Mi Familia

Well, I LOVE my family here. I'm sure that this is due in part to the "honeymoon" period of culture shock that we learned about during orientation, but it's also just because they are awesome. They are super caring and very welcoming.  My mom's name is Rosa, but everyone calls her Rosy (very similar to Roxy) and my dad's name is Ulises.  They have two kids but neither one lives at home any more.  The son, also named Ulises, is very nice though.  He lives in Santiago but comes home every weekend...   My mom makes me lunch every day which I usually eat at school or if it's nice out I take  it somewhere to eat. I'm extremely well fed here but the upside is that I live 4 blocks from the sea and it's a great place to run and they have a BIKE PATH, that's right a bike path. Chile is actually very advanced, they have bike paths all over Santiago too, but you have to be careful because lots of cars use them as an extra lane. 

This evening I went to yoga with my mama, it was kinda funny and not at all like the yoga classes I've been to in the states but it was really fun to do that with my mama.  There are tons of ways to be athletic if you want but that doesn't mean that I've been all that motivated, there are a couple of other people on the program who like working out too though so that helps a little!  

Classes started on Tuesday, I'm in a spanish class with 6 other kids from the program and we have classes with 2 different teachers, for 2 hours or so each with a break in between.  My teachers are really nice and so far the classes have gone pretty fast.  Today during the second spanish class we went on an excursión with our teacher and we had to talk to people in stores and on the streets to figure out about the history of the place we went, it was kind of scary at first but everyone is really nice and willing to help if you make an effort to talk in spanish.  The other day, for example, my homework was to talk to my family about Chilean perceptions of the US and also Chilean perceptions of other Chileans.  My papa and I had a huge discussion about the way in which the as a whole US is seen to be like a powerful bully who abuses its power, but he was also careful to qualify this by saying that it's interesting because all of the individuals from the states that he's met were really nice and helpful.  Our conversation ended with a long debate about the education systems of our two countries and while I'm not totally sure of all that was said, by me or him, it was really interesting. 

I'll post more pics soon but my camera is kinda a pain so it's not going to happen tonight!

Ciao