Two Months...

Hola a todos!
I have now been in Chile for TWO months. That´s twice as long as it was a month ago. :)Time flies here. I now only have three months left here, which feels like no time at all. Eeek! This week was a short week because tomorrow we have the day off, due to it being Labor Day here. This week has been okay. I was sick again, only this time it was my stomach instead of a cold. I think we exchange students are extra suceptible to getting sick. Anyways, that was no fun but it´s all good now plus I got to meet the nurse at school who´s super nice. I left math class to get something for my stomach and ended up staying in the nurse´s office for like a half hour talking to her. She had an exchange student from the US stay with her last year and so she knows all about the exchange process and all that. She told me any time I need to talk I can come see her, which I´m happy about. Oh my god, there´s this horrible music playing right now. Our house is under construction right now and the carpenters are playing really bad, repetetive reggeton-ish music. Anyways, last week I went on the AFS tour. It was fun. It was all of the exchange students from Quillota as well as all the prospective exchange students who are getting ready to go abroad and some exchange students from Viña y Valpo. My friend Leah is in Viña so that was good to see her. Oh, the morning of the tour I FINALLY got my carnet. In Chile everyone, even my two year old brother, has an ID card and all of us exchangers had to get one as well. Needless to say, there were some incredibly irritating complications with mine and I got mine like a month after everone else. But I have it now and the photo isn´t actually that bad. It´s all official and cool. I´ll show you guys when I get home. Anyways...tour. We started in the plaza and took a bus to this little emporium where we had breakfast. Then we went to the Carabinero School of Horses or whatever it´s called. It´s where the mounted police of Chile train. Is that how you say it? My English is getting a little funky. The horse that set the world record in jumping was from there and he jumped SUPER high. It´s crazy. So we walked around there and saw the museum and then got back on the bus and headed over to the huaso museum in the center of town. In Chile there is a tradition of rodeos and the cowboys are called huasos. One of Panchi´s friends is a national competitor in rodeoing. After that we hung out in the plaza and then went out to lunch at this little restaurant that served a TON of food. Remember, lunch is the big meal of the day but this was excessive. First came a salad, then a very large empanada de pino (ground meat, hard boiled eggs, onion and olives...yum) and then a heaping plate of mashed potatos and pork or chicken. Then ice cream. It was all very yummy. Then we went to this art school and checked out the work there and then went up to this rental space and everyone had to sing a song from their country. We gringas all sang Rudolph the Red-nosed Reighndeer. Then we had onces (tea and sandwhiches) and then we went home. I met a Chinese kid who´s been here since August who´s pretty cool. He told me that he saw the entire US Nat´l Mens Basketball team in person in Beijing. Lucky! On Friday night I went to a classmate´s birthday party, which was fun. She has a wicked nice house. The cakes here are sort of different from those in the US. For one thing, almost every sweet thing here incorporates manjar somehow. Manjar, manjar, manjar. I love manjar.
School this week was okay. I finished both the books I had to read, which I was proud of. I understood one of them, the other was really weird and surreal and I didn´t understand it very well. The problem for me is that I understand what I read but I have trouble retaining it afterwards. I think it´s because I guess what a lot of the words mean so I don´t remember them afterwards so I can´t picture what I read. This week my language teacher finally passed back our tests on the Odessy. I was really looking forward to seeing my grade but unfortunately she couldn´t understand what I was trying to say in my test so I have to stay after school and explain it to her. AAAGHH!!! That was sort of a blow to my ego, because I thought I could write better than that. Oh well. School is really hard. My next book to read is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It´s an abridged version I think.
There´s lots of talk here about the pig flu. Here it´s called gripe porcina, I think. Anyone coming into the country from the US or Mexico has to get a health inspection and my sister told me that people are wearing masks in Viña. Chivas, a Mexican soccer team, is here for a game against a Chilean team and apparently when the players went to the mall everyone was staying clear of them. It´s really weird hearing about what´s happening in the US as "over there". It makes me a little worried to hear about the flu in the US. Please everyone be careful. I feel so disconnected from what´s going on in the US. Yesterday I figured I should check up on what´s going on so I went on the NY Times website and discovered that the MLS has been in session for a MONTH and I didn´t know it. Weird.
What else to share...winter´s coming here. For the past two months it´s been super sunny and now all of the sudden it´s really cloudy all day. It´s sort of depressing. And cold. Here´s what I don´t get: I go to the most expensive school in Quillota so how is it they don´t have indoor heating? We wear skirts for God´s sake and there´s no heating! I miss Señor´s incredibly toasty warm classroom. Seriously, we thought Mr. Wallace´s room was bad? It´s not actually that cold here, like in the 50s, but when you´re sitting in a skirt at your desk all day it gets to you. Another weather-related observation....I´m still waiting to feel a tremor. In Chile, like San Francisco, there are very frequent tremors in the Earth. There have been two since I´ve been here and I haven´t noticed them. I was so disappointed because I was really curious to feel one! I can now take public transportation by myself. Well, I can take a colectivo. There´s like taxis but they have a specific route and take multiple people. It costs roughly a dollar to take one into town. I have yet to take a bus but I´want to learn to take them myself so I can go to Viña and visit friends.
So that´s all for this week I think. .

Much love,
Sela