hi everyone! i don't have class until 3 tomorrow (my first class got cancelled) and since i am going to stay up later, i thought i would write a little update. so i have been in classes a little over a week now. after making a few changes to my schedule, i think i have finally found one i will stick with, and i will only have classes tuesdays, wednesdays, and thursdays! i am taking 3 classes as opposed to the 4 i had planned to take, but i think i would rather take one fewer class and be able to have more fun while i am here. anyway, i have so few classes left to take before i graduate that one more class next semester shouldn't be too bad. i am still in the chilean anthropology class with antonia (which involves a lot of reading) and also in a radio narration class and an audiovisual critique class. i can't say that i always understand everything that the teachers and students are saying, but hopefully that will improve the longer i am here. i have already made a few friends, and i'm sure talking with them will also help me.
in other news, my family left last week, and now i am alone in a very quiet house with my grandma and her maid luisa. i haven't had a chance to get too lonely because i DO have like 18 aunts and uncles and 35 cousins, and quite a few of them have been good about calling me and making plans. i know there will be times when i will probably get really homesick, especially when i already miss my family a lot, but i also feel like now the real part of my experience here is starting. i wasn't practicing my spanish as much with all of my siblings around, and now i am the only native english speaker i know. hopefully when we reunite just before christmas (which will be great in itself) i will be as close to fluent as is possible in 6 months time.
even though i am sad about my family leaving, one thing that brightened my week was that mike bought his ticket to come visit me. he will get here september 15th and will stay until the 29th. the best thing is that he will be here for the chilean independence day on the 18th. i have never been in chile for "el 18" before and i am really excited that mike and i will get to experience that together. besides that, i have a whole list of places i want to take him and things i want to show him. this will be the first time that i have been able to show chile to someone outside my family (with the exception of aj, but it was more andrea's responsibility to show him around) and i cannot wait!
i would also like to report that the thing that got me out of bed this morning was... a tremor! that it is the 3rd one that has happened since i got here in june. i have always known that chile has a lot of seismic activity, but tremors happen a lot more frequently than i had thought. my grandma's apartment kind of shakes a lot to begin with, because of all of the buses that pass by.(don't worry, almost all of the buildings in chile are built with seismic activity in mind), but now i am getting kind of paranoid that everything is a tremor. haha. actually in some weird way, i look forward to them because they are kind of cool as long as they are SMALL (!)
other than that, today it snowed in santiago for the first time in 40 odd years. unfortunately it didn't snow where my grandma lives so all i got to experience was the nasty cold wet weather, but it is supposed to snow well into the wee hours of the night. i am hoping it will stick and i will get to play in it tomorrow on my way to class!
well, i think that it is enough of an update for now. i actually have no idea who reads this, so if you (whoever you may be) wouldn't mind leaving me a comment i would greatly appreciate it. hope everyone is well. besitos!