Hello! Still alive. I'm at a complete loss for what to say. Most of the things I do are fairly boring, even if I'm doing them in a different country. There are still weird people on the bus. I'm still late for class half the time. Hipsters here wear skinny jeans and have strange haircuts too. If it weren't for the fact that everybody speaks a different language, I could be in some kind of weird half-American, half-European city.
Since I don't really have anything specific to report, I'm going to talk about my host family. They are some of the nicest people I've ever met. Profoundly kind. For example, this morning I had breakfast with my host dad, Nandy (short for Fernando, I think it's awesome). I guess he's never seen me eat breakfast before because he was shocked that I was only going to eat cereal. He insisted that it wasn't enough, that I would get hungry, really he could make me some bread with cheese on it, how could I not want more food? So I caved (bread and cheese, come on) and then he was like, well, these are very small pieces of bread, I'll make you two sandwiches. Nandy's awesome. We have the weirdest conversations. Topics so far include Michael Jackson, the American civil war, raccoons, hopscotch, and tattoos.
Daly is my host mom (short for Dalila). She's also wonderful. When she sends me texts she signs them 'besitos, Daly.' She said that she'd teach me how to make porotos con riendas (beans with noodles, holy cow delicious). Plus she remembers all my weird food preferences (really, if you've ever eaten with me, you know this is impressive) and regularly laughs at me because I love avocado so much. Her mom lives with us and, embarrassingly, I'm still not sure what I'm supposed to call her. It just never came up and now it'd be awkward to ask. She's the sweetest though. She is forever trying to feed me more (maybe this is a Chilean thing). I'm pretty sure I stole her room when I moved in, and I think she was sleeping on a mattress in my sister's room, until my brother left and then she took his room.
So my siblings. Sofi, is really nice but shy. I would really like to be better friends with her but I haven't made that much progress. Javier is very outgoing but sadly just left on a four-month tour of Brazil with his also very nice and outgoing girlfriend. Plus I have two cousins that I see fairly often, Lukas who has down's syndrome but is really high functioning and keeps trying to get me to teach him English words, and Claudia who's super bubbly and is always trying to get me to teach her English swearwords.
I wish I had more pictures to show you guys but I've been bad about bringing my camera places. Here are some pictures from Pomaire. It's a village that specializes in pottery and tourism and we visited it a few weeks ago.
We visited this beautiful farm/bed and breakfast type place.
They fed us. We loved them for it.
They baked us bread in their oven. It was true love.
The prettiest.
Kitchen/tree house
Pottery demonstration
Andrew learns how to make a bowl gets in the way of that guy trying to make a bowl
So much pottery....
Return back to the house with our goodies
