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Saved: December 23rd 2014
Hola
This has been quite the summer. It's been plenty long, but I haven't gotten bored. It's great. Not really looking foreward to school starting the 28th, but it'll be ok, I guess
Goals for this half of a chilean school year:
1. read all the books they assign me to read
2. get a 7 (100 %) on some test that's not english, PE, or music
3. get good study habits. Some sort of daily routine. Never quite got that down
4. stop buying from the kiosko at the school. The overpricing there is ridiculous, as much as 50% price raises from what you get in el centro. Gotta bring food from home or something
Nathaniel was here for most of January, and it was sweet. I'm sad he had to go. Miss having him here, but I'm having a good time. School starts at the beginning of march for me, so I'm relaxing, saliring.
I guess it's been a long time since I've made one of these. I don't really feel like typing out everything that's happened in the last 2 months, so I won't.
Saliring (pronounced sah-LEER-ing), is a word that is
This is the Atacama
so one day Nathaniel and I decided to go walking in the desert. Said, hey, let's climb that cerro over there, doesn't look too far. So 6 hours later we got to the top, another hour it took us to get to the highway so my host mom and aunt could pick us up. Everything looks close in the desertthe natural product of a lot of exchange students speaking spanglish. Some stuff is just better to say in one language than the other, so why not mix the two for the best product? We understand each other, at least. Saliring is derived from the spanish verb "salir" which means "to go out." Yet english is seriously lacking a word like salir, because with that combination of words it's hard to escape the dating connotation of "going out." It's easy to make that one sound awkward. Saliring is much better. You have the various forms of the word. I salir. You salir. He/she salirs. We salir. Y'all salir. I salired last night. I am saliring. I suppose Sra. Leal is cringing right now.
I want to comment that I love the bus system in Chile. In U.S, if you are going to travel to Minneapolis, you drive your car. In Chile, you get on a coach bus and they drive for you. It was 20 bucks to go to Serena and back, and that was getting the tickets on day before. It might be cheaper if you get them earlier. I suppose it would be cheaper to drive, but
I can't. So I use buses.
Went to Serena with Julio's family. Hung out with them there, got to know the area, salired. Had a good time.
The Cruz del Tercer Milenio (The Cross of the Third Millenium) is a huge cross up on a hill in Coquimbo, a city that's joined at the hip with Serena. It's a famous thing, I think. Made around the year 2000, go figure. They have a nice church underneath it, and a museum, though I wasn't very interested by the museum. It had lots of church artifacts and stuff, but I wish they would have had a bit more about the making of the cross. I guess I'm not too interested by a necklace that a this pope wore and this pope's robes and that pope's chair.
The cool part is when you go up in the elevator and look out from the arms of the cross. You can see pretty much all of Coquimbo and La Serena. I'm not sure how big this cross is, but it's big.
We also went towards the interior. Pisco Elki and Vicuña. Pisco Elki is a city, aptly named because they make
shopkeepers
got to know some of the shopkeepers in Bahía Inglesa. They're cool pisco. Lots and lots of pisco. I think pisco is some sort of grape brandy. You look down as you're driving along the side of the Valle Elki and you see grapes everywhere. The most common pisco in Chile, Capel, though not the best, is made around there. Also, Pisco Gabriela Mistral is made there. You get in that region, and just about everything is named after Gabriela Mistral. She was a very famous Chilean poet, won a nobel prize. Lived in Vicuña. If you stop by Vicuña, you can see her house, grave, and all.
Also, in this region there are a lot of observatories. We're in the desert. Not many cities. Not so much light pollution. Go figure. Up on a cerro outside Vicuña there's an observatory for tourists to visit. You can visit the real ones if you'd like, but you need permission to enter a lot farther in advance, and they're a lot farther out in the desert. This tourist one is called Mamayuca. Not sure if I spelled that right. They show you the basic layout of the universe on a slideshow, and then you go out and look through some pretty fine telescopes.
made pizza
we have Nathaniel, Kamila, Eli, and Jechu. Salired a lot with them, and Cortez, who is off to the side. They teach you a bit of the layout of the sky. Depending on when you go, you'll probably get a decent view of stars, nebulas, planets. They teach you some constellations, including those of the indigenous people of the Atacama. It's cool. Then you get to go up in the observatory and look through an excellent telescope. Try to go when there's no moon.
My favorite was definitely Fray Jorge. It's a national park in the Atacama. With it's own climate. You have a Valdivian forest in the Atacama. Valdivia is towards southern Chile. It's a forest on the top of some cerros, the remenants of a forest that used to stretch through most of Chile, if I understand right. But the climate changed, and man kept chopping it down, so there's not much left around here. This part survives because it is nourished completely by low clouds that come in off the ocean, called Camanchaca. It's awesome. And it's strange how one minute it's all dry with cactus and all, and the next you're walking through all the trees with the fog and the moss and lichen, etc. Love it
Met up sometimes and hung out with
my friend Laura from Massachusettes. Went to the beach, listened to some live jazz, saw an excellent Chilean circus. Had a good time.
Went to a beach called Totoralillo with Laura's family. It's a little ways outside La Serena. A very nice beach, good sand, good waves. It fills up. Like, you have a hard time finding space on the sand to lie down, and the water by the shore fills with people. This isn't too big of a problem, unless you want to surf. I love surfing. I'm bad at it, and I'm too cheap to get the board, but I manage. Just wait for a good wave, throw yourself with it, and it carries you. Timing is the key. But you can't do it when there's a hoard of folks standing there in the water. So we went swimming, and sat on the beach reading.
Recently, though, it went bad. Got some sort of gastro intestinal infection, lots of vomiting and diarrea, starting at 4 in the morning. So, by about 9 I was very, very dehydrated. Got up, walked to the kitchen, filled a glass of water. Got kind of dizzy. Set down the water
Embalse
can't remember what this one is called, but it's where Serena gets's it's water. It's big on the counter to go lie down, getting increasingly dizzy. Several moments later, I woke up with a blow to the face on the floor, and the realization that I had lost half a tooth, and that tooth, before breaking, had gone a good way into my lip. So I got up, drank my glass of water, and asked to go to the hospital. I think that when I tried to explain what happened, I was switching between english and spanish, which doesn't speak well of my state of being at that moment, but says something about my becoming bilingual
So we got to the hospital, they found that I had low blood pressure and a fast heartbeat. From being very dehydrated. Kept sticking needles in me. Blood tests and IV bags. Put me on a blood pressure/heart rate monitor. Stayed the night. Think I had at least 10 IV bags. And the next day they let me eat jello. Jello and tea. Jello and soup and iced herbal tea. More jello and tea. More jello and soup and iced herbal tea.
And when I got home, I got more jello, but I was lucky enough to have
smoking
he's not really smoking it. We just got a kick out of it because all we could think of was Cruella Deville a rice drink instead of tea. And white bread. But I worked my way up and I'm eating like normal now.
The strange thing is, I didn't eat anything that the people around me didn't eat, and I was the only one who got sick. I have no idea what it was, but I had a suspicion about a cheese empanada, a fried one, that I had on the beach. It didn't have any seafood, but right after eating it, I felt like that went down bad. I suppose it probably wasn't infected, considering it was just cooked in hot boiling oil, but still. It has the blame in my mind
email if you'd like, I love hearing from you
talk to yall later. Enjoy your snow, all you up nort
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