if not my most favorite, day in Santiago so far. A Gay Pride Parade was schedule between 2-5pm and 50,000 people were expected to be in attendance. Jess, Tom and I went to the grocery store and bought some rainbow face paint (it turned out we were pretty much the only people who thought of this, and tons of people later commented on it. Crazy Chileans!) So we painted rainbow stripes, rainbow hearts and I had AM(heart outline)R on my cheek, so it read AMOR (or LOVE in Spanish). Once we got the facepaint on we headed to the parade. I'm not sure if 50,000 people were there, but there was definitely tons! The March closed down the main road through Santiago and we walked maybe 2-3 miles.

Tom, me, Jess, Ruthie, and Claire

Oh I also brought sparkles, so this is me spreading it on all my friends.

This is my face with tons of sparkles, but you can't really tell. haha

"Equales"

"Equality of rights. Our right to all be different"

I painted Tom's heart, turned out pretty good. But he had an allergic reation to it, so now he has a rash in the shape of a heart on his cheek. pobrecito!! (roughly "poor baby!")

The paint we used. We didn't have paintbrushes so we improvised with Q-tips.

The awesome sweater that I got. It says "Educate in diversity, live in equality"

I watched the guy paint it (from stencil) and it was a "pay what you want" system. pretty neat!

Some drag queens dancing on a roof in Santiago. No big deal I guess.

One of my favorite things about the march, aside from the general atmosphere of awesomeness, was that there wasn't any counterprotesters like there would have been in the US. I thought that was really neat. Another great part was when we decided to stop for ice cream, but the McDonald's had run out of ice cream (we couldn't believe it!) So we went next door and got some delicious fro-yo from a local vendor.

The march ended in front of La Moneda, the main Chilean government building, so we were just milling around, taking it all in, when Tom and I noticed a lot of people walking in one direction. We decided to follow, and promptly made the rest of the group come too,  as they led us to a drag queen show/free concert that was set up in the middle of a random road that was blocked off. It was amazing and hilarious. We saw the drag version of Adele, Beyonce, Cher, Britney Spears, and countless others. By far Beyonce was the best, if you were curious. After the drag show some popular Chilean artists that we recognized from the radio played their stuff, and overall it was just really awesome.

Afterwards we went to the Telepizza (just Tom, Ruthie, Jess and I at this point, everyone else had bailed) which is just like a VERY crappy, but cheap pizza chain here. We managed to stay at the telepizza until 11pm, just chatting, and then we met up with a bunch of gringos at a bar in Bellavista (a neat neighborhood in downtown Santiago.) We were mostly just killing time until 3AM because at 3 Ruthie's dad's show started. (Fun fact about Ruthie's host parents: While her dad is a married, straight man, he does drag shows on the weekends. For some ungodly reason the shows start at 3AM, so we had never been to one, but we figured this was probably our last chance.) So at 3 we headed over to the show.

The first thing I noticed was that there were about 5 girls, in total (out of maybe 100-200 people.) But the show was great. It was well done and funny and just great. There were some VERY fabulous people there and we had a great time. After the show we stayed later to dance, although none of us could even hope to compete with some of these gay guys, they had dancing skills! I think we threw in the towel around 5:30AM and i got into bed around 6. (We're turning Chilean, maybe?! haha)

Ruthie's dad is the one in white

Sunday
Sunday was obviously a slow day. I woke up around 10 and met Jess and our Gringa friend that we met at the bar on Friday at an eco-farmer's market. It was super cool. All sorts of crafts made from recycled goods and tons of organic food  (Free samples!!) It was really neat. We wandered around there for awhile and then headed over to a bar in the neighborhood to watch the fútbol match (soccer game) between two of Chile's best teams. It was really fun to be with all the passionate Chilean fans watching, although I, of course, hold not have cared less about the outcome. Jess and I walked home after the game (about an hour walk) and stumbled upon the hotel that we stayed at our first night in Santiago. It's funny because we had no idea where we were those first days, so it was funny to find it and know exactly where we were.
When I got home I was rightfully exhausted. I ate dinner with the fam and then laid on the couch by Cristobal and *tried* to watch the last Harry Potter movie in Spanish. What really happened is that I completely fell asleep.

Well that's my weekend. I'll add more pictures when I can, sorry it was so long and picture-less!