Over the Hump, Unfortunately

I came home from vacation to a small package from Tanya with a card and a frame with a picture of us. At the same time I saw a facebook album of a party at the Russian house. I felt a pang of homesickness. It was momentary and I think being tired from all the travel was a part of it. Now as I try to plan future travels and flip through the months on the calendar I see that there is so little time left. It has been half already and I'm not ready to leave. Getting back to Santiago at that "midway point" made a lot of us reflect a bit I think. I realized how very unintegrated I feel here. Not that I feel out of place but it's as if we have carved out our own place within Santiago and live comfortably in it but not so much in the actual community. I don't really have any Chilean friends and I have very few interactions with any of the students in my classes. It makes complete sense: the Chileans have known each other since childhood, take all of their classes together because of the carrera system at the universities (very rigid, unlike a major, so almost all of your classes are in your field) and live at home. We are friends with each other because we have personalities in English and it's nice to be able to express that. So individually I think a Chilean and a gringo would be interested in getting to know each other but with two groups neither is willing to approach the other and risk being an unwelcome intruder. It's not all so grim. Sometimes we hang out with friends' host siblings, some people have friends through a program called Tandem (language exchange basically), sometimes we meet randos at bars but still for the most part we are with each other. On that note I have become pretty good friends with a bunch of people in the group, which is nice, and I look forward to knowing 20 more people back in Boston.

For my only real class, Social History of Chile, our first paper was due this past Friday so ever since break it had been hanging over me. Like most of the Chilean students, I had barely done any of the reading for the class. The professor is a bit crazy and most of the lecture is a tangent so we haven't learned too much in class. The readings he assigned are also somewhat random tidbits of history. So for us, having no background in Chilean history, this paper was quite a challenge. The question: What were the principal sociopolitical and/or economic tensions in the 19th century (and how did they contribute to Chile as it is today - which he let us omit from our essays since we really don't know how Chile is today). My background knowledge came mostly from Wikipedia - Tufts would be ashamed - and I pulled random bits from the readings just to fulfill the minimum number of sources requirement. In the end, after countless hours of procrastination and eating most things in my house, I wrote a 4.5 page history paper in Spanish and my host mom even said it was good. I often regret staying in this class because it is disorganized and really painful to sit through 3 hour lectures (so sometimes I just play solitaire on my ipod) but then I remind myself that I've had bad classes and crazy professors at Tufts too and I've survived. Why did I think it was a good idea to take a class in Spanish on a topic that I would be intimidated to study back home?

Volunteering for English Opens Doors is in full swing. I have been placed in a very good public junior and high school so most of the students have remarkable English. So far I have usually been asked to sit with groups of about 5 girls in the library and just talk to them. They have all been very interested to learn about me and the United States. I guess there are many observations I have made and more that I could say but it isn't coming to me right now. I also haven't started keeping the internship journal that I'm supposed to, so me not having much to say right now is a bad sign. Must get on that.

My host mom left for almost a week to visit family in the south where they are from. I like having her around but I also enjoyed having even more independence that I usually do. I liked that she stocked the fridge with a month's supply of my favorite foods. Not having to watch those stupid fake judge shows on daytime TV during lunch was also nice.

Kate Carpenito, who is studying abroad in Buenos Aires this semester, came to Chile for a weekend with a friend and we got to hang out. It was really nice to see her and interesting to be a tour guide instead of a tourist. Unfortunately the weather was pretty crummy and on weekends the city is generally pretty dead but we had dinner on Saturday night and went to a party at my friend's house and on Sunday we walked around the city, saw some of the main sites and had teatime at my house. It accidentally came up that she is living in a house off campus with space in it so we got really excited about the prospects of living together. Then it turned out that the second free room was just given to some boy and Alli was actually about the take the third room. We would really love to live with the three of us girls because we all know each other and would bake and get along but I don't think it's going to happen. That just opened up a whole new issue because now I like the idea of having a kitchen and am looking at subletting a room instead of living in a dorm but don't like the idea of moving into a house with a group of close friends who I don't know. Currently sans decisions.

On Tuesday for dance class (actually had nothing to do with dance) I went with Alli to La Vega, El Mercado Central and Plaza de Armas. La Vega was an amazing, enormous market with endless piles of delicious looking fruits and vegetables, a meat market with some graphic displays, random stands like styrofoam cups and scattered tiny restaurants with cheap home cooked food. We got fresh squeezed juice and just wandered around for a while. I'm a big fan of open air markets. El Mercado is much classier and smaller and mostly a seafood market and nice restaurants.

Today was a success with planning travel. This next weekend is a long weekend so I am going to Mendoza, Argentina (across the Andes basically) with Alli and Becca. Then on the 21st I am going to Buenos Aires with Emily. There is still more planning to be done but it will be good because we are going to meet up with friends who are abroad there and try to go to Uruguay for a day. I wish I could go everywhere in South America and fill up my little Google map with markers. Now I think the only trip left is to the south of Chile at the end of the semester. I think that I will not be extending my ticket back because I think that trip will fit in the two weeks we have of "finals" (but really free time) and I think most people aren't planning to change their tickets.

I wore flip flops for the first time today. People have allergies. Everything is green. Spring is here and that's fantastic.