Happy one month anniversary to me!

As of today, I have officially been here for one month.
A month is time enough to have grown a bit; and do I feel like I have grown? Yes.
I think I´m finally getting the hang of this being in a big family thing. That doesn´t mean that I would have loved to grow up with 6 siblings, but it´s getting better. My Spanish is progressing too. Not something that I would have thought was true, but today at lunch, everyone was complimenting me on how much better my Spanish is, so I guess it must be true. I don´t think that I´m talking half as much as I should, but I´m slowly getting over the whole second-guessing every word that I say, and just going with my gut.

As much as I would love to say that I am some sort of sophisticated world traveler who can adapt to any environment whatsoever, but that would be a lie. I´ve come to the conclusion that I am a mall/street market kind of girl, not a South American flea market one. I would love to explain what I mean, but I can´t find the words. It seems that as my Spanish gets better, my English gets worse.

Kind of a short post because I don´t really know what to say except for that I´m alive and well. 140 more days here seems like a long time, but I´m sure it will fly by. But for now, I´m content with it just being today.

School and Barney

So, i´ve almost been here a month and I really can´t believe it. It´s going by really really fast.

I started my second school [Colegio Curimon] on tuesday and I hate to say it, but it was a better first day than at the first school. A good 70% of the kids in 3 and 4 medio (11th and 12th grades) have either been or are the siblings of exchange students, so they know exactly what i´m going through. Which is a good, and a bad thing. Good thing, they know how akward everything is, and go out of their way to make me feel part of the class. For example, my school prides its self on the students involvment in the perfoming arts, so they put on 2 plays every semester. The play was to be performed 3 days after my first day. Instead of having me just watch, the kids wrote in a part for me, a small part, but a part all the same. They´re so nice, and the guys at this school are actually good looking (smiles) not that it matters. lol

Anyway, monday, i went to work with papá. Which was cool. He and his brother own a steel engenering company. I met everyone that he works with and got asked, ¨is hawaii part of the united states¨about a million and a half times. Then they would say ¨oh so you´re american¨ to which papá would respond ¨no, she´s Chilena.¨ I´m one of them!! lol.

I didn´t realize how good my spanish had gotten until we went to McDonalds (not my idea, i promise) and i could order without any problems. Then, all of these tourists came in who couldn´t speak any spanish, and i felt sooo proud of myself. lol. I should have helped them out, but i was translating for Cristhian. lol.. ooops. Just add, i like McDonalds here soooo much better. They have waitresses.

Yesterday was also my youngest sister Agustina´s 3rd birthday. We had a party and invited her favorite person in the world Barney! lol, the sad thing is that when he got there, she started to cry and wouldn´t go near him for the entire night. lol

Well i have school tomorrow, and I´ll add pictures and maybe another entry after that.

Colegio, Carrete, que mas!!

Update anyone?

Well this week has been an interesting week to say the least. I ¨started¨ school and ¨finiished¨ school all in the same week. Let me explain. So tuesday I offically started school, because monday was a holiday. Maria Montessori is the name of the school, and it has to be the smallest school that i have ever gone to [ well, not the smallest mom, but i do think that little flower was just a little bit bigger] Anyway, i think in total, grades 1-12, there are only about 150 kids at the most. In my grade, quarto medio, which is the equivalent of 12th grade, there are only 13 kids including me. Super small!!! It´s a private school, so yes, i do have to wear a uniform, grey skirt or pants, red and grey polo shirt and black dress shoes. Pretty snazzy if I do say so myself.

Here it´s the teachers who change classrooms, not the students, which I think is pretty cool. And they have 13 different classes that everyone in all grades take, only in different degrees of dificultly. The kids in my class are all very nice, which leads me to my next story...

My first party in Chile!!!
So saturday night i went to my first carrete, which is chilean slang for fiesta. It comes from the verb carretear, which means to party. I left with 3 other people from my class, luis, fransisca, and paulina, at about 11pm, which is pretty early by chilean standards. So then we drove for about 30 min. to the town of rinconada, the town didrectly to the west of los andes, to another girl from my school, Connie´s house. BTW, if you google hacienda rinconada, you´ll see that it´s all fields and horses, so it would only make sense that the party was in a barn. This was pretty cool, all except for the fact that it was about 20 something degreese outside, and we only had one space heater. But it was still fun, we danced, listened to music, all the regular party stuff. It was over at 3am, which again, is still pretty early by chilean standards.


Que mas... oh yeah for rae, the food.
Breakfast [desayuno]- usually is fruit and coffee or tea or calientitos, which are little ham and cheese sandwitches that have been warmed up.

lunch [almuerzo] the biggest meal of the day. usually consists of some type of meat [today it was chicken] bread, salads, and again, tea or coffee.

Once- tea or coffee and bread with butter, jelly, cheese, or whatever. usually served around 5 ish

dinner [comida]- a smaller version of lunch.

I promise i´ll take pictures of the food and stuff for you rae. We don´t really eat alot of typical chilean food, for example, yesterday we had chinese take-out, and the day before, we had arabic take'out. but it´s all really good.


Well that´s all for now, i´ll post more if i remember anything.

xau!