La Jac Goes to South America.: Deep-fried broken underwear.

Last week my weekend started early because they closed campus down due to CRAZY WIND. There are too many old trees and stuff on campus (trees and branches were falling down all around town) for it to be safe, I guess. By the next day things were pretty calm, a little lingering rain.

Oh! The power did go out for about 14 hours or something, due to wind and stuff. So that night was fun, we made a type of doughtnut called calzones rotos ("broken underwear") by candlelight. Some relatives stopped by and we had a pitch-black conversation over Nescafe and our calzones rotos. Later Vale’s friend came over and we and played cards. So fun! I can’t even begin to explain how much more I am learning here than I would from a textbook. Real-life stuff like how to measure flour (and talk about it in Spanish), what the Spanish terms are in card games, how to talk about power outages… we never learned this stuff in school!

So, they killed Osama bin Laden. This has been an interesting cultural experience for me. Clearly, no matter what your viewpoint of the happening, it was a big deal in the United States. Here, however, it wasn’t anything to speak of. When my friend Erin’s family asked her if she’d heard “the big news” the next day, she assumed they meant Bin Laden… but he was more like the fourth mealtime topic. It’s interesting how much I expect the world to care about our “big news,” when really… I don’t generally know too much about the world’s big news. I guess it just inspired me a little to find out what sort of “big stories” are happening elsewhere in the world.

But for now, a quick overview of other happenings here.

-I don´t want to think about leaving yet (less than three months now!)
-I just finished knitting a scarf.
-I have too many classes but everything is so INTERESTING.
-I´m learning the phonetic alphabet for fun.
-They say this is the prettiest fall (March and April) they´ve had in 30 years. (I´ll take it.)
-I FINALLY learned how to make a cursive 'x'.
-I made chocolate chip cookies. They were a disaster.
-It stays dark until 8 in the morning (and we haven´t even hit daylight savings time yet).
-I was [briefly] mistaken for a Chilean.
-I started helping teach English to 11 year olds in a school here and I LOVE IT.
-Also, the public school systems are a little bit of a mess.
-Luz is studying the Tempest… which means I get to learn a little about the Tempest. (fun to have a study buddy.)

This weekend we´re going to Pucón as a group. It’s a cute ski town at the base of a snow-covered volcano. We went last semester, also, so it will be fun to return to a familiar place. (I can’t get over the funny feeling of having familiar places down here.)