English Camp and Pan D'Azucar

A couple of months ago my host-sister applied to an English Camp run by the government and she signed me up to go along and help people practice their English. I'm not sure hyow much good I did, but I certainly had a lot of fun! It's run through a program called English opens doors that brings english speaking volunteers to Chile to help teach English so there was an American couple at the camp. There were also a few English teachers from the Atacam region and one from Santiago who spoke really good English. It was awesome being able to speak English with people though! We also did a lot of fun things like we played pictionary in English and we did karaoke, plus we did field trips to a pool and the beach. I actually met a girl who goes to the ETP, the school I'll be going to next year, and she's really cool! I feel like it will be a lot easier to switch schools now because I'm a lot more comfortable with the culture, the language, the people, and I swear I've become more outgoing although that's not saying much. I'll tell you all about how it goes in a month though! Speaking of school, we tried to go uniform shopping today. I ended up buying some stuff, but the only school related thing was a notebook with a tiger on the cover. Yes, it's awesome. We basically just did some price comparing today, I think we'll actually go buy the stuff tomorrow. It kind of sucks though because it makes it real. Part of me wants school to start, but I'm also starting to enjoy summer a lot. I've been hanging out with some of my friends this week which has been a lot of fun! Not to mention I've started going to swimteam practice. We'll only be going for two weeks because we leave on vacation next weekend, but it something to do. The other weekend we actually went on a camping trip to try out our new tent and stuff. We went to a national park called Pan d'Azucar which is about a three hour drive north of here. It's full of amazigly dry hills and it's right on the ocean. Supposedly there are penguins there, but I didn't see any. Well, I saw some black strips on a rock which technically may have been penguins. We camped right on the beach though and we had asado both nights, but I guess that's what Chileans do when when they go camping. We also went on a hike which ende up more like rock climbing than hiking, but we got some amazing views of the ocean! We went swimming a little bit too, but the waves were really strong wo we didn't go very far in. I think we're ready for our upcoming trip now and I'm incredibly excited about it! I'll probably make a blog post about just that when I get back, so be ready!

Erika Sucks at Keeping her Blog Updated

It's been what, like a month since I've updated this? Yeah sorry about that. I've been really busy with the holidays and everything and this whole summer thing is just making me lazy. My biggest news is that I'm changing schools next year. San Agustin, the school I was at last semester was great, I made awesome friends there and I had a lot of good times, but I think that I'll have good times and awesome friends at the Escuela Técnica Profesional (ETP) too. It's right around the corner from my house and my host-sister is starting there in primero medio next year. The really exciting thing is that I'm going to be studying metalurgy! It's because it was the only curso with enough room, but I get to wear steel toed boots so it's all good. Other than that there was Copiapó's birthday parade on the 8th of December. People danced Cueca and all of the schools were represented by students with their uniforms.
We also had an exciting AFS event last month. The volunteers set up a flee market in Caldera (a port town near here) and all of the exchange students made posters about their countries. After that we had an Asado and we talked with the Chileans postulating to go abroad.
I supose I should mention something about Christmas and New Years too. Well Christmas here is really different in a lot of ways. We got all dressed up and ate dinner on Christmas eve. We had a Peruvian themed appetizer (I love Peruvian food, it's almost all seafood!) Couscous and lamb for the main course and suspiro Limeña which is basically manjar with merengue for desert. After dinner we opened presents and then everyone went to bed at like three in the morning. My host-brother got an X-box Kinect which basically allows you to play video games without using a controller. It's kind of awesome! The day after Christmas we went to my host-family's beach house to celebrate my host-sister's birthday. Out of curiosity, do any of you know of somebody who has fallen out of the top story of a bunk bed while asleep? Let me answer that for you, yes you do. After that fun little experience we went home for a couple of days before heading to La Serena for New Years. We got all dressed up (again, but I was cool with it this time because I had an awesome pruple dress and heels) and went out to a restaurant for dinner. We ate and talked and after midnight everyboy toasted and started dancing. I still don't think I've gotten the hang of this whole dancing thing. It was a lot of fun though! We stayed out until like 4 am. The next day we went to the Valle to visit some of my host-mom's cousins and we had an asado. We also visited a dam with an awesome view of the valle. The following day I went fishing with my host-dad and kind of broke his fishing reel. I'm never going to live that one down! Now we're back in Copiapó and I've been getting a little bit bored of summer. I went to my first yoga class today though! It was fun and I felt really relaxed afterwards! Tomorrow we have the despedida or going away party for the AFSers leaving in January.

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).