Nike pics!!

Pablo sandwich

My running partner/big brother, pre-race!

Left: The Temptations; Right: Metallica and lots of air-drumming :D

Weeeeee arrre the chaaaaampioonsssss!

It's a good thing the 10K wasn't IN the desert.

Hooooey the Nike 10K Santiago was this morning! It. was. AWESOME. I picked up my t-shirt yesterday at Mall Sport (a mall full of sporty stores), and even THAT was cool. Everybody got a chip to put on our shoes so that we could know our exact time (they haven't posted them yet, but I think I ran it in about an hour and one minute). It was a chilly, cloudy morning for the race but it didn't bother me, especially because of the big, elaborate Nike set-up at the start/finish line. It went by pretty quickly too. I ran with my host brother-in-law for about 8 and a half km and then finished about a minute after him. The route was up one side of the river and down the other, so it was really cool to see the leaders running on the other side. Our friend Pablo took pictures, so I'll post them when I get them :D

As for the desert, it was cool but really touristy. I mean, obviously it's touristy for a reason, but my mom compared it to Niagra Falls, and I think that's pretty accurate. Awesome nature, weird atmosphere. I can't figure out why that takes away from a place, but it does. One of the things I don't like about the tourism there is that everything is pretty far away from the town of San Pedro de Atacama, where most visitors stay, so tours are almost necessary. And a bunch of different agencies do the same trips, so everywhere we went there were vans full of other out-of-towners. However, the company I was with was good and we stayed in a really great hostel, complete with a bunch of cats (three of them gingers) and a couple dogs. And an above-ground pool. During the days, we went to the Salt Flats of Atacama (not very flat, but very salty), the Geisers El Tatio (not very tall, but there are a LOT of them), a fertile valley that looks really out of place in the middle of so much sand, and some small towns out in the desert. (Stole the pics from my friend Matt because I forgot to bring my camera.)





At night we sat around and made dinner at the hostel, and watched Chile QUALIFY FOR THE WORLD CUP!!! That's right, if you hadn't heard or were too busy celebrating the US's victory in Honduras (wait, the US has a soccer team?), now you know. Chile is going to South Africa in 2010. I'm going to have to buy myself a jersey now. The whole country seems pretty jazzed about it.

Both university and volunteering continue to go well. The high school kids warm up to me more and more every week. I showed them a bunch of pictures of Madison last week and they were really attentive the whole time I was talking about it. Pretty cute.

Other thoughts that I can't muster up a paragraph for:

I left a birthday party at 3:30AM on Friday night and got made fun of for leaving "early."

A new TV series started two weeks ago called "Los angeles de Estela" or, in English, "Estela's Angels." I watch it with Magdita sometimes. It's kind of like a soap opera but entertaining nonetheless. It makes for good sister bonding.

Speaking of TV, I have been keeping up with The Office and Grey's Anatomy (it is much easier to find pirated movies and TV shows online here). Both seasons are off to a fantastic start and that's a fact.

My friends and I have been making pies pretty regularly. They get better every time. The pumpkin pie we made on Friday was the best yet. We also made banana cream.

It's totally spring here, so if you're looking for an escape from the snowy midwest (yuck, by the way), come to Santiago. If you don't mind a little smog, it's beautiful. And you can still look at snow, but from a distance (of about 5000 meters, on top of the Andes). Peace!

I still have sand in my eyes!

And that is why I haven't blogged about the desert yet! No, that's a mentira (lie), but I have been really busy this week and will get around to it this weekend. For now, know that the desert in Chile is much like other deserts I have been in (okay, I've only been in one other one), in that it is hot, sunny, sandy, and dry.

10K race this weekend! Ahhh!

Crazy Coincidence

I forgot to mention something pretty unbelievable that happened while we were rock climbing yesterday. There was another group climbing at the same spot we were at and we started talking to them after a while. There were four college-age students and they all spoke enough English so that we could communicate in either that or Spanish. After a while the only girl of the group told us she had lived in the US in high school and we asked where and she goes, "Minnesota?" Lucy and Mathias and I unanimously went, "WHAT?!" Hahaha! How hilarious is that! She did her sophomore year at Wyzata because she has some family there. Incredible. It also turns out that she lives about three blocks away from me in Santiago. Sometimes I wonder if the world could get any smaller.

Also, close to the cerro we climbed there is a small airport (I guess that's what one would call it) for gliders. They're this really skinny airplanes with no engine that literally glide around without making any sound. It's a beautiful thing to see in real life. If you haven't seen them before, check some out on youtube (although videos don't really do them justice). Off to school!

10 years later...

You may call me the rip van winkle of blogging. Except I definitely haven't been sleeping the past two weeks...

Spring has hit Santiago, and it has been warm and sunny lately. The smog tries to block out the sun once in a while but thanks to the thin ozone layer around here, it doesn't do a very good job. Good weather during the day means that it doesn't get freezing cold inside of houses/apartments at night, which is a nice change of pace from when I first got here. My friend Lucy has a really charming back patio behind her house and we have eaten our there three times over the past two weeks (pictures!). We also had coffee out there one morning before school, sitting at the big wooden table dappled in sunlight. It would be perfect but they have this crazy dog who is always running around, jumping on laps, and trying to steal food. We love her but sometimes you just want to throw her on the grill with the burgers. Nooooo - she's a lover. Anyway, one night Lucy made caprese salad, our favorite, and last night another friend of ours made these delicious burgers and we had sauteed onions, mushrooms, and peppers to go on them, along with avocado and tomato. AND Heinz-brand ketchup and mustard. Loved it. Last weekend we had another go at pie-making (strawberry this time) and this one was much more successful.

On Friday night a bunch of us went out with Mariana and her friends to a club a bit south of downtown to dance some cueca, because Mariana's friend plays in a cueca band. It was soooooo much fun (more pictures!). What I have realized about dancing the cueca is that more important than knowing the actual steps is having the cueca attitude. It got packed in this club with people of all ages, and the pañuelos were flying. Really, if you haven't done it yet, look up a video of chilean cueca on youtube. We decided it must run in Chilean blood because even after the band stopped playing, people started banging the rhythm on tables and couples were just as happy dancing to that. Awesome.

Soccer has been so good to me lately. I'm becoming much better friends with some of the girls in my class, and the team I play with on weekends qualified for the gold bracket! We thought we were still in qualifying rounds, but we showed up for our game on Saturday and found out we had already made it! And we tied our first game 4-4, thinking we were going to lose. PLUS I think we're getting t-shirt uniforms, aka my favorite thing in the whole world. That will be a great souvenir. I might add another weekly soccer session to my week too - another girl in our class has a team in a different league, and our teams might get together to play pick-up on Wednesday nights. Which would bring the total to 5 days of soccer a week. Beautiful.

Today I went rock climbing for the first time. It is so much fun!! I had gone in gyms maybe twice in my entire life, and not since I was probably 10 or 12. This was on top of a cerro, real live rock climbing. (Pictures, obviously). I only went up once but I can tell my arms are going to be sore tomorrow. Not to mention the hike up is no easy task. A few of my friends have enough gear that we can go ourselves and be self-sufficient. I love climbing anything, and this was no exception. We also have two really good climbing trees outside of the apartment building. I might have to start being more of a monkey in those now that I've gotten a taste of the real thing.


Volunteering at the high school is going well. The boys whistle at me less outside of the classroom now, and the students are getting more comfortable asking me and the other volunteer questions when they're working. I'm going to show one of the classes a powerpoint about places in Madison. They're doing a unit on cities. (Speaking of Madison, what a season to be a Badger football fan, no? I don't even like football but I do like beating the gophers in their new monstrosity of a stadium :D)

Next weekend I'm going up to the Atacama Desert with some friends. It is purported to be the driest desert in the world and some people think it hasn't rained there for decades (for example, me and my Dad), but my geography professor told us just the other day that that is BS. It rains a little bit every winter, and also she said, "and what does 'dry' mean anyway?" Apparently some guy wrote an article about it a long time ago and called it that, and the reputation stuck. It should be a fun trip. Hopefully I'll get another chance to blog before I leave!

Here's a picture of the view from where we were rock climbing today. That's all for now! Missing home, loving Chile.