October 5th

Vacation part two: Cuscu!!

(we spent two nights in Cusco, one on either side of our trip to Machu Picchu. For my personal convenience, I'm putting all the pictures from Cusco in this one post)

Church! (spot the starbucks)

Vive Peru!!

Convent!

Cuscu!

Best lemonade EVER

Pancakes with CARAMEL sauce

Nach-yo-cheese

Best. Meal. Ever.

50% satisfaction, 50% where did that cute waiter go?

When traveling in a group, a lot of time is spent waiting around for people

Horseback ride!

Some ruins

Cows!!

The littlest sheep

Exploring

We survived the cave!!

A good place to be a cowboy

Meet Pinto. It's funny cuz we both have bangs.

More Cusco.

Alternative pronunciation of Saqsaywaman (sexy woman)

Cat friend

September 30h

Hi!! Still alive. Still recovering from spring break last week. A group of us went to Bolivia and Peru and I took approximately 907 pictures so I'm going to split this up into a couple of posts because nothing is more fun than looking at somebody else's vacation photos, am I right?

We had a layover in Iquique, also known as the moon.

BOLIVIA! Aka, the cheapest country in the world. No really, you can get a pretty decent four course meal for about three dollars.

Llama! And coca tea (what, it helps with altitude sickness, really)

Bus tour. Watch out for low-hanging powerlines, please.

Valley of the Moon. TRIPPY.

Adventurous eating!! Api: red corn-derived beverage that tastes like Christmas. Everything else: FRIED.

Fastest ferris wheel of MY LIFE.

Crossing Lake Titicaca

Copacabana in sight!!

Let's go for a walk we said...

So close to the top...

And it's...a shrine?

And we watched the sunset with all the other tourists.

Isla del Sol. Nice terraces you got there.

Table.

Labyrinth!

Hike to the south end in record time!

Rewards for a job well done.

To be continued...next up: Cusco!

September 11th

Oh my god, two posts in one week. Crazy. I have two things to report today.

1) Lunch in Chile is the most ridiculously big meal. It's like a feast. Every day. I don't know how they do it. For example, today I was served a bowl of tomato soup, a giant pile of salad (salad in Chile=chopped up vegetables with salt and lemon juice on top), two crepes stuffed with spinach and covered in cream sauce (not my favorite thing but I finished it through sheer force of will), a piece of bread, and a banana with honey for dessert. SO MUCH FOOD. It's insane! And today lunch was on the smaller side.

2) September 11th is a really important day in Chile. It's the day that Pinochet staged a military coup and overthrew the democratically elected socialist government of Allende in 1973. So pretty much every year since then Chileans have staged marches and protests both for and against Pinochet. And they can get pretty violent. My classes are cancelled for today because all the campuses of my university are closed. When I left the house to go visit a friend my host mom and grandma told me about a million times to be careful and take care of myself. It's kind of strange because the rowdiest protesters are students who weren't even alive when Pinochet was deposed, much less when he came into power.

September 9th

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

August 11th

First week of school: DONE. Kind of. Funny story, actually. As previously mentioned, we're currently enrolled in two different universities, la Universidad de Chile (la Chile) and la Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile (la Catolica). La Catolica is a private, obviously Catholic, university that is very well regarded. La Chile is the university of Chile, is state-funded, and is considered the best school in Chile. It's also completely crazy. As evidence, I submit this video, which we had to watch at two separate orientations:

You don't have to speak Spanish to be intrigued by the music selection/editing. So that was one of our first impressions of la Chile. The second important impression was when we went to the first class, a history class about the 18th century and the professor just didn't show up. We were there for 30 minutes until some Chilean students came in to say that he had forgotten classes started that day and he'd see us on Wednesday instead.

On Wednesday, there was nation-wide student protest advocating for education reform so of course there were no Chilean students in class, just us Americans, which I can only assume is why the professor chose not to show up for a second time. So hopefully he comes to class on Monday because this Wednesday is a national holiday and it'd be nice to see him at some point in the first two weeks of school.

The best la Chile story is from a friend of mine, BJ. He was told class started at 8:30 so he got to campus at 8:30 only to find that class actually started at 10. So he waited around until 10 and then he was still early because the class actually started at 10:15. So once the professor showed up he was expecting to actually have class. But no, that's not how la Chile works. Instead the professor wanted to know what other classes students were taking so that he could schedule that class at a convenient time for everybody. So they decided on a time to meet  at which point everybody would decide when classes should meet. Seriously, this school is crazy.

Aside from the crazy, it's been good so far. I'm currently signed up for the previously mentioned history class as well as a ceramics class that takes up eight hours a week but should be fun.

August 7th

It's been a busy week since I last posted. We spent five days in Buenos Aires/on the bus and classes started yesterday. Sitting down is nice sometimes. So let's talk about the bus ride to Buenos Aires. Ha. It's a six hour trip from Santiago to Mendoza, Argentina. You have to go through customs, which is in a giant, unheated warehouse thing in the middle of the Andes, at like 10 at night and it can take at least an hour, easily. A friend's host dad insisted he bring a parka specifically to go through customs. It was good advice. There are pretty mountains though.

That's the fun part of the ride. Once you get to Mendoza, if you're anything like us, you forget that you switched time zones and instead of having an hour to buy tickets for the last bus out of the station, you have ten minutes to locate and purchase tickets for 17 people at 11:45 pm. Then you have, I kid you not, 14 hours (sitting next to a profoundly disgusting bathroom, on an unheated bus) to be thankful that you're not sitting in a bus depot all night. All in all it takes a solid 22 hours to get to Buenos Aires by bus.

It's totally worth it though because Buenos Aires is genuinely one of the best cities ever. It's awesome. Even walking around in the rain in an almost deserted neighborhood, you wander across such wonderful sights as this:

Puente de la Mujer (it's supposed to look like tango dancers!!)

And then when it starts pouring and thundering and lightninging, you can just duck into a cafe and drink Paso de Toros (best soda ever, grapefruit flavored) and eat yummy zucchini tarta which is like quiche but better.

If it continues raining the entire time you're there, the obvious solution is to go to el Cemetario de la Recoleta where all the famous people are buried. Nothing says a good time like an overcast graveyard. In all seriousness though, it was very pretty and peaceful with a dash of creepy (where do all those staircases go, seriously.)

But actually, it just goes down...

Grave of Eva "Evita" Peron

Best statue

It was sort of like a quick tour through architectural fads

We concluded this tour with a test of Argentina's baked goods:

A++

We concluded our day of touristing with an empanada dinner/lunch in front of la Casa Rosada.

Only Argentina has pink government buildings

Okay, full disclosure: that was not the end of our evening. Our dear friend Andrew, henceforth known as the delicate flower, spent the day in bed, and, after vomiting all day, demanded to be taken to the hospital. So an ambulance was called. An hour and a half later the EMTs show up, pronounce him to be a big, whiny American, prescribe Cipro, antibiotics, and anti-nausea meds, and drive away laughing. So me, Becca, and BJ ventured out at midnight to find a 24-hour pharmacy to get anti-nausea meds, which was an adventure and a half. But when we get back, Andrew has projectile vomited his Cipro all over the bathroom and is demanding to be taken to the hospital again. So we called a taxi this time and loaded him and some other people and a lot of fluids in. Turns out the EMTs were totally wrong and he had some sort of stomach inflammation thing and all he needed was a lot of fluids via IV.

On our last day we went to a market that sells arts and crap and stuff. We tried mate and looked at stuff and made a quick trip to el Museo de Bellas Artes. We got fantastically lost on the way back to the hostel but ended up eating lunch at a very economically priced cafe with the sweetest waitress of all time. We wanted to bring her back to Santiago. Then it was time to get back on the bus.

It snowed while we were in Buenos Aires

Back in Chile at last!

School started yesterday and registering for classes has been obscenely complicated. I'm currently taking classes at two different universities on three different campuses. Yikes.