Oh how the mighty fall.

After watching my fellow volunteers succumb to various illnesses over the past two and a half months, I thought I was out of the woods and could relax. Not so. I finally fell yesterday. Luckily it seems to be just a 24-hour thing, as I was feeling much better today, but I stayed home out of fear for the kids health. At least that's what I'm telling them. Nothing much has happened in the past couple of weeks. After getting back from vacation it was hard to transition back into school, but routine is a devious mistress. Once you get back into it, it's hard to tell where time goes. Last weekend Cami and I went to a little town outside of Rancagua, called Coya, to go hiking for the day. It was a pretty big adventure. We went to the bus depot to find a colectivo to take us there, not sure where there was exactly, so once we found one, he just dropped us off on the one street in the town. Seriously. We were a little apprehensive at first, but we wandered around for a little while, and finally found this little convenience store where the owners son offered to walk us to a "trail head" a little ways down the road. So we wandered up this steep hill, basically trailblazing, with the exception of mounds of horse poop. Once we figured out that there wasn't much more hill to be hiked, we caught the micro (small bus), back to the 'cagua, and got off about halfway back to hike some more. We wandered around more hills for a while longer, then decided to head back to the city, but realized that we didn't really know how. So we were waiting on the side of the road for the micro, hoping that it would come that way, when a car pulls up beside us and this woman pokes her head out and asks us where we are going. We say Rancagua, so they open the door and Cami and I hopped in. It was two boys, and an older woman, all heading back to Rancagua, so they drove us back to the center. It was the perfect ending to the most random but fantastic day. We saw some amazing views, and had lots of new adventures.
This past weekend we spent in Rancagua again, mostly because my host mom wanted to have everyone over to our house so that she could meet all the other volunteers and all that. That was Saturday night, and it was super fun. She was so excited all week, so we had a lot of prep time. We made mountains of food, including 5 kilos of machas, like razor clams, that she bakes in the shell with butter, lemon juice, white wine, and Parmesan cheese. So good. Then on Sunday it was Dia de los Ninos, Children's Day, so we went out to lunch with my host mom's cousins family and our neighbors. We had a traditional Chilean parrillada, which is basically a heaping mound of meat. I have never seen so much meat on one plate before in my life.

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