Paseo de Curso Among Other Things

The last week or so has been pretty awesome for me. It was the last full week of school so we had finals but there was also a bunch of time to hang out and my friends taught me some cool Chilean card games. Yesterday was actually my paseo de curso which is kind of like a class field-trip that we took to the beach to celebrate the end of school. We went to a beach called Loreto which is about an hour or an hour and a half from Copiapó where we rented a cabin. The official paseo was only for the day but about half of my class aranged to spend the night there. I only stayed for the day but I had an amazing time! We played some cards with my cool New York deck, we went to the beach and swam in the freezing Pacific, we walked around a lot which I should not have been doing barefoot. After lunch which was an asado (surprise!) we walked to Bahía Inglesa which is a beautiful beach a supposed 15 minute walk from where we were staying. It turned out to be more like 45 minutes, but it was still fun. We went swimming there and the water is so clear! Everybody took a bunch of pictures and I'm posting mine to Facebook as I write if you want to stalk me. My curso even gave me a gift, an Indio Picaro. It was adorable! I think this is the first time in my life that I've been sad about school ending. I feel like I'm finally starting to fit into my Curso and have a place there and now school is over. I'll still go tomorrow to get my final grades and on Thursday there's an acto de premicaión which is some kind of ceremony in which they give out prizes for the best average and a bunch of other stuff. I have an invitation for me and my family for the cuadro de honor, actually I think all of the exchange students do, but it should be cool. Among other exciting things that have happened this week, Friday and Saturday was the Teletón. It is a telethon as in a 24 hour TV show to raise money, but it's so much more than that! It's something that Chile does every two years (I think)to raise money for disabled children. The have a bunch of famous artists perform and people donate money. This year they were trying to and succeeded in raising 16,000,000,000 pesos I think. I get increidbly confused by the size of number here. It was lot of money though. They also showed a lot of stories of people who had been helped by the teletón. It made me cry. They also do shows in all of the major cities and there was one in the Copiapó plaza. My host-mom, my host-sister and I went to the bank to donate and afterwards they got teletón related massages. Saturday night was an AFS thing. We went to my tía Cecilia's house for a culinary night. Everybody cooked something from their country. Nook cooked Pad-Thai, Annika cooked Kartoffelsuppe and Butterkuchen and Julien cooked Quiche Lorraine. I made monster cookies. It was really fun and we talked and hung out as well as eating some Chilean food. So that's basically all of the highlights of the last few weeks.

My Chilean Thanksgiving

I know most of you probably won't believe this, but I put my hand inside of a dead turkey. My host-family wanted a traditional Thanksgiving meal and preparing turned out to be quite an adventure. We had my host-mom's mom, her cousin and her friend over last Thrusday and I cooked. I'd made pumpkin pie and pecan pie (but with walnuts) on Wednesday and my mom had sent me a package with some stuff to make cooking easier (including a loaf of pumpkin bread!!!) so Thursday wasn't all that overwhelming. I did, however, have to make stuffing and stuff the turkey. My host-mom bought an 8 kg turkey which I figure comes out to something like 20 pounds but all went smoothly. It came out of the oven a nice golden brown. We also had mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes and apples which turned out a little bit different since sweet potatoes here are white, and some greens. Everything actually turned out really well and everyone enjoyed the food. I even gave a little speech before the meal and we all said thanks which I actually have video of but I haven't uploaded it to the computer yet. I'll try to post it later because it's really cute. So that's basically everything
thanksgivingy. I'm taking my finals all this week. My school has a christmas tree in the lobby.

Carreteando

I've been too exhausted this past week to update my blog. This may have something to do with the fact that I didn't go to sleep until 6:30 last saturday. The funny thing is, before coming here, I always thought 6:30 was pretty early to go to bed, but it turns out it can be pretty late too, at least when you're talking about A.M. The reason I stayed up so late was for my host-mom's mom's birthday party. She turned fifty and my host-mom threw her a vegas themed casino party. All last weekend we were making appetizers for the party with everything from canapes to sushi. It was a lot of work but it was also really interesting to see what goes into throwing a party. The party itself was a lot of fun though. I played some blackjack and even danced a bit of cumbia. Apparently that is not one of my many talents. I had to keep looking down at my feet to keep from completely losing the rhythm. It was fun though. Did I mention that the weekend before last my host siter threw a Halloween party? It was fun, I ended up inviting a few people and we hung out and danced a bit. I dressed up as a devil but it was really a lst-minute costume. Literaly. I think halloween is pretty much just another excuse to party here. Most things are. But hmm, what else has been going on? On tuesday I went to the pool with my class in educación fisica and it was a lot of fun. We swam and hang out. It's getting close to the end of school now and everyone's getting in a summery mood, but there are also christmas decorations in the stores. It's relly weird. Other than that I've pretty much just been hanging out. Today I went to the centro with Sara, a finnish girl here with rotary and we window shopped and talked about Chile. It was really fun and I discovered that apparently everyone goes to the centro on Friday afternoons. I guess there really aren't that many other places to go. I also happened to mail my first letter since I've been here. It was just a simple one page letter but I had to go to a bookstore to buy the envelope then to the post-office where I waited in line for ten minutes and then it took the lady at the counter ten minutes to fill out the paperwork for selling me three stamps. I almost suffocated in bureaucracy. I still love Chile though.

"Nothing Exciting" in Chile

I was just telling my host-sister about how I couldn't update my blog now since I hadn't done anything exciting this week. She then reminded me about how I played the bass in the plaza yesterday and how my host-dad threw a party at our house last night. Actually, as she also mentioned, a week of life in Chile is enough to write about in itself. She's right, of course, but things here are starting to feel normal. I'm beggining to forget that if three months ago, I'd done any of the things I've done this week, I probably would have written a very long blog post about it. I suppose yiou really can get used to anything. In the spirit of trying to recapture my sense of wonder though, let me tell you about how Wednesday, I went with my host-siter to the library to look for a book I have to read for school. I didn't find it, but I did check out an Agatha Christie book and Ely and I have decided to make weekly trips to the library a tradition.
I should probably also elaborate on the things mentioned above. Yesterday my school orghanized a "caminato familial", or a family walk from my school to the plaza. Once they got to the plaza, some of the bands in my school played live music. Do you remember how I played the bass during our school's celebration of the 18th? Well we played the same song, El Guillatun, again. We also went first. It was pretty exciting. After that, my host-sister and I went to the exhibition in the Casa de la Cultura dedicated to the 33 miners. It had poems that people had written, things from the "Campamento Esperanza", the camp that the families made outside of the mine, and a lot of other mementoes. It was really beautiful.
After walking back to the house, we improvised something to eat for lunch since my host-mom is in China on a buisness trip. At about 3, my host-dad's friends started arriving for a birthday party that lasted until about 6. Yes, I'm talking about 6 am. I went to bed at about 11, but I did go swimming for the first (actually make that second) time in our pool. Apparently my host-dad's friends are all very musically talented, they're part of a tuna or some kind of traditional band. They played a bunch of songs on the guitar and sang. It was pretty cool.
Today, we pretty much spent the whole day sleeping and cleaning up.

Chile, Chile Lindo

I've just been informed that my dedicated fans are clamoring for more news of my Chilean adventures. Before I start telling you about last few weeks, let me take a moment to extoll the virtues of this country. I am under the distinct impression that Chile is the most beautiful place on Earth. I haven't seen enough to say this for certain, but the few places I have been can best be described as awe-inspiring. The Elqui Valey in La Serena is idyllic. The mountains around Santiago are gorgeous. The Atacama desert is other-worldy. Did you know they filmed the moon landing here? That's what my host brother says anyways. My host-family spent the day at the beach the other day and among the few photos I took, aboiut half are worthy of national geographic (a slight exageration). This is not due, as much as I may wish it were, to my photografic talent, but to the mind-staggering beauty of Chile. Before I begin to bore (is it too late?) let me tell you about what I've been up to these last few weeks.
After we got back from La Serena we went to the AFS asado to celebrate the 18. There I got to talk to the other exchange students scattered around Copiapó, and we got to know eachother a little better on our excursion to Santiago for our first AFS orientation. The exchange students from the middle part of Chile all met up in Santiago to talk about how our experiences have been going. Although we've all been living disrtinct experiences, we had so many things in common! I feel like I made some life-time friends there in the space of four days. I also got a chance to practice my English and catch up with two of the other Americans who were at my Miami orientation. Rosemary ws telling me about a friend she has in the US who's interested in coming to Chile next year who had actually read my blog. I'm not going to lie to you, I felt very important! A thing that really surprised me at the orientation though was how many people were still more comfortable speaking English than Spanish. I think the US really needs to come up with a new method for teaching languages because frankly, after five years of taking it in school, my German still sucks! And don't even get me started on how bad my Spanish was when I got here!
Speaking of my Spanish, its been improving fairly steadily. I recently discovered that I can read books in Spanish. Or book anyways, I just finished "the Lost Symbol" by Dan Brown. Yeah, I felt prettyu good about myself after that. I even walked to the plza the other day and signed up at the library. Let me tell you, that was an adventure in itself. I had to figure out where to get things photocopied! OK, so not that exciting, but its these little Chilean things that I still haven't gotten figured out. I suppose I still have nine months to work on that.
Hmmm, so other news. My host-mom left for a mining exposition in Shanghai today. That's right, we sent her off to China for two weeks. I might be more jealous if I wasn't currently in Chile! I¿ll try to keep the updates more frequent in the future! (On a side note, comments are always nice).

Hanging out in La Serena and Celebrating the 18 de Septiembre

So last weekend was the long awaited 18 de Spetiembre. My family went to La Serena (a city about a four hour drive south from here) where we stayed with my hostdad's sister. On Friday we went for a paseo in the Elqui Valley to my host-family's lugar secreto. Frankly, I probably shouldn't be telling you about it, but it's not like I could tell you where it was if I wanted to (and I don't). Suffice to say we had an asado there with my host-family, my host mom's mom and my host-dad's mom, dad and sister. As you can probably guess, we ate empanadas and large amounts fo meat before breaking out the guitar for some typical chilean songs and dances. I mainly just watched most of this, but I did dance some cueca. On saturday, more or less the same thing was repeated, but this time at somebody's house also in the valle. You will probably be shocked to learn that there was no cueca danced n the 18th (ok, so not where I was, I'm sure there was somwhere in Chile. I did however learn how to hacer bailar el trompo (I'm not actually sure that's the correct term for it). It's something like spinning a top, but it requires way more skill. I'll try to upload a video but I'm not sure if I'm blog-savvy enough.
My succeses with flying kites were a little less, well, succesful. Apparently Chile is big on kites, who knew? On Sunday we went to the beach (no, it wasn't exactly beach weather) and explored Coquimbo, La Serena's port counterpart. We ate at a restaurant in the seafood market and wandered around a bit before heading to a giant fair that takes place every year over the 18th. It was packed with people and everyone had to stick close together so as not to get lost. Monday we headed back home because my hostsiblings had school starting on Tuesday even though I have this whole week off. I've pretty much been studk at home for the past couple of days attempting to tach myself guitar, but yesterday I met some friends at the mall and window shopped. Getting there was a bit of an adventure, I decided to walk and ended up getting just a bit lost, but I made it. Last night was also my hostmom's cousin's 18th birthday, so they had a fmily asado with all of the cousins and everyone. I go back to school on monday, but this weekend I have an AFS get together, and next weekend is our first real orientation! I'm excited about hanging out with the other exchange students again!

Getting ready for the 18 de Septiembre

For this to make sense, you should know that the 18th of Spetember is the Chilean national holiday. Picture the fourth of July, but a way bigger deal. The whole month of September gets devoted to being Chilean, people put flags on their cars, on their houses (apparently it's against the law not to) and act Chilean. From what I can tell, this involves dancing cueca and going to asados. Last weekend my host family went to visit my host dad's grandma in Totoral, a village in the Chilean countryside. Yes, it is as cute and rustic as that description makes it sound. There we ate a ridiculous amount of grilled meat. I'd been under the impression that asados were like barbeques with the salads and side dishes etc. but it turns out that they are comprised of grilled meat. Period. After eating, my host-mom helped me improve my cueca (the Chilean national dance) because I was going to dance it in an act at my school on the 16th. Don't think that because Chile is a Latin American country that it's national dance is anything like tango or salsa (which by the way just means sauce) because it's not. Cueca is a quirky flirtation. Frankly, I can't describe it. Go google it if your curious. My cueca did get to the point where it was passable, and dancing it in front of the entire school was actually fun! I think I'm growing to like the spotlight. If you're wondering why I ended up dancing the Chilean national dance in an act, you're not the only one. (I'm still wondering this myself.) All five of us exchange students had to dance and they partnered us with Chileans who are actually good at dancing to make up for our lack of knowledge. All and I'll I'd say it turned out pretty well. I also ended up playing the base for a song that my class was performing a Mapuche dance to. (In case your curious, yes I did feel cool, despite my flowery cueca dress). Speaking of which, everybody with a few exceptions came to school dressed like huasos (chilean cowboys?) today. Why don't we do anything like this in the US? To wrap this up let me mention that my family is going to la Serena for the weekend of the 18th where we will (hopefully) eat empanadas, go to an asado, and dance cueca.