y ahora soy estudiante de la católica

Hmm..it's been a couple weeks since I wrote anything, so I guess I'm obligated now to post. Hmm, what should I write...

Well, I guess I will start more or less when I left off. Our language class ended last thursday. I'm bummed because I really liked our professor but he's only teaching the basic and extrememly advanced Spanish courses this semester, so I doubt I will have him. It was a pretty cool class, all in all quite helpful. Friday we had our orientation, which wasn't much but helpful. We sat and listend to a lady talk about the school and rather boring statistics that are, for the most part, irrelevant. Then we got to go have fake coffee and a sandwich with corn in it and sugar-blasted juice (funny, its called jugo fresco, aka fresh juice...lieeeeeeeeeeees!!!) The better part came after that when there were chilean students from all the departments in the big auditorium for us to talk to about anything. Basically we asked them questins like what classes are good, bad, which professors are cool, mean, talk fast, etc. It ended around one. I went to a cafe/restaurant with soem friends, didn't eat anything as I was 2 blocks from my apartment. Em..the weekend didn't consist of anything interesting, but I started classes Monday. Oh wait, last thursday I discovered that thrift stores exist in Chile, YEAH! I bought a coral colored cardigan and a skirt woohoo!

As far as classes are going, we just crash whatever ones we want to or can and find what we like. Technically we cant register for them till next monday, but some of the departments were mal-informed until yesterday, and im registered in 2 already as I got my form stamped before they realized they werent supposed to be doing that. Monday I went to two: soccer (womens, level one, the only available) and calculus. We're alowed to take one sports class and two academic classes in addition to the two mandatory classes we have to take. It's cool cause the sports classes are three days a aweek and for 1.5 hours each, so it's actually a somewhat significant amount of time. The calc class i went to was not the correct one though. The math student i talked to at the orientation told me there were probably only two sections of calculus II I could take (out of 10) that were more bio science based. I could only go to one of them because the other section is at the same tim as my mandatory spanish class. So I went to the one I could, and it was not anything that would work for me, its calc II for civil engineering majors. Plus the teacher talked supppppppper fast and just booked it after class before I could even ask her anything. So I went and wandered the math department and somehow found myself in front of a math advisor who recommened the correct calc for me. But unfortunately, they conflict, once again, with my mandatory spanish class. Seems like they all do...I guess i'll wait till next semester.

Yesterday I attended two classes: Fonología y fonetica, basically a fonetics of Spanish. i know it will transfer directly towards my major at SFSU so i'm going to take it, depsite the rather Severus-Snapish-aspects the profesor tends to show. If you've read harry potter, you'll understand. If not, I shall just say that she's harsh, mean, and super strict. Some kids walked in late (duhhh its the first week of classes) and about 10 minutes into class she says, "if you're going to come 10 minutes late just dont come in at all, it's a disruption." MIght I add that everytime soemone came in, she would stop talking and just stare at them until they sat down. I understood only about half of waht she said becasue she spoke super fast..but at least I have a friend in the class from sfsu and we are determined to ace the class. I talked to a chilean girl to ask her if she thought the other teacher teaching the same calss was better but she told me that he was likely even harder. EEks.

After I had about a 2 hour break. I hung out with Nico, the kid from SFSU in the fonetics class, and one of our "tutors" from the little field trips we went on. I met one of his friends too, who is super smart in languages (majoring in english AND teaches it) and I felt smart because he told me that my spanish was good and that he was impressed with some of the verbal tenses i was bustin' out.... haha yeah! When all else fails and you don;t know what tense to use, just guess.

After that, I attended a class called la prosa de borges, aka, the Prose of Borges. Borges is a super famous surrealist writer from argentina. I read some of his stuff in the latin american literature calss i took at sfsu and surprisingly got an A in. I swear, analzying this literature and writeing about it simply requires lots of innovation to make up anything. It worked, my teacher liked it, I got an A. I plan on taking this course, especially because I like the teacher a lot. He speaks at a decent pace and I understood most of what he said, and he's nice and funny.

And then last night I was able to go to a pretty much pro soccer game. Nico lives with a host family and has a host sister who is my age and a host brother who is 19 and they are bother super cool--they've both studied and/or spent a lot of time in North America but they still speak spanish with us. They invited me to go to the game with them and their friends so I went...it was pretty awesome. The ticket was as general as it gets, about $11 but the experience was pretty cool. The team playing is the club team affiliated with the University of Chile. My school has a club team too. It's strange though, they aren't students, they pretty much are just professional players. They start as students, playing for a schools' individual team and then if they're good enough they play on the club team and stop school. So the schools that have club teams have two teams essentially: club team is pro, the school team is made of students. So we watched the club team of "la U" (shortened term for universidad de chile) play a team from venezuela. There were about 50-100 people chearing on the venezuelan team and about 5000 for la U. It was in the "estadio nacional" too so a rather large stadium and ridiculous amounts of police. Some police here ride horses too, kinda interesting. The game was awesome, there are so many songs the chileans sing for la U, so I plan on learning them. We painted our faces too to blend in. And, they won. Yeah!

Today I just had my soccer class and nothing after it. I'm really stoked to be playing soccer again after not having played in 3 years. I forgot how much I love it. The only thing that kinda sucks and surprised me, is that there are some girls in the class that honestly know NOTHING about soccer. Still surprises me how unpopular soccer is to women in pretty much any county except the US. weird.

Umm, I guess that's it....I suppose I'll post more when more interesting things happen....