Earthquake update

The earthquake that woke me up at 6:00 on Sunday morning was actually a 5.3! That same day there was a bigger earthquake in southern Chile that created a tsunami and killed a few people! Yikes!

school got harder...but I did go to Argentina

The first thing I should let everyone know is that my computer power cord is fried. Therefore, I haven´t had quite the internet access as before, but more importantly, have not been able to upload pics yet :(. However, new power cord is in the mail (hopefully) and I have pictures of the yacht trip and Mendoza to upload.

Lately, I have fallen into a more normal routine with school, which has been a nice, but somewhat difficult change. I had quizes, readings, and even a presentation this week (that was really scary). Besides having consistent work for the foreign student classes that I did before, I now have constant work in my meteorology class and a class which started recently called Globalization, Development, and Regions...a two credit geography class that I have been anticipating. However, because that class JUST started, we have lots of make-up classes and well, lots of work. This week I will start my volunteer (well volunteer for credit because it is part of a class) work in a elementary school. I´m excited about that too. The only class that has yet to get hard, not surprisingly, is History of the 20th century through film...we just watch movies in class. that´s it.

Last weekend, I took a lovely short trip to Mendoza, Argentina. It is an 8 hour bus ride over the Andes, which in itself was worth the trip--very beautiful. Mendoza is a very pretty, serene city, with lots of parks, plazas, tree-lined streets etc...While I certainly noticed many differenes between Chile and Argentina, aside from the obvious differences in spanish accents, I feel somewhat disqualified to elaborate since I was only in that country for three days. What I did realize though, is how much a rivarly exists between the two countries. Argentina is a huge country, but chile is quite powerful for its mere 16,000,000 inhabitants (there are about 36 million in Argentina and almost half live in or near Buenos Aires).

Anyway, I really enjoyed Mendoza simply because it was a very relaxing, peaceful weekend. Argentina is much cheaper compared to Chile, so we were able to eat, shop, and have fun without spending too much. Most of the time was spent wandering the city (by the way it has about 1 million people, to put it in perspective), going to the large park San Martín, and basically relaxing. Saturday we did a fun winery tour...on bike. That is kind of the thing to do in Mendoza tours of "bikes and wines." It was so lovely because you really are just biking down these tranquil, tree-lined roads in the country going from winery to winery. Soooo nice.

Other than that, my only other recent news I suppose is that I got the flu this weekend...sucky. But, I am getting better. I miss everyone and am kind of sad to be missing the end of the year, graduation festivities happening at LC right now. I will write more soon.

OH YEAH, a 4.0 earthquake woke me up at 5:00 this morning. Scary and exciting!

Easter in Chile...surprisingly uneventful

Despite having a videotape of myself as a child begging my parents to celebrate Easter "just a wittle bit..." and despite the fact that I am living in a conservative Catholic country, Easter passed here about as uneventful as usual. My family is not Catholic, hence, we didn't celebrate Easter. However, I had a wonderful three day weekend and the weather was gorgeous. Saturday was in particularly spectacular. I spent that day sailing on my friend's yacht (i know i know, sounds hella swanky), but of course it was awesome. My friend Andee's dad invited us on their family's yacht to "view Viña and Valpo from the sea." We had perfect weather, brought snacks and champagne...all and all a wonderful day.

Friday, Paloma finally finished her movie that has been keeping her incredibly busy for the past month. For those of you who don't know, Paloma is a film producer and has actually been working on a very large film here. She recently told me that this movie, called "El brindis (the toast)" is the most expensive film ever produced in Chile. Paloma worked as one of three producers, the other two being in charge of scenes shot in Mexio, and her being in charge of production in Valpo. The theme of the movie is interesting: it is about a young woman who travels from Mexico to Valparaíso to find her estranged father. She becomes involved with rabbi and hence there is an overtone of judiaism in the story. Ironic i think. Anyway, while I don't know a lot about Chilean film, the director and main actors are apparantly well-known in this country and the script writer wrote the very famous movie "Machuca." The film won't be realeased until September, but it will be very to cool to see what my sister has been working so hard on.

In other news, another boy moved into the house yesterday bringing the grand total to 7. He moved into a spare bedroom i didn't even know existed in this large house! Although the weather was lovely this weekend, today makes me think fall is coming. Today had a portland-ish feel, cloudy, not hot, not cold, slight drizzle that doesn't really make the ground wet...
Oh yeah! Emma, David, Dana, Andee and I bought bus tickets to Mendoza, Aregentina for the weekend. It will be a quick trip (well an 8 hour bus ride, and then three days there) but should it should be lovely. I just have to cross my fingers for nice weather in the Andes so that they don't close the road back to Chile!

Finally, i have to say that while I'm having a blast, but I am always missing everyone at home (home in portland, home in colorado...everyone). I love when you comment on the blog and I love getting emails from people. Thanks for the love! EVERYONE COME VISIT ME IN CHILE! Besos.

Patagonia II

I might as well finish telling my Patagonia adventures while the memories are fresh...

So I believe I left the last blog talking about glacier grey, which reminds me something super cool: every couple hours in the park near the glaciers you can hear a huge rumble, akin the thunder, it is the glacier moving. I loved it.

Next, rainbows, I have never seen so many feel rainbows, they occur in Patagonia as if that was a normal, everyday sight! At one point, I felt I was in a dream: sun was lighting up a glacier, a rainbow arked the sky with one end landing on the glacier and the other on a mountain top. Behind me a waterfall...amazing. Totally, totally surreal.

Anyway, the rest of the hike continued to varied in difficulty and scenry, but always gorgeous and vale la pena (worth it). Nights three and four we stayed at Camp Italio, pretty high up the mountain in Valle Frances (French Valley). The campsite was right along a gushing river of glacier run-off, very very cold water. We spent day 4 doing a short day hike up to a lookout. We were pretty beat that day and used it to recuperate a bit.

On Thursday we hiked very long hard day up to the Torres. Everyone had told us the best way to see the Torres is to do a sunrise hike to the base. While I can´t complain about the beautiful weather throughout the rest of the trip, it was somewhat disappointing that it ended up raining the very last day. We decided to brave the rain (mixed with hail and snow) and do the sunrise hike anyway, even though there wouldn´t be much of a view. I though it was still worth it to climb an hour straight uphill on huge slippery boulders just to see the little lake at the base of torres and see the faint faint hint of pink from the rising sun. At this point we were soaked, freezing, and verging on miserable, a perfect day to be the last one in the park. We packed out an made it down to the bottom in 2 hours although it was supposed to take closer to 3!

All in all, I was beat, in a lot of pain, but super super happy. I love to hike, I loved the challenge, and we had a wonderful time. Asdie from the quarelling and broken tent, we did alright. I feel very lucky to have seen that part of the world.

Regarding pictures: I only have pics up until the viewpòint during the day hike (i´ll put those up tonight), but eventually i will post some of the other´s pics to log the rest of our trip.

Patagonia Part I

Last Friday night at 3:00 am my flight landed in the southernmost city in South America: Punta Arenas. In the dark, Emma and I joked that we were probably landing on top of an iceberg or squashing a penguin colony...hmm, maybe that was funnier when we were delieriously tired. Anyway, after sleeping in the airport for the next few hours, the sun finally rose and I could see that we were not actually surrounded by snow, but still in a in the middle of a rather dry, barren tundra. Our destination was Torres del Paine National Park; one week earlier my friends and I decided on a whim that we must make it to Patagonia. Torres del Paine however, is nowhere near Valparaíso. We had to fly three hours to Punta Areans and then take a bus 6 hours north to the Park. It was totally, totally worth it.

First of all, I should say that when we arrived we had no idea how long we'd be backpacking. There are both free and paid campsites in teh park, but there are also refugios (kind of like hostels, but still pretty expensive). There is a common route through the park called the "W" which you can do in anywhere betwee 3 and 6 days depending on how much hiking you really want to do. In the end, to avoid paying for refugios, we decided to hike and camp the entire 6 days. Indeed, 7 people turned out to be a bit too large of a group to travel with, but we made it work.

The first day of hiking was sort of the optional day, or extended trip hike. We chose to hike 6 hours to the base camp at Lake Pehoe rather than spending $20 to get there by boat. This was perhaps my favorite day of hiking for several reasons. First of all, the weather was gorgeous. It was very windy, but still really sunny. Also, the trail wasn't too difficult, which is nice given how heavy our packs were. Also, less people take this trail, I think we only passed one other couple the entire day. That night however, things got a little rough. We were stupid enough to bring a borrowed tent before checking to see if everything was okay with it. We got to the site at Lake Pehoe kind of late because the bus didn't get us to the trailhead until noonish. Turns out the tent was broken. One of the strings inside the tent poles had snapped. We had to perform major pole surgery in the dark, freezing, wind. Everyone was grumpy--we fought a lot that night. In the end we did manage to pitch our ridiculously huge 6-person mansion (which slept 7 comfortably even with all the backpacks inside) and we awoke in the morning to another beautiful day.
Day 2 was a hike up to Glacier Grey. I have never seen a glacier before (where would I?) and it was amazing. I especially couled believe the way the light lit it up as the sun rose. That night we had to fix the tent again, in fact we had to fix it every night of the entire trip. Every time we took the tent down it broke again. However, we finally figured out a method of repair and we never stressed as much as we did the first night. There is so much more to tell...rainbows, the torrres, but I'll save it for the next post. I don't want to make these too long and overwhelming. Check out the pics of these first two days!