El Fin

So in the beginning of February when I was preparing to go to Chile, I thought about it constantly. There was a always a part of my mind reminding me of the tiny amount of time I had left until my plane would be taking off. But it felt like it would never happen, like the seconds ticking by would never add up, that February 19th would never actually arrive. And then it did. My mom and I drove to Conneticut and for the first time in my life, I went through security without her. After walking through the metal detector and slinging my backpack back into place, I smiled and waved goodbye to her and then walked towards my gate. None of it felt real. Not flying by myself to Atlanta. Not meeting ten other exchange students in the airport in Atlanta. Not checking into our hotel together in Miami. Nothing. In the moment all the little things that were happening seemed perfectly normal, but when I stopped for a minute to think about the bigger picture it was unreal. Ridiculous. Impossible. There was no way I was actually going to be arriving in Chile in some small number of hours. What even was Chile? How could I be sure that it really existed?
At some point in the last six months, the roles reversed. Chile became my reality, my home, my life and the US became a distant dream, something that my head thought would happen someday but no other part of me believed. The Spanish language infiltrated my brain, pushing out all traces of Chinese and a good portion of English. The school skirt stopped bothering me and I became accustomed (should mention that I had to google the spelling of accostomed because acostumed didn't quite look right but I could swear it was spelled like that) to the idea that girls sit with crossed legs all the time. Onces-- pancito y cafecito-- became so normal that when making a presentation about the US it didn't even occur to me to mention that onces doesn't exist in the US.
So right now, I'm back to the dream state. I have a week left in Puerto Natales. That means somehow, in some way, I've got to say goodbye to my reality and live in the dream. Again. Only this time, the sense of excitement isn't there. Because before, I knew that I would always come back. That no matter what happened in the dream world, I would be back in the real world in August. This time, the dream world is my future. I might never see the real world again. But I still have a week or so before that hits for real. Right now, my life is in Puerto Natales and I can't imagine my life in the US as my life.
Before anyone gets the wrong idea, I am really excited to see my friends and family again. But at the same time the Chilean half of me has to say goodbye to her friends, her family, her school, her culture for an unknown possibly infinite amount of time.
In short, when my six-thirty am flight leaves the south of Chile next Monday, I'm going to be the wacko on the plane who spends the entire time staring out the window, looking for Puerto Natales and crying.

My Last Month Picture Style

Naty's Birthday Party

For my friend's birthday, a group of us went out to eat to a popular local restaurant. (They have the best sandwhiches in the world.)

Me

Naty (the birthday girl) and Gaby

Me and my sandwhich

Naty, Gaby, Aim

Gaby, me

me, Claudia

Cake Project

A group of friends got together in Gaby's house to make cake. The way you make this particular cake is with chocolate bars around the outside to hold it together and filled with layers of whipped cream and ice cream and topped with chocolate. Really delicious. And fattening. There was a ton of leftover cream and we ended up eating it and then having a fight. 

Gaby cooking

Kamii and Naty

Gaby eating the leftover ice cream (I helped)

the cake before it went in the fridge

Gaby, me, Kamii

Cake

The inside of the cake

The Campout

We went to camp out at a friends house as a grade to celebrate the end of the semester and the start of the three week winter break. It was an awesome night but also very cold (15 degrees farenheit and without any of the proper winter gear) and the homeless dogs ate most of our food. I ended up sleeping inside the house with my friends and most other people came in in the early morning.

Kamii (without a jacket, she ended up being frozen a little later... the first time I've ever seen her get cold)

Claudia and Aim

A bunch of people piled together with sleeping bags to keep warm. 

Aim, Gaby, Kami, Me, Cony

Huddled around the fire to keep warm

Me, Cony, Gaby, Claudia, Gaby, Aim, Kami

Despedida

AFS hosted a goodbye party for me, Antonia, and Dion, giving us AFS Puerto Natales shirts and talking about the pleasure it was to share time with us. Then we all went to Antonia's surprise goodbye party. (Her two closest friends came to the AFS goodbye party and told her that she needed to go with them immediately because another friend had been in an accident and was in the hospital. Antonia went with them and ended up in the countryside walking into the room where we were all hiding.)

Antonia, me, Aim, Dion

Antonia, Aim

Antonia, me

the exchange students and volunteers

sitting at the table, Antonia, me, Aim

A bad picture, but it doesn't matter

The girls with our t-shirts

my family

Hanging Out-- Natales and Completos

Went out to walk downtown and eat completos with my friends. 

Chiloe

"El archipiélago de Chiloé está localizado en el sur de Chile, entre los paralelos 41º y 43º de latitud sur. Comprende principalmente una gran isla, la isla Grande de Chiloé, y un gran número de islas e islotes menores. El archipiélago tiene una superficie de 9181 km² y contaba con una población total de 167 659 personas en el año 2012.1" ~ Wikipedia
The archipelago Chiloe is located in the south of Chile (sidenote: it's in the south according to all the Chileans who live in the Santiago area or farther north, for Natalinos, Chiloe is considered the north) between the southern latitudes 41 and 43. It exists principally of a big island, the Grand Island of Chiloe, as well as a large number of smaller islands. The archipelago has a surface area of 9181 km and in 2012 had a population of 167,659 people.


Recently, I went to Chiloe for a week short exchange. AFS arranged for the four students in Puerto Natales to live with Chilote families for a week and go to Chilote schools. The point of the short exchange is to know another part of Chile as a local and get a broader view of what the culture of the country as a whole is like. I stayed with a host family in Castro, the only city in Chiloe, which has about 40,000 people (twice the size of Natales). My host family consisted of a father, mother, grandmother and three sisters- seven, twelve and seventeen. (When I found this out, I started wondering how it's possible for me to have three families in a row with a thirteen-ish year old sister... Also, Aim's family was just her, a mother and a seventeen year old sister and in Natales her family is her, her mom and her sixteen year old sister. Given that my family in Natales consists of the same number of siblings the same ages, I'm wondering if AFS purposely gave us Chilote families that were similar to our Natalina families.) I went to school with my host sister, Aim, her host sister, and our exchange student friend, Lucas from Finland. Because we were only there for a week, school was very flexible and we never went the whole day.

My "global view" or whatever you want to call it before I went to Chiloe was that people are basically the same all around the world. Yes, the cultures and languages change significantly. Yes, everyone has different beliefs and values and behaviors. But, we're still more alike than we are different. Chiloe just reenforced this belief.

The differences between Chiloe and Puerto Natales:
-Landscape
  In lots of ways, Chiloe is a warm version of New England in terms of weather and landscape. I got really nostalgic looking at all the gorgeous, big, green trees and the sloping hills and the cows. Of course, the houses and the bus stops and the general feel of Chile kind of stopped that nostalgia in its tracks. But it was certainly a big difference from the stark, wild beauty of the Magallanes.

Chiloe landscape

Magallanes landscape

-Weather
  It rains and rains and rains in Chiloe, but it never gets that cold. Even though we were there at the end of fall, when it was only a couple degrees celsius in Natales (think fourties for you Farenheit-minded Americans) it got all the way up to fifteen degrees celsius (think sixties). So all the times when the Chilotes were using their thick winter jackets, I was using my favorite sweatshirt. It was to the point that, the first day in school everyone else had sweatshirts and thick sweaters on inside because it was "cold" and I was in a shortsleeve t-shirt because I was warm.

-The Public Transportation
 Something I absolutely love about Chile is the transportation (although to be honest this is something most countries have in common, ahem car-obssessed USA). Public transportation is super common in Chile and really well used. The general types of public transportation are taxi, colectivo (taxi with a set route, so more like a bus in taxi form, very cheap), micro (little buses that run all over the cities) y bus (big buses that go throughout all of Chile bringing you from city to city. It's all very cheap and very common and it's very liberating. It's to the point that, using just public transportation, I can get from my house in Puerto Natales to the airport in Punta Arenas for twenty dollars. Puerto Natales is small so the transportation is limited to colectivos and taxis (both very cheap- colectivos are about fifty cents for students and you get off wherever you want and taxis are two dollars to anywhere in Natales). Castro is twice the size and the public transportation is extended in a web all over Chiloe. Within Castro, there are the taxis and the colectivos but also the micros which are very easy to use and allowed me to get from my house to the downtown on my own. Between the towns in Chiloe there are other buses that run about every twenty minutes and cost less than a dollar.

-The Isolation
   Living in the end of the world tends to be pretty isolated. In the Magallanes region, there are three towns/cities that have a population of more than a two or three thousand (the smaller ones are very few and far between and the people in them spend all their time in the larger towns for working and buying stuff and basically everything): Porvenir, Puerto Natales, and Punta Arenas. And Puerto Williams but that's in Antartica. The three are very far apart and the only things in between are grass, a few trees, water and wildlife. So there is a distinct sense of being separated from the world. In Chiloe, all the little towns and the city are connected and there is a constant flow in between.

-The Accent
   Chileans have a thing about accents. First of all, as a country, they have a very distinctive accent. Within the country, the regions all have accents, some more than others. The Magallanes has what I'm told is a strong accent. Chiloe also has a very strong accent which is more of a tone of voice and way of forming the sentences than pronouncing the words differently. It took me a lot to understand in the first night because of the way they raise their voices at the end of the sentences. I imagine it like if you see the words, the first ones are all cramped together black without any white spaces in between. The even out a bit in the middle, allowing some white to shine through, and then start curling up towards the ceiling and bunching together at the end.

-The Food
    I thought we ate a lot here in Puerto Natales. I was wrong. They told me that "no soy buena para comer" (I'm not good at eating) because I was incapable of eating breakfast, snack, a large lunch, snack, onces, and then dinner. All with very large serving sizes. Compounding on this frequency, the food is all very heavy, with a majority of it fried.

Chochoca 

Milcao (or the accurate spelling is Milcado but this is Chile and we never pronounce the d when it's in-between two vowels so the spelling has been changed to Milcao)

Curanto

Chapalele

The Week

Wednesday
      After school, I went home, shoved everything into a suitcase I borrowed from my host mom, and she dropped me off at the bus station where I got on the bus and went to Punta Arenas with the other exchange students. Aim actually missed the bus because her mom ended up getting out of work late, but one of the other host parents changed her tickets so that she came an hour later alone to Punta Arenas. We took a taxi to the hostel, dropped off our bags, took a taxi to collect the Aim and then went to eat with Maxi, the head volunteer of AFS Natales who goes to the university in Punta Arenas.

Thursday
     A three hour flight from Punta Arenas to Puerto Montt followed by half an hour to the bus terminal in downtown Puerto Montt, half an hour in the bus terminal, and three or four hours in the bus to Castro. At the bus terminal in Castro, Margot, the head AFS volunteer in Chiloe with whom Dion and Antonia were staying, picked us up. She waited with us until Aim's mom and sister arrived to pick her up and then my dad, big sister and youngest sister arrived to get me. We went to the house, ate dinner, and then I spent a good four or five hours in my sisters' bedrooms talking with them. Ended up going to sleep way later than I should have for an exhausting day of travel followed by a day of school, but part of the exchange experience is giving up things like sleep so that you can enjoy the experience.

Finally in Castro- Dion, Aim, me, Antonia

in the bus- Aim, Antonia, Dion

In the bus again- Dion and Antonia

Dinner

Aren't they adorable? My sisters- Daniela, 12 and Carolina 7

My bfef (best foreign exchange friend) Aim 

Making faces at the computer... bus time boredness

Dion on the ferry onto the island

Aim on the ferry

Bye bye Mainland Chile

Hola Chiloe

Landscape

Chiloe... kinda like New England only with a sign in Spanish and with the mark of the Chilean government

Chiloe

Friday-
I went to school with my sisters which meant after going to bed at like one am after a really long day of traveling, I was up at six am and showering and eating breakfast. I got to school to discover that it was El Dia de los Alumnos or Student's Day, which meant we didn't have classes. Instead I sat and talked with Aim and Lucas (from Finland) until eleven when we ate tacos and then went to watch a show organized by the teachers. It was really funny because they dressed up as Minions and did coordinated dances (just to prove that all Chileans can dance... once again). There were games where people from the different grades competed against each other to complete the tasks. At the end, there was a little presentation for the seniors- a slideshow that the parents had put together. Aim, Lucas and I sat with the class (Lucas is in the senior class for the year and Aim and I for the week) and tried not to feel awkward while everyone else cried. School ended at one o'clock so Aim and I went to Lucas's house for lunch. He lives like a hundred meters from the school. After lunch, we talked for a while in a mix of Spanish and English and then took a bus to the downtown. We walked all around, talking, and then met up with other exchange students, my host sister Javiera and a classmate for ice cream. Later, in the night, we went to a dance, all the exchange students in Chiloe plus the visitors.

Aim and Lucas walking to the bus

Senior class watching the slideshow

Lucas, me, Aim in "class"

Aim, me, Lucas, Dion, Javiera

Aim, Lucas, and me at the dance... really bad picture because it was really dark

Aim and her host sister

Lucas from Finland, me, Aim, Lucas the Castro AFS Volunteer and Senior

Aim, Lucas, me

Antonia, Lucas, Anna, Me, and Aim with a really bright flash

Aim, Lucas, me in Lucas's house

Saturday
I was informed by a very excited group of Europeans that Saturday was the finals for Eurovision!!! I asked what the heck is Eurovision and was met with a bunch of dumbstruck faces and a "everyone in the world knows what Eurovision is". For the record, none of the people from Asia and the Americas that I talked to later had any idea what it is. Eurovision is a song contest where each country in Europe is represented by a song. So I went to Lucas's house with Antonia, Dion and Anna to watch Eurovision. It was fun to watch it with everyone, but at the same time a little awkward to be the only one in the room who couldn't cheer for my country.

Sunday
Also known as Mother's Day. I went with my family to eat lunch in a restaurant and then went with my little sister and my dad to drive around Chiloe and see some of the other towns near Castro.

A note from my little sister to me saying I love you Christina

the little sister in question, Caro

Caro

Lunch part 1, salmon

Lunch part two... this was a seriously large hunk of meat. Did not finish

So in the non-meat part of the meal instead of being something green, there is more meat in between layers of potato

Dani, Caro and the wreckage of a fire

Caro

Dani was cold

Host Dad

Me and Caro

Me and my host dad

Me and Caro

Me and Caro plus our new hats

Me and Caro being silly

Caro

Caro's a fan of taking photos

Especially of herself

Me with Castro in the background

Me, Caro and Castro

Me and Castro

Caro and the little homeless puppy we found

Chiloe

Me in Chonchi

Me in one of the towns but I don't know which

Me and Scott, the family dog

Monday
Being a good girl who didn't want to waste the day in bed, I got up and went to school for the morning. I no longer remember why, but for some reason, Lucas doesn't go to school in the afternoon on Mondays. All the Chileans do, but he doesn't. It has something to do with the class they have that block. So Aim and I ate in the cafeteria at school and then went to his house. We hung out with him talking for a while, then the three of us went downtown. We met up with a bunch of other exchange students, walked all around the downtown (again), and then went to the seashore. There is a little market place to buy knitted things (lots and lots of sweaters and fingerless gloves and scarves and hats, if I had a thousand dollars to spend I would've spent it there) and little souvenirs. I bought presents for my friends and family in the US because in Natales it's really expensive to buy little presents like that. Then we all went out for ice cream, to the Brujula for the millionth time (we went nearly every day of the week to the Brujula for cafe or for ice cream or to eat).

Some of the things for sale along with my foot 

In a different market... this one for food.

Souvenirs galore

Anna from Germany, Catherine from Germany, Lucas from Finland, Antonia from Germany, Sendija from Latvia, Aim from Thailand, me from US in the Brujula eating ice cream with a map of Chiloe in the background

Food and Handcrafts

Yummmy

Antonia playing the stair piano

More helado

Tuesday
Having nothing better to do, Aim and I went to school in the morning. Originally, we were going to stay until lunch and then go downtown to eat. But upon arriving we discovered that the second hour of classes there was a test so we would just have to sit there bored and silent waiting for the test to finish. So instead of doing that, we left school after the first hour and took a bus to the center. It was a good choice. We spent several hours walking all around, looking at everything the other exchange students hadn't wanted to see and talking. I learned a lot about Aim's life in Thailand. (It takes her more effort to speak in English and Spanish than it does the other exchange students so when we're together as a group she usually ends up staying quiet.) We went to the market and looked around more than before. We ate milcao and empanadas. We walked to see the palafitos. Then we took a bus to Chonchi to meet up with Sendija and Antonia. At three, Aim took a bus alone back to Castro to spend some time downtown with Paggad, the girl from Thailand who lives in Castro. I went with Antonia and Sendija to Queilen, a town in the south of Chiloe.

This is garlic and although you can't tell, the cloves are larger than my fist

Aim

Chonchi

Palafitos

Palafitos

An old church we visited

Sendija and me trying to write AFS in the sand

Sendija, Antonia, Me

Wednesday
The only day I didn't go to class. I stayed in the house, sleeping and packing until noon. Then I left the house by myself, walked around the neighborhood a bit, and took a bus to the downtown. I walked around the downtown alone for a couple hours and then met Aim. I don't remember what we did, but we had a good time for three or so hours. Then Antonia and Sendija came to Castro and we took a bus to Dalcahue, a nearby town. We invited Aim to come with us, but she elected to stay in Castro. We ended up having cafe in Dalcahue and staying longer than we should have. There was an AFS information session for the residents of Chiloe in Castro at 7 and we were supposed to be there at 6 to help set up. We arrived running from the bus stop at 6:55. Ended up being really boring. They talked for two hours about everything that we, as exchange students, have already done and are already aware of. There were like ten of us sitting together and nearly everyone fell asleep. At the end, we got up on the stage and introduced ourselves with our names, ages, and countries. Afterwards the kids who wanted to go to our countries came to talk to us. One girl wanted to go to the US so I talked to her for a little bit and then she gave me her name to friend her on Facebook (at this point I have something like ten friends who are Chileans I talked to for three minutes about the US... but if they end up going, always good that they have a way to contact me to ask questions, because out of experience, it's reassuring to know someone who's from the country you're about to move to for six or eleven months).

Onstage at the AFS talk

the audience

Lucas and me with our flags

Exchange students chilling

Exchange students and volunteers chilling

Volunteers

Exchange students present and future

Aim and her flag

bored exchange students- representing Germany, USA, Finland, Denmark, Latvia and Japan

Me and Anna from Germany

Dion sleeping

Antonia and Lucas sleeping

the girls from Germany and Lucas photobombing

we were bored

Ryo sleeping

View from my house

You can't see my house, but it's there next to the house you can see

Castro

Dalcahue

Dalcahue

Dalcahue

Sendija taking pictures

Antonia

Dalcahue from the tower

my hot chocolate

Onces with my little sister on our last night together

The last night of a week long sisterhood

Thursday
I'm trying not to remember this day. It was painful. More than thirteen solid hours of travel. And we were just going from the south of Chile to the farthest south. Didn't help that in the airport in Punta Arenas when we were waiting for the bus to arrive for the three hour ride to Natales, I got the email informing me of the details of my flight home. Between the shock of realizing how soon I had to leave and the utter exhaustion, I nearly had a meltdown in the bathroom. I managed to buy myself a hot chocolate and make it through though.