Hola Todos!!

So if you don´t know already, I´m in Chile! I´ve been here since last Monday (2/5), but I haven´t been able to communicate with anyone since the outside world because my callingcards haven´t worked, and this is the first time I´ve seen a computer in what feels like forever.

But anyway, this place has been so amazing since the beginning. After that disappointing Bears loss, (which I happened to catch the end of in the Atlanta airport...grr) I took a 10 hour flight to Santiago, Chile, which really is as long as it looks. I slept on and off, but when daylight finally broke, we were looking down at clouds and the Andes.

When the plane finally landed, the entire group of us met up at the luggage claim. Customs was a piece of cake, definitely not the nightmare I imagined.




So now we´re in Chile. The description of what we´ve been doing is this: the first 3 weeks are like Spanish boot camp. We are staying in Rabones, a small town in the diocese of Linares, which is south of Santiago. Its like summer camp; girls and guys in separate rooms, a few bathrooms with (sometimes hot) water, and a cafeteria in a building across from the dorms. It is definitely what I can only describe as the Country. Cows grazing in pastures, chickens in the road, rustic patched fences, farmers with goats, oxen, sheep, the whole nine yards. The weather here is supposedly Meditarranean climate, so its really hot during the day and it cools off in the night and morning. It is in the foothills of the Andes, so the scenry is breathtaking.

We eat all the time here, which as you all probably know, is heaven to me. The food is simple, but unbelievably fresh. We´ve had traditional Chilean dishes like empanadas, (a tamale with meat, cheese, eggs, olives, raisins & onions) humitas, and cazuela. Every kind of juice you can imagine is here, in every color, and the general statement is that they taste like liquid Starbursts - orange, papaya, pineapple, watermelon, honeydew.

There is a river in the forest a few houses down that we´ve swam in, and you can ride little waterfalls and rapids down like a waterslide. There is also a soccer field across from out retreat house that we use almost every day. Behind us is a trail that leads up into the mountains. We had a star-gazing night out there once, and Oh My God, it was so gorgeous. The southern sky just shines. Being the Country, there are absolutely no city lights, street lights, or anything. We saw a ring of the Milky Way with tons of stars, the entire Orion constellation, and the Southern Cross.

Our typical day is four sessions of Spanish class breaken up with breaks for lunch, and two breaks in between. I feel like I understand Spanish already alittle bit better, almost like when people speak, I don´t have to try as hard to understand them, so thats pretty amazing after only one week.



We are currently on our weekend trip to Constitución, a city on the coast south of Santiago and Rabones. There is black sand beaches here and huge Pacific waves, which we of course bodied surfed yesterday. So amazing. We ate dinner at a seafood restaurant, and I couldn´t believe how hard it was to read a freaking menu and order a meal. That is definitely something that I never thought of as hard work before. During the meal, we saw some guys dressed up as pirates, and we ended up walking outside and seeing a pirate festival of some sort on the beach. It was really random, but entertaining.

On the way here we stopped in Nirivilo, where an old friend of our director, Sam Stanton, lives. The friend is a carpenter named Alejandro Caceres, who makes sculptures out of wood. He gets the wood from the forest and doesn´t use the tree if it still has life. He gave us a tour of his workshop which has sculptures of horses, mermaids, faces of his family, holy figures, and many more. His house was the coolest part. It is made of adobe and is a perfect circle, with circular windows on every side. His whole house has wooden furniture that he made, but is very modern, (running water, electricity). The bedrooms are in rooms in the middle, so the windows which have no blinds, don´t interfere with sleeping. It was cool in the house, even though it was 85 degress and there was no air conditioning.



That anyway, is a rundown of everything that I´ve been doing since Monday. I will post pictures soon and hopefully that will give you a better idea of what I´ve been experiencing. It has been great. Thanks for all your support and encouragement. It really has helped me settle here the first week. Until next time! Hasta luego!