Travels and Triumphs: another month in Chile!

Ahhh! I apologize that so much time has passed since my last blog entry…I’ve been busy and a lot has been happening, I’ll try to summarize the best my long-winded self can.

First: I went to Mendoza, Argentina a few weeks ago for a weekend with friends. It’s about an eight-hour bus ride through the Andes Mountains and the views were awesome. Border crossing is at something like 11,000 feet, so we had to wind up and up and up and up and up on these narrow, steep roads…I think I counted about 25 hair-pins turns from what I could see from the top looking down. I stayed in a hostel for the first time (welcome to the world of super cheap lodgings with lots of interesting strangers), and we spent a lot of time drinking wine. We did something called “Bikes and Wines”, where you basically rent bikes and ride throughout the Argentine countryside from winery to winery doing tours, taste-testing, and buying all the wine you can fit in your backpack. Unfortunately I was really sick the whole weekend with a horrible cold that I couldn’t shake for about two weeks, so this was pretty much the only thing I got to do in Argentina. I lost my voice for about four days and was miserably sick, so I stayed in every night at the hostel while my friends went out and I ended up going home to Viña a day early. It was still a lot of fun and a great trip, though.

Second: I have been rockin’ the making of Chilean friends lately. I am lucky to have some fabulous American friends who I love spending time with and who are great to me, but it’s also really important to me to make Chilean friends. I spend all day speaking English with my American friends…I need Chilean friends to give me the opportunity to speak Spanish and to learn from them about the language and the culture and to give me a real, true Chilean experience. I’ve made friends with three Chilean girls (and that’s quite a feat, let me tell you) from one of my classes, and I went to a birthday party with one of them recently and am planning to go home for a weekend with another to her hometown. I also made friends with four Chilean boys, two of them I knew from class. I ran into them while I was out one night and invited them to join us…later my friends took off for the dance club and I stayed out hanging out with the boys until 3 am. Mom and Dad, don’t be concerned. These people have all been so nice to me—always helping me with anything I need, being very patient with and interested in what I have to say, and making sure I’m well taken care of. I’m really happy and excited about how things are going and the friendships I’m hoping to develop. I’m also about to start doing a language exchange program with a law student at my university here, in which we split an hour of conversation between English and Spanish so that we can both practice our foreign language. On top of that, I’m also planning on beginning to volunteer in a boys’ high school helping teach English, so I should be meeting a lot of new people/friends in the coming weeks :)

Third and most important/awesome: I just got home from my 9-day trip to Patagonia!!! Classes were cancelled all last week, so three friends and I took off traveling to the very, very, very south of Chile…what is literally almost Antarctica. I went with my friends Abigail, Sarah, and Misha (gotta have a boy along for good measure—aka to carry the heavy stuff, light the fire, etc., haha), and we went backpacking for 5 days in Torres del Paine National Park. Can you believe that I went backpacking?!? Yeah, neither can I. I pretty much went straight into the wilderness with absolutely no perception of what I was getting myself into. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done—we hiked 76 kilometers!—and as mentally and physically trying as it all was, it was totally worth it and was one of the most incredible trips I’ve ever taken. It’s a very isolated place (who wants to live in the Chilean Antarctic after all?), so it took a looooot of traveling to get there. A bus to the capital of Santiago, where we spent a day touring around and hanging out and then slept in the airport so we didn’t have to pay for a hostel, then a five-hour flight to Punta Arenas, then a three-hour bus ride from there to Puerto Natales (the jump-off city for getting into the park), where the four of us spent Easter together by going to church, eating dinner in a nice restaurant, and preparing all of our backpacking supplies, then another two or three hour van ride to get to the park, and finally a super-expensive boat ride across the lake to the beginning of the trail. Wooooo. From there we hit the trail, hiking anywhere from four to seven hours a day, through all the elements—lots of wind, lots of rain, some snow, and even a short but strong hail storm. It’s the very end of the hiking season in Patagonia, as winter is about to begin, so the weather is pretty crazy and VERY cold. We would hike for the majority of the day and when we arrived at our new camp each night we quickly got set up in our new rugged lifestyle—getting water from the nearest stream because it’s pure glacier water, cooking dinner on our tiny gas stove and often eating out of one pot with four spoons, and then jumping in the 3-man tent for four people to sleep for the next twelve hours because we were so miserably cold and tired (it kept us nice and warm at night being so close together…we’re very good friends now, especially after not showering for five days, haha). There are no roads to get to the sights you want to see in Torres del Paine, so the only way to see them in person is to hike there…therefore making all the difficult hiking worth it because you have earned that view. I got to see a glacier, a real Antarctic glacier! It was huuuuge and really blue and so amazing. The other sights were breath-taking rock formations of the mountains and valleys, lakes and lagoons with the most intensely colored water I’ve ever seen, tons of waterfalls and rivers, dozens of gigantic rainbows, the changing colors of the foliage because it’s fall here, and some crazy animals I’ve never ever seen before. Many people consider Torres to be one of the most beautiful places on Earth, and now I understand why. I feel so insanely lucky to have been able to see the things I did there…pictures can never capture it the same way, and it was an incredible experience. I think it has to be the coolest thing I have done in my life so far. There were so moments when we all just stood back shaking our heads in disbelief at the awe of all that we were seeing and wondering how we got so lucky to have such an experience. After finishing The W (the whole trail throughout the park), we dragged our weary, broken bodies back to Puerto Natales for some good eating, dry clothes, sleeping late in a soft bed, and at last a hot shower. After recuperating from the trail we did the sleeping-in-airport-thing over again and thankfully got on a flight at 4 am to get home…..I’m still tiiiiiired……

Well, those are the major events of my recent weeks here. School continues to go well, I guess—it’s such a side-note to this whole experience really, haha, and that’s fine with me because I deserve a semester like that. The Spanish has gotten much easier, I now understand almost everything I hear, I just need to continue improving my speaking. But my triumph with making Chilean friends is that I finally feel like I can have a personality in Spanish. It’s kind of hard to explain unless you’ve learned a foreign language, but it’s SO difficult for SO long to express how you feel or what you think or anything at all you want to say. I feel like I’m finally reaching the point where I cannot only communicate well, but I can be Amanda in another language, telling people about who I am/expressing and sharing opinions/telling jokes or being sarcastic/etc….if that makes any sense. But anyways, it’s a big deal for me, a big accomplishment to be living normally and functioning to full capacity in another language and it feels really good. I am so insanely happy here in Chile. This has been, absolutely, the best decision I’ve ever made. In a few days I will mark two months down here, and in such a short time it has been the most incredible experience on so many levels for me. So, no worries, I am wonderfully content here, having tons of fun, and thinking of you all often. Until later :)….