I spent the weekend in Santiago with my exchange student friends, a trip I managed to take alone and relatively smoothly, and I had an amazing time. When the intercity bus pulled into the streets of the Chilean capital, all of the wonderful memories I made in my first few... Continue reading

Living with two little Chilean sisters, I have heard every song the school teaches them about a hundred times, and their repertoire is extensive. They have a song for greeting someone in English, the colors and numbers in English, the five senses, the vowels, the parts of the body, the... Continue reading

For the dance competition at my school, my course danced to "La conga" and "Levantando las manos", and my class, yellow (the school colors are green and yellow, and every grade is divided into those two classes), won. We definitely struggled to get it all together at basically the last... Continue reading

This Spanish this is both easier and harder than I thought it would be. I can understand (for the most part) people who speak Spanish and not "Chilean". When a friend of mine (who was born and raised in Chile) told me that the Chilean accent is the most difficult... Continue reading

If someone had told me three weeks ago that I would be this attached to my classmates here in Santiago, I would have doubted that we could possibly be that open with each other so soon. However, it seems like the open, friendly environment of Chile has influenced our little... Continue reading

I'm sitting in the Dallas Airport now, thinking about how to get through customs in Santiago, how to say hello to my host family, and how I'm going to make it through the next five months when I still have a hard time stringing a simple sentence together in Spanish.... Continue reading

Arriving home from my last semester in England has been uncanny, as Freud would say. Familiar, but different; as though my home has been tampered with in my absence. Although I have kept in contact with my friends during my trip abroad, an undeniable gap separates us. My initial reaction... Continue reading