3rd Update...

August 21, 2006

Hello to all...yes, I am alive and I apologize for not sending out an email earlier! Life has just hit the ground running and I´ve been trying to keep up with it. It´s amazing how much things have changed here in such a short time. It´s also amazing how much time has passed since I left the States. Where to begin...?

*August 6th—Día de los Ninos (Kid´s Day)*

How cool is it that Chile has a national holiday for kids? I believe it was created by the corporations to gain more money from families because they all have to buy presents for the kids. My Chilean sister stayed up until midnight just so she could open her present from my Chilean parents. That definitely reminded me of how my real sister and I always open one present on Christmas Eve. The cool, and very unexpected, thing that happened was that my Chilean parents gave me earrings! I wasn´t expecting a present at all but the fact that they gave me one….and it was for Kid´s Day….made me feel super special….like I am part of the family now. The earrings are really pretty andthey are pure silver. My Chilean mom sells jewerly as a part-time thing, so she knows the good stuff. I´ll try and get a pic to send out of my earrings.

*School*

Classes have finally started to pick up the pace and I actually just changed my schedule around this past week. I dropped my art class because the professor was a flake and kept showing up like an hour late to class…..UNACCEPTABLE. I also dropped my Spanish writing class because it was too technical and it was all foreigners. So instead I picked up another history class that I really had wanted to take in the first place called International Relations. It hasn´t started yet, so I´m not sure how it will be but the syllabus made it seem like a really interesting class. I also added a different class that is called The Practice of Comprehension, Oral Production, and Writing in Spanish. That is a horrible translation of the name of the class but it is a class for Chileans who are studying to become English teachers. So we read texts, find the themes, discuss how to teach someone and break things down. I think it´ll be a really good class. Bethany and I are the only gringas in the class which is awesome and we´ve already made friends with some of the Chileans in the class.

Last Wednesday during my Cultural Anthropology class a girl passed me a note asking me if I wanted to go to a pub after class for a bit. I thought that was really nice so I went with about half of my class. The group of girls had invited most of the foreigners in our class to talk to us. It was really cool. We have a group project for the class and they also asked me to be in their group. Having them make the first step towards becoming friends is a really big deal here because it is usually a lot harder to make friends with the girls.

*Going Out*

Since I haven´t really had too much homework, my girlfriends and I (Bethany and Claire) and our Chilean friends have been going out quite a bit. The nice thing is that going out here is different from back home. Drinking isn´t a huge deal here….well for some it is, but for our group it´s not. We´re just all about having a good time.

The girls and I threw an American BBQ on Monday the 14th. We cooked hamburgers, hotdogs, had chips and tried to make s´mores. The sad thing with the s´mores is that there is no such thing as graham crackers here….so if anyone would like to send me a package of them, I´d greatly appreciate it! Claire´s host mom also made sushi for our bbq, which definitely isn´t American, but it was delicious! I have an album of pictures named August 17, 2006-Asado Americano if you want to check it out.

*Horcón*

Bethany and I took a trip on August 11th to Horcón which is a small town north of Viña del Mar. You can check out the pictures from that trip in the album August 11, 2006 Horcón & Kamikaze. Kamikaze is a disco in Reñaca that we go to quite often. But in Horcón, we just ate lunch (shrimp & cheese empanadas) and walked around a bit. There really wasn’t anything there but it was beautiful!

*La Isla Negra*

This past Saturday, CIEE took us on a trip to La Isla Negra which is a small coastal town about 1.5 hours south of Viña, where Pablo Neruda lived. Well, where he had one of his three houses. But this location was the most important; it is where he died and it is where he is buried. You have to take the time to look at these pictures, if any, because it was just remarkable. Walking through his house, I just felt strange because years ago, he had probably stood in the exact same place. And the ocean that wet my feet when we were playing in the water was the same blue vastness that inspired so many of his Nobel Prize-winning poems. The tour of the house only took about 30 minutes and after that we had time to go eat lunch on the beach and hang out for a bit. Bethany and I had a photo shoot on the beach with our free time...it was great fun! I wish I knew how to send video because we took a really funny video of us singing Part of That World from the Little Mermaid. Hahah you´ll know what I mean when you see my pictures!

*Life in General*

All in all, life is awesome right now. I am having a blast meeting new people, going new places, and speaking Spanish all of the time. I will try to get emails out more often, or to at least update my blog more often so that you know I´m alive and doing well. Plus I do want to document all of the fun stuff I have done here….I´m just bad at sitting down to actually do it. Hope all is well. Send me updates...I love getting mail! Chau...!

~Tyffanie

P.S. The link to my pictures in case you don´t have it:
http://espanol.pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/tyffstravels/my_photos

"Sueño con tantas cosas
que quiero que sean realidad,
sueño con morir de viejo
y no de soledad."
-Juanes