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.