Po, Po, Po

March has been a great month here in Chile in a lot of ways:

CLASSES. Classes "started" March 2nd, but this coming week will be the first time I'll actually have all of my classes at the right times and hopefully consistently. I've had all of them at least once or twice so far, though, and they are all amazing and exactly how I imagined a perfect semester of classes would be. I spend all day learning about indirect object pronouns, the social situation leading up to the military overthrow of the Chilean government in 1973, and getting to ask Chilean students why they can't dance or eat hot sauce in my class that's dedicated to bettering cultural understanding.

THE HOME. My host family is still lots of fun. My host mom and I have long, relaxing lunches together most days and I like that I get both a Chilean and Argentinian perspective from her about thoughts on culture, because she's from Argentina. My host dad is super-amusing and talks and sings and tells us interesting things about Chile whenever he's home. Last weekend they gave me a lesson on how to make the famous Corn Casserole of Chile - pastel de choclo - which was entertaining and took all three of us a couple hours to prepare. The host sister, her friend and I watched Twilight on the computer in Spanish the other day. Haha.

SIGHTS. I'm actually a little disappointed in myself for not having traveled more already with the last few weeks of warm-ish weather before winter sets in, but our group that I hang out with is huge and I let that slow me down a little. However, we've actually done pretty well for ourselves by average standards. A few weekends ago several of us took a double-decker bus overnight to a town 12 hours south of here where we went white water rafting, tried climbing a volcano (but couldn't summit because the wind kept knocking us over), went to some hot springs, and went biking through the mountains. Our school took us on a tour of a couple vineyards one weekend which made me realize I am sadly not a very good wine connesur (I can't spell that). Yesterday some of us went to a national park with a lake and wild horses where we walked around and enjoyed the sun that only seems to appear outside of Vina. On my less-busy class days, my class buddy Kayla and I have mini-adventures. We've gone to museums where we've seen art and real shrunken heads from the Amazon, to randomly-selected, tiny towns along the subway line where we buy cheap books and ice cream, and to cheap movies.

FRIENDS. I have a really fun little group of Americans that I hang out with a lot. We have fun going to our weekly salsa lessons, getting together almost every night for a walk or dancing or a bakery-run, and hanging out on weekends. They're all really sweet, funny people that I for some reason hadn't even envisioned meeting - I'm not totally sure who I thought I'd be hanging out with - and I'm blessed to have met them. We are slowly making acquaintances with actual Chileans also and some of them have been joining us to go dancing or for terremotos - these drinks we like made of wine, blended fruit, and ice cream.

IMMERSION. I'm definitely feeling more confident every week in my Spanish. Being in a setting where you get to practice what you're learning every single day is absolutely amazing. Between making new friends, classes, and just going about daily business in Latin America, I am getting SO much input every day and it's helping me learn a lot of vocab and just get better at listening and communicating.

And that's about it for excitement so far. The next few weeks look like they'll be pretty eventful, so I'll be sure to keep this updated!