The weekend before last, which was the 18th, Mackenzie and I went to visit the Chilean girl who is also going to live in our house in about a week. She and her family spend their summers in Bahia Inglesa, which is a teeeeny tiny beach town in the north of Chile. Everyone described it as a wonderful resort town similar to the Caribbean...but we're not so convinced. We left thursday night and arrived in Copiapo in the wee hours of the morning and took another bus to Caldera, where Vale and her sister picked us up. Despite our swollen feet and ankles from 15 hours on the buses, we were very excited. Vale's family lent us a tent because there was no room for us in their house, which was filled to the brim with family members. I've never actually set up a tent before, so doing so with two Chilean girls who don't do it very often either was certainly an interesting experience. There was a lot of miscommunication and pointing at things, but we finally got it up almost right, and the parents came the next day and helped us fix it. But it didn't blow away at night, so I'd consider it a success. We spent the day friday hanging out with the family and only went to the beach a little bit. Saturday morning we walked along the beach from our campsite to the tiny town, which was very close. We saw people setting up tents in the street and found out that it was the festival of the scallop. There was all kinds of food with scallops, none of which I tried because we were having lunch with the family soon. After everyone had eaten a few empanadas, we had lunch of fried fish. And I even ate some, but mostly I ate rice. That night we went with some girls around our age to a big party in an inflatable dome. We went after the asado/bbq, so about 2am. The next day my stomach was very displeased with me. The family told me it was from drinking pisco sour, but i only had one glass, so more likely it was because the first day we drank the tap water because they didn't tell us until the second day that it was bad and we couldn't drink it. So Sunday and Monday at the resort beach town were not very fun for me, since I didn't feel much like going to the beach. The most embarrassing part was this little 5 year old boy asking me very bluntly in Spanish, "Is your s*** hard or [some word that I didn't know, but I could guess at its meaning]?" Mortified, I pretended I didn't know what he was saying, and then one of the moms asked a girl who knew english and came back with a piece of paper with "diarrhea?" written on it. From then on I ate rice, crackers and an apple. After many goodbyes and invitations to visit any of them whenever we could, we rode the buses 15 hours back and arrived at 6:30 am. None of the collectivos (taxis) were running yet, so we walked home from the bus station. Since we had already missed two days of class, we had to go to school at 9. Needless to say, we were exhausted. The weekend was definitely not the relaxing beach weekend we were expecting, but I still enjoyed it. It's nice to meet so many people who were ready to welcome me into their family without even knowing me, and now I know so many wonderful people who I know would love to help me out if I'm ever near them during my travels!