Week 3- A beach, a birthday, a bad guy, and a broken water pipe? (But not in that order)

I don't know if I'll be able to match the length of my last posts, and perhaps I shouldn't have set the bar quite so high, but we'll see how this goes. (Sorry for the delay.)

My sister left for Peru and Ecuador 2am last Saturday morning. She's going with a group of friends who all came over before they left for the airport. As is the Chilean custom, when they entered and saw me they made a B-line for me to greet me with a kiss on the right cheek. I still have to hold in the laughs because kissing strangers is still so strange for me.

This past week we went to the beach in the city of El Quisco, which means "the cactus" in the Quechua language. Ron Palmer, our professor, has an old missionary friend who lives down here and let us stay at his beach house there with him and his family. We left right after classes on Monday and took the subway to the bus station and the bus to El Quisco. The trip probably took 1-2 hours.

After putting our luggage away we all walked around the town a bit. We were looking in stores, restaurants, little shops, etc when suddenly all the lights went out...in the whole city. It was quite a sight. They said it doesn't happen very often, so I guess it was their way of welcoming us. Maybe 10 or 20 minutes later, after the stores had tried to close their shops, the lights went back on and we got some ice cream. Later that night, 3 members of the group wanted to hang around and explore a bit while the rest of us went back to the house. (Just so you know this is not an eye-witness account, so I can't really attest to any details.) They stopped in at a restaurant for some food and drinks and Alyssa set her camera down on the table next to her. I guess a guy came in and stole the camera and before any of them knew what happened he was already long gone. We had all been told to be super careful, but I guess it didn't really hit any of us until this happened.

On Isla Negra we got to visit the house-turned-museum of Pablo Neruda, one of only 2 Chilean authors to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was overlooking the ocean and quite amazing. I can see why he was inspired there. He had his house kind of like a boat and collected a lot of sea shells, boats in bottles, colored glass, those things that are on the front and back of ships that look like heads, and a lot of other random stuff from all over the world. It was actually pretty cool. They might be able to make a lot more money by renting the house out.

We came back Thursday evening just in time to find out that something was wrong with the pipes downstairs so my bathroom didn't work, the kitchen sink, and the washing machine. It was fixed sometime Friday, whew! =)

Friday morning at 6:16 I felt a shake while laying in my bed--another earthquake! I guess they get them here all the time. I wanted to make sure I wasn't crazy or imagining it so here's my proof: See? Speaking of Friday, that was my 20th bday! Last year it was my first out of the state and this year it's my first out of the country...I wonder what next year will be: out of the Western Hemisphere? World? As a group we went out for dinner at a nearby Chilean restaurant. It was pretty good. Thank you Palmer!

Now the plans for the rest of the weekend? Homework sadly.

PS: Want to try making some Chilean dishes? This is Jim Thurston's website (the missionary who let us stay at his house) http://www.studio-jtv.com/newsite/food.htm
While we were there they made us Cazuela a stew more or less and here's a recipe for that if you'd like to give that a try: http://www.tasteofhome.com/Recipes/Cazuela