Blah Blah Blah, I'm only blogging because, as I sit freezing, curled up under an electric blanket, moving my fingers to avoid frostbite currently seems like my best availabe option. Survival of the fittest baby; just me, a years worth of propel, 3 layers of clothing, and a book of 501 really fun and interesting Spanish verbs, the real question is why would I NOT blog? MIRITE?!?! LOL, anyway.... I'm chilling in the appartment. A maid came today and reorganized the location of the couches and beds. I made a Stepbrothers joke about now having more room for activites. My host mom didn't get it. Paragraph ahoy.

Woop Womp hope we all made it across that paragraph gap in one piece! Tonight we had a dish that my mom said is typical Chilean cuisine, I always hate when she says that because I do not like typical Chilean cuisine. Since I'm starting this blog 2.5 weeks late, I'm just gonna do a quick synopsis of my favorite things I've done so far here. Villa Grimaldi toruture camp was cool, Valpariaso, Vina del Mar were interesting, enjoyable, would visit again. Beat a university women's P.E. team at handball. That's right I attend a University, La Universidad Catolica. I don't remember if I mentioned that in my other post or not, too late now, I'm not looking back. Went to a bar with some dude that works at the US embasy. I climbed Cerro San Cristobal, Cerro Santa Lucia, and Cerro Pochoco. Cerro Pochoco was hands down my favorite thing I've done here. It took us 2 hours to climb to the top but it's worth every second of the climb. The summit offers a sprawling, 360 view of Santiago on one side and the Andes on the other. Highly highly highly recommended. On the way back down you can pretty much just slide because of all the loose rock. Speaking of rocks, we climbed all over the mountain, essentially making our own trail for the majority of the hike. I aim to conquer more cerros in the future.

SHWOOP PARAGRAPH GO! I have my spell check set to Spanish so I honestly have no idea what I'm spelling correctly and I have no intentions of re reading this post so deal. I have decided that being in a city for this long is torturous. I love Santiago, but keeping me pent up between streets and buildings when there are such beuatiful and treacherous mountains to be explored is cruel indeed. My heart belongs to the wilderness and I'm trying at every opportunity to bust out into some other woodland escape. Class is great, I love being immersed in Spanish, and I love learning about medicine/health. I'm pretty excited for when we actually begin doing observations in hospitals and clinics, that's when it gets real doggie dogz. Speaking of which, There are thousands of stray dogs that roam the streets, and they are awesome. If you take the time to be nice to them (many just ignore them) they'll follow you all across the city while recruiting their furry bretheren until, after a while, you have ammased an army of perros. My only gripe is that when class ends at 3:30 and it get's dark at 6, there is no time to explore the country side, especially since it takes at minimum of an hour and a half to get beyond the confines of the city. I want so badly to scale every mountain in sight. The cold also hampers my access to adventure in that I don't think any overnight trips would be wise/enjoyable. Bummer, especcialy since I feel like so many of the mountains would take more than one day to truly appreciate and conocer. I'm pumped about going to the desert, San Pedro, but again I fear that I will have but precious little time to explore. My true time to explore will come after the program at which point I would love to go back north to the deserts, to Peru, to Argentina, or to Torres del Paine, what looks to be the most beautiful palce on earth and a backpacker's nirvanna. While the allure of the rawbeauty Torres del Paine (Google Image it, I promise it is gorgeous) is almost enough to provoke me to book a flight right this moment, I have to remember a couple of things. Primarily that Torres del Paine is literally located at the end of the world, just a hop skip and a boat to Antartica. This means that Torres del Paine would be COLD. REALLY COLD. While I can picture all sorts of terrible winter accidents happening, I sitll really want to go. If not now then later in life, but I will get there.

Que sera, sera though. I have to remind myslef that travel is only a secondary goal, with spanish and medical experience being the focus. When I'm in a place dominated by such natural beauty, however, that's a hard focus to maintain.