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That´s right ladies and gentlemen, I have officially reached my half way point down here. Crazy how time flies.

Since my last blog, my roommate Jessica and friend´s Rachel, Amanda and I did the horse riding/ziplining outside of Con Con. When we arrived we were all very skeptical. The zipline tour was in these skinny rickety trees off the highway, and we were like ¨Canopy tour? Really? Or just playing in some trees¨. But, it turned out to be a lot of fun. It was something like 8 or 10 ziplines plus several other obstacles. Which were horrifying. There were some tree limbs we had to climb up that were wrapped in roap and therefore ¨ladders¨, then a net we had to shimmy across, but worst of all some freaking swings we had to sing between. Scary as shit, but we all survived and had some good laughs about it.

The ride was incredible. We were supposed to go for an hour but the woman (her and her husbnad own the company and are incredible and have two adorable little kids) is used to doing three hour rides so our hour took about 2 hours. Anyway, we road over these enormous sand dunes, where all you could see for miles were more dunes and the sun and each other. We eventually got to the beach and galloped. My horse, chosen for me as I was the only one with real riding experience, apparently was a rodeo horse and loved to run. I don´t know if I´ve ever gone quite that fast or had quite such a hard time stoppping a horse. It was awesome.

That was two Sundays ago, and on Monday I woke up feeling horrible and didn´t go to work. I spent pretty much all last week in bed with what I´m pretty sure was strep and definitely sure included a constant fever. It sucked and made me homesick, as being sick often does. And to make the homesickness worse, Rachel and Amanda both left for home this weekend. Of the original 8 students in my program we´re already down to 4. Jessica leaves this week too.

On the upside, on Saturday we went to Jessica and Eric´s (my other roomie) boss hostel asado (barbecue) and met a lot of locals, a long with some students who just arrived for their semester abroad and two young women from Austria. We ate tons of food, including the staple here which I don´t know if I´ve mentioned is hot dogs. We also drank lots of pisco, the national drink here. Afterwards we went to one of the more popular dance clubs in Viña with a line around the block. Someone at the asado had some connection though so we got to skip the line. We´re having a potluck on Thursday for Jessica´s goodbye party and invited a lot of them, so hopefully that´s a whole new potential bank of friends.

After Jessica leaves, Eric, Joe and I are heading to Mendoza for the weekend. We are planing on doing the biking wine tour there. Hopefully the pass will stay open for us in both directions. It does seem to be warming up here so that´s a good sign. The sun is also rising earlier every day which makes getting up for work a little easier each time.

I guess that´s about it. I´ll write again after we get back from Mendoza. Lots of love in the mean time.

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