Thursday, August 23, 2007 Paseo a la Playa

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Woke up around 8:15, breakfasted, and headed out to meet Calli and Kristin. While we were waiting to get on the bus, we met a group of girls who went to Wash U in St. Louis! We of course started comparing names and one of the girls knows my friend Ashley Gold from MSA and another girl from Houston knows my friend from Tulane Brooks Fowler. Small world huh? We got on the bus around 10 and unfortunately all the gringas were sitting together. We had a fun time, but agreed that we needed to make friends with some Chileans at the beach. Everyone started drinking around 11:00 and I had flash backs to Mardi Gras!

We got to the beach, which is actually Cartagena, where I’ve been twice before! We got of the bus and accidentally separated from our new friends from the States but it worked out fine. I saw Luna, the super outgoing Chilean and said hello. She hadn’t heard about the fight and Christian and when I started telling her what had happened another guy, Marcelo, overheard and had heard all about it. He ended up being a good friend of Emilio and had heard about me, the extranjera that was caught up in all the fun! Calli, Kristen and I ended up hanging out with Marcelo and his friends all day. They are all engineering students and super friendly.

I paced myself throughout the day and by 3 o’clock we were all dancing Meringue on the beach with 3,000 other La Católica students. It was incredible. A great live band, a beautiful beach, a courageous day, and thousands of drunken college students. I met lots of students and even talked to some kids in my classes that recognized me and said hello. Amazingly, I even had some great conversations about God, religion, relationships etc. At 6 they started herding us back to the buses. I was absolutely exhausted and ready to sleep on the ride home. As soon as the bus started pulling away, a fight broke out between some drunken guys. It wasn’t that big of a deal: you can’t do too much damage on a moving bus full of people, but they pulled the bus over and gave us all a good talking to. I made a comment about how I was sick of fights and all Marcelo told me was, “¡This is Chile!”.

On the ride home I talked with two different engineering students. They both spoke English quite well but we only spoke in Spanish. They told me they were really impressed how well I spoke. Overall, the trip was perfect for me: I relaxed, only spoke Spanish, and gained a lot of confidence. This week has really shown me how much I’ve improved, which definitely makes me feel better.

When we got back to campus I took the metro home. Olga made me dinner and I filled her in on the day. After dinner I crawled in bed, talked to Trevor and caught up on my journal, thankful that the next few days should be a bit more relaxed.