un poquito atrasado....

Okay. I've sat myself down to blog because I've been slacking so badly in that department for the last 2 months. I have relatively legit excuses though....SCHOOL.

First, before I start, note that sometimes a word that usually has an "s" may not have it because my S key is kinda messed up and it only makes the s if i press really hard. So if i miss it, sorry.

Now...alas,....where do I begin. Well, I'm done with the semester. Seems like it went really fast. Maybe it did? I had my last final last thursday and now three whole months of vacation!!!! Woohoo.

I suppose I will start where I left off last time. I had mentioned how Chile had been in some soccer game and won against whoever they were playing, I don't remember...colombia, ecuador, i think, and so they will be going to the world cup in south africa in 2010 for the first time in 12 years i think. Since then I really haven't done much, hence my not blogging. I left Santiago once on a little excursion that was planned by my CSU program. We went to a teensy town on the coast called La Isla Negra...and no, its not a black island. It's just a coastal town. It's where Pablo Neruda, the most famous poet of Chile, had one of his three houses. We toured his house. He reminds me a bit of Grandma Jean...has a lot of things. But his were relatively organized collections. For example, he collected African masks and artesenal trinckets. As well as ships that are inside glass bottles. He had a massive shell collection, including a Narwal horn that was about 9 feet long. Also had a shell from the Philippines that was about 3 feet in diameter, it was pretty sweet. Appeared that he just had a lot of things...he was quite wealthy and also people would just give him things. The house was pretty, the bedroom overlooking the beach with the wallbeing a massive window alone. It was cool. After the house, we wandered around the rocky beach and then went to a restaurant on the beach (the bus driver had some difficulty finding the place, but eventually we made it down there). It was okay-food. Not as good as i thought' it'd be for it's location and snazzy-ness. Funny how the CSU program includes these fancy restaraunt meals for us in our "program costs". If i could decide, I'd prefer to save the money...i'm sure that meal was AT LEAST $50. Appetizer, coctail, wine, entre, dessert, the whole shabang. It was a nice day though.

And other than that I've been in Santiago...studying pretty much. There were a few fiestas I went to...there was a Halloween party and I dressed up as mother nature, by far the best costume in the party. I was going to be gone that weekend, but the plans fell through so I had to find a last minute costume that would be original and cheap. It randomly occured to me in the middle of the night while pulling a late-nighter studying for a Borges exam. The day before halloween i went to Patronato...an outdoor shopping market with tons of vendors that stretches about 7 city blocks to look for things. Pretty much I just wanted green fabric and a bunch of fake flowers and maybe some vines. I found a store that sold me soem perfect green fabric and some yellowish fabric that has a very nice texture for about $3. After that I ran into a fake plant shop which was perfect, and got all my flowers and vines for about $6. And that was it! I robbed a big palm frawn from the short fat palm tree downstairs in the courtyard of my apartment building and made a sweet head-dress type thing with it, fabric, and duck tape. It was the highlight of my costume by far. I now have a forest-theme decorated bedroom...i already have green walls and now i have all the flowers and vines draped around my room. It makes it more homey. Now with my free time with school being over, i am going to make things out of the fabric. I intentionally did not cut the pieces up, or as little as possible (i had to do a little hand sewing for the costume, but the pieces pretty much stayed as big chunks...it was a wrap around dress with lots of safety pins). I don't have a sewing machine here obviously, but i have time, so I'm going to hand sew a skirt from the green and a top from the yellowish fabric. Something to occupy my time.

I also had my birthday party. It was a joint birthday party for me and Felipe. Anyway, we had our birthday party together because his birthday is the day after mine. I wanted to do a theme to make it more interesting...so we made it a black and white party. Obviosuly the idea was that everyone dress up in black and white. It was quite good! The girls were the best about being color coordinated, naturally. We made black russians and white russians to continue with the theme and got black and white balloons with streamer thing and felipe got some black lights. It was in the backyard garden/patio of his house and the weather was really nice and never got cold at night. It was a fun party and everyone pretty much danced all night long and had a good time. It was much better than my 21st birthday, in which I had to take an exam for my online psychology class and didn't really celebrate.

Otherwise I've just been doing school things. Well, not now, but up till last thursday. I had my final in Borges 2 weeks ago, got ALMOST an A. I got a 5.4 and a 5.5 to a 7 is an A. Oh well, doesn't really matter because even had I got a 7 I woudn't have got an A in the class. But I got a B in the class so I'm happy. I studied my butt off for that exam...I even went to a startbucks to study because, even though it's a bit more expensive, for the cuantity of coffee you get it, its cheaper. There is a nice café downt he stree from my apartment but you pay about $4 for a coffee thats 2 inches tall with some cream plopped on top. NOT worth it. For about 3-4 weeks straight, monday through saturday from 9am to 8pm there has been construction going on in the apartment 2 floors down from me so I had to leave. They just finished on monday, FINALLY. It was excrutiatingly annoying, really loud, and banging shaking always going on. I studied quite well though.

Last thursday was my phonetics final, which was hard. I had a 4.3 or somethign going into the class...a 4.0 is passing (its a 60'% but equivalent to a C- in the states). The class just irritated me, and I wasn't the only one...there were plenty of chileans who had the same complaints as me...the teacher honestly only taught us one thing in class after the midterm exam, yet there would be 5 or so concepts on the 5 quizes we had during that unit. The TA's made the quizes and it appeared that they werent necessarily on the same page as us or the teacher. therefore i did pretty badly on most of the quizzes but on the final project I made sure to get a good grade. We had to do a paper in the form of a hypothetical research project that was about 10 pages long in the end (1.5 space, so pretty long). I ended up with the theorectical research part to back the ideas and hypotheses, don't ask my why or how. There were 4 of us, and me and one other guy pretty much made sure thigns were getting done. And then the day before its due at 5pm in the evening when we meet to put all the parts together and make sure everything is good, this kid from my class Marco shows up in the study room. I say hi and he asks me if I saw Martin. And I said, yeah, he's right there. Marco says, oh I'm meeting him for the final project. And I said, oh, ok, well martin's in my group, and marco says, well, then i'm in your group! He laughed and I was mad. I knew this kid was a slacker. I asked him why he was suddenly in my group after we chose our groups 6 weeks before. He told me because the girls he was with dropped the class. Irrelevant, the drop date was 2 or 3 weeks before that, so he would have already known. And because he's a slacker, he intentiionally asked martin to be in our group at the last second so he could get points for the project, which was worth 15% of the final grade. So since he adds himself to our group, I ask him that because he had done absolutely nothing to contribute to the project, if he could add mroe to my portion. I had written 2 pages and the page amount for this section was to be 2-4 pages. I said, PLEASE see if you can write one more page. All he had to do was that, and the abstract, a one paragraph summary of the project, which would take 10 minutes. And since I wanted to put everything together and print the thing to turn it in (i wanted to make sure it was perfect and looked good, those points count...and seeing i was working with 4 boys i was sure that none of them would be that picky, no offense, males). , anyway, i asked him and the others that were still finishing up their parts, to send me what they had before midnight so I could do it and sleep and then just turn it in before my soccer class at 10am. I had been working on very little sleep for the previous few nights. Well, i stayed up till 1am and only 1 of the 3 had sent me their stuff. So i go to sleep and set my alarm for 8. Marco calls me at 7am---still hasnt done his part , and asks to send him something to help him write the abstract. I was so irritated. I hate working with people like this...SLACKER. Needless to say, he finally sends me his thing at 8, i had to put everything together still and ended up missing soccer becasue i didn't finish it all till 10am at my apartment. Oke, that was all said and done...but still the presentation remained. And the deal with that was that one person would present, and it was supposed to be 10-15 minutes. But the person who wass presenting did not find out until the day of the presentations. They started on a thursday, and this kid marco calls me at 9.35 am that day and says "oye, kari, i dont really understand what the project is about" REALLY???!!! 30 Minutes before we have to be ready to present and you're calling me asking me wahts its about?!! Might I add, he had the paper document for a week before this, so he had time to present! I was so mad and just told him sorry i cant help you, you had a week to call me and ask questions.

We didn't get called the first day of presentations and had the entire weekend to prepare more...I was scared to death i'd get picked cause it wouldbe hard in spanish etc...so i made sure to be ready. I had notecards, practiced, etc. Go figure, when we continue tuesday she calls him. Not only did he only speak for 6 minutes, but he couldnt answer the teachers questions. I had to give him my notecards cause he wasnt ready and otherwise woulda just read from the powerpoint. We scored a 3.7 on the presentation which is a 50-somthing%. We got a 6.2 on the written document, the best grade in the class. Came out to a 5.7 on the project in the end. Now i'm just waiting my grade on the final...we'll see. 7 pages of torture...needless to say it was nothing like the practice exam that they gave us. No joke. oh well, thats life.

Otherwise...here I am. I suppose I should comment on the weather, which has been fabulous. It's been the the mid to lower 80's lately, and I'm loving it. Went swimming the other day to the public pools that are on the big hill in the city., They were pretty.

I posted pictures, check those out.

And now, until I late post I suppose!!!! ChaU!