So many Chilean firsts in the past few day! including my first:

1. Chilean earthquake! (very small tremor, don't worry :)

I was in class, on the third floor, and the teacher didn't even notice it. I did though! And i sorta screamed because I was excited, just yesterday I was saying how I wanted to see what it was like. The teacher in the class next to us thought i screamed out of fright, but it wasn't scary in the slightest. The people on the first floor didn't even feel it at all.

2. Swim in Vina (water = freezing, waves = huge, overall = awesome)

We're so busy with tours, activities, orientations, ect. after school everyday that we have not been able to go to the beach until today! Once a week we meet up with a group of Chilean students so we can practice our spanish, and we told them that today we'd meet at the beach, so we can get tanner and look less like gringas!

3. Skipped class, and I don't even think it counted as one of my two allowed absences!

We had to go register our visas and apply for our Chilean ID cards!! I'm going to have an identity in Chile yayy!! We had to go to what seems to be the Chilean DMV. Luckily, our ISA person had gone earlier and gotten numbers for us, so we only had to wait about 10 minutes. The people who worked there talked reallly fast and my guy seemed annoyed when I asked questions, but I had to! Especially when he was asking me if i wanted to be an organ donor, because all I could figure out was that he was saying something about when I die! Yikes! Then we went and got breakfast while everyone else went back to school. I had a yummy croissant, and the other girls were really excited to find real coffee, because it's hard to get anything besides instant coffee here. We took an ascensor with an awesome view of valpo and vina, bought some souvenirs, and made it back to school just in time for our second class

4. Asado (bbq that starts around midnight) on a school night

The boys made chorizo. They cleaned the grill off with an onion. They dropped the sausages on the ground before they cooked them. While the sausages were cooking, they taught us bad words. It's strange, because in english, I hardly ever curse. But here, everyone is so eager to teach us curse words, and they sound so funny and harmless, that we all say them all the time, myself included. We probably offend people when we're walking on the street, and one of us spontaneously remembers some bad word and shouts it out, and we all get excited about the new word and echo it. oops.

I tried to eat the chorizo, but i could only make myself have a few bites. I ate the bread and gave the sausage to my friend.

5. Chilean rainfall (which apparently NEVER happens in the summer, as every single chilean assured us many times how shocked they were)

We were on our second tour of Valparaiso, where we saw one of Pablo Neruda's houses. He seems like he was a very eccentric guy, and also very awesome. When we were walking to the museo al cielo abierto, it started raining. Not a whole lot, but enough that we got to see an amazingly huge rainbow over the cities and the port.

Chao!