school work?!

The whole point of my program is that it's based on field work and experiential learning. The first section (which comes to an end next week) has been more classroom based but in two weeks I am moving down south to Temuco to live with an indigenous Mapuche family. 

After three weeks down south, we get to spend the final month wherever we want to, living with whoever we want to and studying whatever we want to... a little scary but I finally decided what I am going to research and if you know me at all, it really won't be a surprise.

I am going to volunteer at and research an organization called Teletón which helps children with physical disabilities. The handicap accessibility here is horrible and Teletón's whole mission is to empower people with debilitating diseases. I am going to look into how they help people here overcome all of the obstacles that this city throws at them.

If this goes well, my senior thesis will be a comparative piece which analyzes how non-profits in both Chile and the US help kids with physical disabilities. 

And that's the next year and a half of my life.

this means i'm kate winslet!

I'm more or less living The Holiday! (Super cute movie if you haven't already seen it).

Fast forward to the 1:00 minute marker...

Similarity: Today, my neighbor told me his doctor suggested that he walk a little bit every day to stay healthy so we made a nightly date to walk around the block when I'm done with class.

Slight differences: Kate Winslet's older neighbor is a famous movie producer getting ready for a night in his honor, he has all of his teeth, you can understand what he is saying and they make it further than half of a block every night.

So those may be some pretty large differences but I'm excited that I'm becoming a large enough part of this community that I am getting to know my neighbors. Maybe by the end of our nightly walks, I'll be able to understand what he's saying.

and we're back to monday.

Man time is flying by! Sorry I haven't written in a while. It's been busy around here. Also, I just had to write a proposal for my research project and now I'm sleepy so this is going to be mostly pictures.

Thursday evening after class: We headed to Top Top which is a second story bar with a patio that we have been hitting up quite a lot lately. Ordered a few drinks and un churrasco gigante which is a typical Chilean dish consisting of french fries covered in onions, eggs and meat. My pirate face was because I was sick of taking pictures...

On Friday we had a field trip in the afternoon so in the morning cruised over to Cerro Alegre (one of my favorite neighborhoods in Valparaíso). We had brunch at El Desayunador (The Breakfast-ery?) which may be the only breakfast joint around. The back wall of the restaurant has a giant print by the artist Loro Coirón. He's from the area and makes awesome wood prints which is pretty rare anywhere these days.

Saturday we decided to venture into the world of Chilean wine at Viña Emiliana. It was my first ever wine tasting and I was quite surprised that I could taste the difference between the different wines as my usual reaction is just: "Ick. Wine." I had a lot a lot of fun and feel like I learned quite a bit too about both wine in general and organic farming. For fertilizer, they use alpaca poo and for insecticide they just let hens run around the vineyard and eat the little bugs.

The second vineyard we went to, we just drove up, ate some grapes off the vine and left :) It turned out to be ok though because later that night, we met the man who is their wine maker and became friends.

Today (being Sunday) we went to Reñaca Alta which is a community up a ways in the hills and spent the day with an urban Mapuche community. We helped them built an outdoor grill for community gatherings and add a roof the the existing area. In return, they fed us a feast for both breakfast and lunch, taught us the traditional Chilean dance la cueca and taught us the traditional Mapuche game palín. It is essentially field hockey but much more dangerous because you are allowed to pick people up with your field hockey stick and throw them out of the way. I asked the man teaching us not to hurt me and he agreed. I kind of felt bad because we went to do community service but we mostly just ate and played games. I think they enjoyed showing us different aspects of their culture though. 

I also became buddies with baby Matias and played let's scoop dirt onto the soccer ball and into Jill's hands for a while.

Happy weekend!

qué rico

Today was the best day of class. Our first Spanish class got sidetracked and ended up spending the whole class discussing good restaurants in the area. I now have a very long ling of places to try. There's even an Indian food restaurant and a vegetarian place that everyone loves.

Spanish class number two went on a little field trip today... to our professors house. We went to the grocery and got eggs, veggies, bacon, orange juice and pancake mix! The real kind too!! (If you order pancakes here in a restaurant, you are guaranteed to receive crepes). We intended to discuss subjunctive verb conjugations over brunch but ended up just relaxing and enjoying ourselves and having a wonderful 3 hour brunch filled with some great Spanish convo. We then had to go because our professor had class at 2:00 but we didn't have our next lecture until 3:00 so we went and hung out by the pool in the middle of our campus. I could get used to this!

shhh

So I'm pretty sure the whole goal of coming down here was to experience something different. Although that is true, you sometimes just need a boost, especially on the day you have a 5 page take home test. And where did we unfortunately find that boost... Starbucks.

To our credit, we did go to a couple of other cafes first but they either didn't have wifi or were too small for the four of us and our computers. So my evening after school consisted of passionfruit iced tea, a cinnamon roll and Chilean environmental policy. What a funny combo.