Friday, November 9th, 2007 Gringos vs. Chilenos: the epic battle

Friday, November 9th, 2007 Gringos vs. Chilenos: the epic battle

I had my Poverty class this morning at 10:30 and before and I met up with a volunteer from Nuestra Casa in the metro so she could give me tickets to sell for their upcoming fundraiser. Every year they have an Avant Premier, where they premier a movie in Chile and have desserts, coffee etc. They are showing La Pasion de Beethoven (The Passion of Beethoven) with Ed Harris at a really fancy movie theater in the richest part of town. It should be a fun event and I just hope I can sell all of my 10 tickets. They are $12 a piece, so it makes it kind of hard with my poor college friends.

After class I was supposed to meet up with the 3 other gringos in my Doctrina Social class to work on our final group essay. But the 2 boys didn’t show, so Christine, Courtney and I went and got lunch at this cute restaurant down town. The food was really good and it was only $5, including dessert and coffee. Since I never eat out in Santiago, I forget how cheap food is (the only thing that is cheap in Santiago). After lunch Mike finally made it down town to work with us so we went to the library at La Católica and got a good outline for the essay.

At 3:30 I headed to the other La Católica campus to meet up with everyone for our epic Gringos vs. Chileans soccer match. Christian and I organized the whole thing (which really only included making sure each team had enough players) and it worked out perfectly. The Chileans only had guys and they ahd about 12. The Gringos had 9 players, including 4 girls. But we actually kept up really well and it was a great game. All the Chileans were really impressed with how well we girls played because apparently Chilean girls aren’t quite as good. I was the worst girl out of all of them, but it was still really fun. We ended up losing 4-2, but that includes the 2 goals we made on ourselves on accident, one of which was by me. (I know, I know).

After our glorious defeat most of the Gringos and Christian went to a bar across campus and shared a couple pitchers of beer. I felt very college-ish; it was fun. Around 8 pm I headed home, took a quick shower and had dinner with Olga. Then I headed out again to meet up with friends to hang out and celebrate my friend Sam’s birthday. While we were waiting in the metro we ran into Emilio, Christian’s older brother who had also played soccer today. He told us that his friend Juan, who I’ve hung out with a few times before, was having a party at his house later that night and invited us to go. Before we went to Juan’s some of us headed to La Chile’s Fiesta de la Primavera (Spring Party) which had been going all day long. Obviously by the time we got there it was a mess. The closest thing to a Frat party that I’ve seen in Chile, but in the University! While at La Chile we ran into Juan a bunch of other Chileans I’ve met/hung out with before. When the party shut down at 11 we all walked to Juan’s apartment.

Funny side story: The elevator going up to Juan’s apartment got stuck between two floors for about 10 minutes. We were crammed in and a little nervous for a while until we finally got a hold of the security people with the little emergency button. A little while later it lowered us town to the 2nd floor and we took the stairs the rest of the way!!

At Juan’s it was about half gringos, half Chileans and everyone got along great. I realized that 4 months ago I never would have been able to carry on as many conversations as I did tonight. It was really fun and much better then the typical club scene in Santiago. Around 3 am someone put on Salsa music and we all started dancing in his little apartment living room and by 3:30 we were exhausted and shared a cab home.