Beautiful

27-8-06

Hola,

Holy smokes it has been a long time since I last wrote! I have been very busy lately…classes are tough and they are a lot of work and I have been taking time to play as well. Last Saturday was absolutely beautiful! On Friday I went over to my friend, Claire´s house for a relaxed movie night because we had to be up early the next morning to go to Isla Negra, another of Pablo Neruda´s houses. Friday had been kind of an icky day, but Saturday, Saturday was absolutely beautiful. The house was full of maritime things…ships in bottles, shells, the women on the front of the ship and a real ship outside in his backyard. And to top it off, it is on the ocean! He also had a collection of things that he brought back to Chile with him from all over the world, pretty amazing. This house like la Chascona was in many parts, with several different buildings. After our tour of the house, we had time to eat lunch on the beach and wander around. It was very nice. The sand was bigger sand, it was not fine, and the grains of sand were like little pebbles. I took my shoes off and wandered around barefoot…it was like a massage on the feet.

That night we went to a concert of Mozart´s Requiem at el Teatro Municipal de Viña del Mar. It was a very nice concert, very well done! We got dressed up to go, I really enjoyed getting dressed up.

Sunday I did homework all day!

On Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday I had class and a cold.

On Thursday I had three essays due, craziness. One of them was a group essay on a poet and his work for my Literatura Española 4. I worked with two other people, Claire and Martín (a Chilean from our class). I went over to Claire´s house after class on Wednesday to put all of our parts together. We both thought it would only take about 30 minutes and then we would be able to work on our other essay. Turns out that while Martín is super intelligent and well versed, he isn´t the best writer in the world. His sentences were paragraphs; he has a big problem with run on sentences, so Claire and I had to rework his entire part, which ended up taking about 2.5 hours. Finally we finished at about 8:30 pm and then started on our next essays (different essays, but for the same class). I worked on my essay until 4 am! I then went to bed at Claire´s house to wake up in 3 hours for class. We didn´t have the class that the first essay was for, but I still had one essay to write, turn in the essay at the university, and class later. Since I was sleep deprived I got confused and showed up to a class that I didn´t have, it wasn´t my class (my class was the next hour), oh gracious. Thank goodness my friend Emily came walking down the hall before I entered the classroom because I would have gone in and been really confused, more confused than I was in the hall not seeing any of my classmates. Oh well, I went back to the office and finished my other essay and then had some time to read for another class.

Thursday after class, I had a viaje en bote (a boat ride on the ocean to see Valparaiso from a different perspective). It was amazing. Valparaiso is so beautiful; it was easy to see why it is an International Heritage site. On the boat, we heard stories of Valparaiso, were serenaded with traditional Chilean music, saw Valparaiso and all of the lights of the night (stunning),ate emapanadas, and drank wine. It was a very nice evening!

On Friday I had my first prueba (quiz) or what I thought was going to be a quiz for my class, Lengua Materna 2, a grammar class. It turned out to be a Taller, a quiz-type thing but with less pressure than a quiz, for this we worked in pairs. I studied really hard for it and was ready to do well on the quiz. When the professor announced that we had to find partners, I looked around the room for a partner, but no one wanted to be my partner. No one wanted to work with the gringa because she probably wouldn´t know anything. It was really sad, I was ready to work by myself, but there was a group of three in the back of the room and the professor made them spilt up. I got to work with Daniela (pretty sure she was not real happy to be my partner at first, but I showed her!) Since I had studied and done my homework for the week, I was ready for the taller and the questions, while she was not! I knew my stuff and answered the second half of the taller by myself (questions on the Ortografía de la Lengua Española de la RAE) because she didn´t have a clue. I was pretty proud of myself, but kinda upset because no one wanted to be my partner and then the person who was my partner didn´t really pull her weight in the group. Friday night I went over to Claire´s again for a movie night.

Yesterday I had soccer practice. I am playing baby fútbol, there are five people on the field at a time and the field is about a quarter of a normal field. It is like intramural soccer. I ran to practice, about 8,000 meters. And then had practice for an hour and then ran back home from practice (at a very brisk pace because I had plans at 1 pm and practice got done at 12:05 and I needed a shower). I got my shower and then walked to Claire´s to meet her and Tyffanie to go to Valparaiso to take as many ascensores as we could. Turns out that the ascensores where we started were closed as a result of construction. We walked A LOT because the ascensores were closed! We didn´t find a single ascensor open yesterday. It was disappointing, but oh well. Next time we go on a tour of Valparaiso, we are going to take Lelo because he knows Valparaiso very well because he grew up there. When I got back to Viña I took a nap and then last night went to a birthday party for one of my friends from the program, Wilson. We drove to Valparaiso. At Wilson´s, there were lots of people (about half Chileans and half intercambios). It was really fun. When his mom brought out a cake with candles, we sang Happy Birthday in Spanish and English. After singing, Christian, one of my Chilean friends and Wilson´s brother moved closer to him, grabbed his head and put it in the cake. Wilson was covered in whipped cream! Wilson was then surrounded by a group of Chilean men; all of them cheering and chanting (like a team before a big game). They picked him up and lifted him to the ceiling 21 times (like birthday spankings except more difficult). It was so amazing to watch. After this, Wilson got cleaned up and was handed a bottle of Champaign, which he was encouraged to drink rapidly. There was a barbeque of choripan (a type of sausage), birthday cake (yes the same one that Wilson´s face was in), wine, and lots of dancing. I danced a cueca with one of the Chileans there because Rodrigo, Wilson´s brother handed me the handkerchief and pushed me onto the dance floor. I didn´t think I danced very well, but others told me I did very well and even if I wasn´t as good as the Chileans, I had fun!

Okay, this is sufficiently long…I need to work on writing more frequently, but it is difficult with school, but I will try!

Love,

Kathy