Routine week + random weekend

I’ve just spent a lovely week in Vina and have some fun and random updates for you. But first, good news! After a chaotic MONTH of registration, I finally have my schedule figured out. Here is a list of my classes with small descriptions.

• Universal Art History – This class is a real Chilean class and is also the largest class I have ever been in with over 50 students. I can barely understand the professor, but that doesn’t seem to matter too much as the TA’s do the majority of the teaching. The class is very rowdy, nothing like you’d find at Whitman. We’ve already had a bunch of readings and an essay test, I’m still waiting (with my fingers crossed) to see my grade!
• Social & Political Themes in Chile – This class is through IFSA and is the smallest class I’ve ever been in with a total of 5 people. The professor is a sweet, older man who speaks beautiful, clear Spanish and has already brought us Chilean sweets and candy three times! The class is really interesting and relevant, and we get to choose the topics for our papers, so I’m looking forward to it.
• Advanced Spanish – A very lively class also through IFSA. Our professor Jorge is wonderful and teaches us very useful ‘chilenísmos’ and grammar.
• Community Action Workshop (TAC) Internship – This involves two parts. First of which is volunteering to teach kids about the environment and coexistence. They are full of life and so excited each week. The second part is meeting my advisor Isabel each week to read articles related to TAC and discuss them, in addition to writing a few research papers. It’s great to talk one-on-one with Isabel as she is very nice and a good opportunity to speak about complicated issues in Spanish.
• Traditional Dances of Chile- This is just about as good as it gets. Best class ever. Our teacher can sway his hips better than anyone I know, and the way he says ‘¡Eso es!’ is priceless. We wear long skirts and bring our scarves to do the traditional dances.

It was nice to have a regular week and routine, then on the weekend have time for some fun. On Friday evening, I played a great game of Pictionary with my host family. Then the ‘three musketeers,’ as I like to call my friends Chaz, Jacob and I, went out to our favorite place, Café Baul. After awhile there, we decided to branch out and went to a place called Aries, where we ran into our Academic Director and my TAC advisor Isabel! That was a pretty hilarious coincidence.

Chaz, Jacob and I at Aries

On Saturday, TAC had a special training day for volunteers. The goal was to learn more about the environment in order to a) take care of the TAC garden and b) pass along the information to the kids. It’s really interesting to see the different level of environmental awareness in Chile in comparison to my past volunteer work in Seattle. That being said, the volunteers are motivated and definitely have the right attitude, and it’s great to see progress being made to bring the community together while promoting environmental causes. Anyways, my work group built structures of wood or rocks around trees and plans in order to help water sink down to the roots of the plants. It was a nice sunny day with some good physical, dirty work!

This is an example of the rock circles we made around plants

That evening, a group of friends decided to try the intriguing ‘Hard Rolls and Pizza’ restaurant (fantastic name, right?) that serves all you can eat pizza and sushi. What a combo! We ended up sitting in an awesome VIP feeling lounge, with white leather couches and a plasma TV showing an amazing collection of the best music videos ever (Britney, Lady Gaga, some reggaeton, etc.). We had a great time eating way too much pizza and sushi, and afterwards hung out at the beach to digest. We ended the night watching ‘Monsters Inc’ in Spanish on TV. A good night!

I think they were attempting to make a play off of 'Hard Rock Cafe'...clearly it failed

Notice the sushi and pizza...mmmmm

Sunday morning I went to the beach to watch an amazing spectacle. It’s called the Bicentenario and is a regatta of sail boats from all the South American countries. These amazing, decorated ships had been sitting in the bay for the past week and then did their traditional parade past all the beaches of Vina and Valpo. Sitting in the white sand and feeling the warm morning sun while watching these amazing sail boats on the sparkling water gave me the reoccurring feeling that this is all just a wonderful dream.

Everyone comes out for the regatta!

Hope you enjoyed the stories and photos. I’m sending my love to you from Chile!