Journal Page (for Chile)

Saturday, February 7.

I Really miss my friends and my pets, but at least I can email my friends. In fact one of my friends is helping house-sit for my family. So I can ask her how my pets are doing. Chile is pretty cool. It kinda reminds me of LA because it's hot, loud, and full of traffic, but there still are HUGE differences. Every day we have school go out and explore different places, then we come back have some free time (2 hours) to do whatever. After that we have dinner and go to sleep. It was funny, when we got here we set our clocks for the time in Chile, and we didn't notice till yesterday that we were behind by one hour! The other night it was REALLY hard to fall asleep because there was a car alarm that was on for litteraly 2 hours, and I ended up falling asleep on the couch because my bed was too hot. In Chile there are alot of stray dogs running around, they're acctually pretty smart too. My older brother and I keep on getting into fights about whether the dogs are dangerous or not. Today I saw some department store people on strike and my ears were like, getting blasted out because they kept on blowing their whistles REALLY loud in my ear. I also saw someone pickpocketing. Some guy walking on the street yelled "HEY!!!" and I turned around and saw some person running off with his bag that he had a couple seconds ago. Internet is expensive here and I can only send/recive emails everyother day, but I can make them whenever I want the server we call up to use is 7200 pesos per hour (600 pesos=1 dollar). There is a place across the street that is a lot cheaper though, it's 1000 pesos per hour. Near our apartment, there is a really weird mall. All it is, is two big spirals of shopping stores going up! My mom, my sister and I are all going to explore it sometime, we've wanted to, but we havent got the time; and it's closed on weekends. People here take their weekends seiriously and don't want to work on the weekend. Maybe that's one of the reasons the department store people are on srike? Because they have to work on the weekends?

----------------------------Sophie-------------------------

 

Friday, February 20.

I haven't writen in a loooooooooooong time, so I guess I have a lot to write! Ok let's see... Oh, the Striking people are still on strike. From that mall that they are striking at, me and my siblings get bouncy balls from a gumball machine. We have about 31 bouncy balls, and we have 3 of a couple types. Now, with how many we have, if you want to get a new one, it's like playing the slots. The Internet cafe across the street closed down apparently. No one goes in there, no one goes out. James thinks its a legal issue. My dad thinks they just closed down because they didn't have enough money to support their company. I think that they're changing their location, they have a lot of boxes in there. Anyway, we went up to La Serana to look at a BIG telescope. It was pretty impressive. They had a pool table there, and they also had free internet access. We took a while coming back. We found a lizard and me and my sister named him Mike! Later on during the week, we went for a day on a road trip, and we went to a Vineyard and a beach. It was REALLY fun at the beach, but we only got to stay there for 45 mins. At the end there was a lot of sand on me so I went on the wet sand and waited for a wave; and there were people running away from a wave, but I stayed there. I thought: Its not that big... But it really was. It knocked me off my feet, and hurt my ankles, I felt the waves pushing and pulling me even when we were in the car. That's how powerful the waves were. They got me clean though!

There is a pigeon that keeps coming to our balcony. We named him Essuave. We feed him in the morning and at night, and he always brings a friend. Or maybe other pigeons just stalk him. On the 22nd we leave for South Africa. I hope they have an Internet connection there, or at least we are close to an internet cafe. We're going to live near a beach, so we get to go there and play in the sand.

Oh we also went to Pucon, south of Santiago. We stayed at a BEAUTIFUL resort there, it had a swimming pool, but we never got to go in it! As soon as we got there it turned from California weather to Seattle weather; and it stayed that way. In their bar, they had free internet, so me and my sis played around a bit. Valerie just lost her camera, it's sad, and we forgot to download 4 great pictures. She left it in a taxi, we hope the taxi driver comes back to the spot where he picked us up and gives us back the camera. She's also stealing my Smiley faces, because she can't think of any herself.... (>.<)! So back to Pucon. We drove up to a valcano and took a tour of the caves. They were so rocky!!!! My ankles are really bad with stepping on rocks, so they were hurting really badly. What is with my ankles? There was a kitten there, and it was running around in the waiting area for the tour. It looked like one of the kittens our family fostered for MEOW: we called him Simba. He was white, with a brown back and brown ears and the back of his head was brown too. He was so cute! I miss him now. I wonder if I can get any pictures of him for the site. Simba's brothers were Timber, a silver striped kitten, and Raja, a brown tabbyish cat. their mother was named Serabi. She looked kinda like Timber. While we were in Pucon we went to a rodeo, and me and my sister kept on getting bugged by this group of 6 kids. They would tap on our backs, and we would turn around and they would say something in Spanish and I'd just turn around and they would laugh. And I'd be like Oh sure, pick on the stupid tourist Americans. The rodeo wasn't all it was cracked up to be either. All they did was tick off the bulls, no riding though. Anyway, I'm having a good time!(^-^)

~Sophie~