August 16, 2009

Sorry everybody - it's been an entire week since the last time I posted anything. This week has been great - school is kind of boring though. I still am not understanding much; therefore, most of the time I am just sitting and staring blankly at the board or reading a book. The teachers know that I understand nothing (except for my language teacher) so they usually don't mind if I read or just sit there. For whatever reason, my language teacher seems to think that I understand everything and asks me questions about what she is teaching in spanish constantly - obviously I do not understand a word she says haha. I finished the Catcher and The Rye this week and it is definitely my favorite book now. Not too much happened during the week, but on Saturday my host family took me to Santiago. The one hour drive to Santiago is beautiful: the Andes are on either side of the road (snowcapped as always) and there are a few hills in front of the mountains covered in green grass and cacti. The contrast between the green grass, the cacti, and the snow is really interesting haha. When we arrived in Santiago we went to the coolest restaurant. It was on one of the street corners downtown and my host father explained to me in spanish that it was over 100 years old, but had been restored. And it had been restored very nicely too. I ordered a cuatro queso pizza and it was great - I think that the cheese on it was unpasteurized because it had so much more flavor than a normal cheese pizza would. After we finished eating we went to the centro commercial of Santiago, which once again was basically a mall. It was probably the nicest mall that I have ever been to in my life. The mall had literally every store imaginable in it, some that I didn't even know existed. After I thought my host  family had finished their shopping, we went to another mall. This one was much cooler in my opinion. One level of the mall was outside on top of a building and, of course, the Andes could be seen from almost every store. This was the last mall that we went to, although my host family informed me that there were about four more. Next, we went to my host uncle's house in Santiago. He had a really nice house near downtown Santiago and we ate dinner there for the next two hours. We didn't get back to my host family's house until about one in the morning. Around 2:00 pm today my host dad took me driving to see the Andes. I thought I could see the from the house, but he wanted me to have an unobstructed view of them. I really have never seen anything like the Andes - they are definitely the biggest mountains that I have ever seen. I also had to get my hair cut today for school. I am still mourning over the loss of the majority of my hair - I barely have any left haha. I have already posted the pictures that I took of the Andes on facebook. I am not going to post all of them on my blog because it takes a really long time.