the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated

Ok quick point before i get to the good stuff. exaggerated is a really really funny lookin word. quick point over. Over thanksgiving i was able to skype home and talk to the whole family which was really fun and cool. after we all conversed i took of for the city of conception. conception is about an hour and a halfish south of chillan. the focal point of the earthquake was located close to here. theres is one building i saw where the earthquake had collapsed the top floors. about two blocks around the biulding are roped off and evacuated in case the rest collapses before the city can take care of it. in conception i met up with some other exchange students in my program. Jacob from denmark and Tim from Germany. friday night tim had his birthday party and was kind enough to invite me. the party took place in an old observatory. its not used anymore so the boys went in and set up some really cool lights and a DJ friend of Tim's host dad came to take care of the music aspect of the night. Needless to say it turned out pretty darn cool. saturday i enjoyed the luxury's of sleeping in really really really late. i went and saw the Univerity of Conception campus which let me say is amazing. the biuldings are all spread out with a center plaza type thingy. extreamly beautiful. Saturday night my oldest sister her boyfriend/fiance and his younger brother who just so happened to be only one year older than me went to the seventh harry potter. if that sounds suspiciously like a double date to anyone else it did to me to. insert akward moments abound here. akward moments aside it was a really really good movie. i totally give it five stars. plus it was really close to the book sense i've only read the book six or seven times sense coming down here. (i kinda got it illegally in a word doc formant on my computer) Sunday my oldest sister her boyfriend and i went to a town about an hour bus ride away called Lota. random fact this town had a huge mine but it was shut down because it was considred dangerous. the family who owned the mine had a huge private garden that has been turned into a park. think secret garden with cool random statues and a funky reflecting pool. we also went to church there. monday i mostly hung out with Jacob before coming home that night. the week was pretty relaxing which is code word for boring i had nothing to do so i sat on my hind end and did nothing but relax. it was amazing. no one calling me to come in and work for them no one needing me to do anything. AMAZING is the only word for it. this weekend i went to the country with my rents. friday night it was just us but saturday a bunch of people came over for lunch. i had a bit of a head cold so my mom gave me a pill for it. well there was a night time pill and a day time pill the night time pill is supposed to make me sleepy it did. the day time pill wasnt supposed to make me sleepy, it did. so this weekend due to pills i basically slept all weekend. it was a nice weekend. i enjoyed it. this coming weekend i am returning to conception. my danish friend katrine and i decided visiting sight seeing and raising general heck was a good idea. write again soon :)

I really really honestly promise to get better at uploading this thingy but alot has been going on so if i forget to add something i'm sorry

Sense its been roughly twoish plus a little weeks sense I last posted I had all sorts of fun little antocendets to write about. Now that I'm sitting down to write them I have promptly forgotten them all... Ah yes I remember one. So last Friday I was two hours late for school. Why was I two hours late you might ask? I mean I love to sleep in as much as the next girl but I'm fairly good and forcing myself awake in the morning putting on a semi happy face and going to school. To enable me to do this i have four alarms set in my room. (I'm really not a morning person, I kinda think mornings are a gift from the downstairs place and should go back there.) Well this lovely Friday morning i slept threw my first two alarms as normal. when the third alarm rang i groggily groped for my cell phone aka alarm clock from hell and pushed snooze again as per usual. when my fourth alarm rang i was awake enough to form semi coherent thoughts. my brillient thought was, why the heck is my alarm set its saturday. I made the crused alarm shut up rolled over and went back to bed. two hours later i woke up on my own accord and stumbled twoard the kitchen for some breakfast. My nana kindly greeted me and asked "oh you dont have school friday mornings?" (here insert leah in sweats tee shirt bed hair and an immensly confused face) "friday? its friday??????????" My nana confirmed this fact. i was out the door and running to school in all of five mins. fortunatly my host mom thought this whole thing was hallarious and called the school excusing me for the first two hours. also my second funny little story is of how much house alarms hate me. in the past two weeks i have sent the darn alarm off twice. when you set the alarms off the security company calls to makes sure everything is ok. the second time when i said it was "la Leah" speaking all the company said was oh "La Senorita Leah, todo esta bien, gracias" or oh its miss leah everything is ok... yep the security company knows i'm the crazy person who cant remember the damn house alarm system. yep i'm that special, again. Other than crazy alarm systems everything down here has been going good. i do promise to write again soon :)

Pigs heads, Cooked Sheep, Setting the House on Fire and Other Fun Things to Try During a Week

I´ll start with almost setting my house on fire. So for the hot water in my house we use a gas heater thingy. which is great cuz you never run out of hot water in the shower, its bad because you have to light it to get the hot water. well i was home alone and i wanted to take a long hot shower. EPIC FAIL. I went to the bath room stripped down turned on the hot water. no hot water came. Leah was all oh thats ok i´ll just run down stairs and light the gas i forgot to light. well my mom was just getting home, wrapped only in a towl i was down stairs about to use a match to light the gas thingy. another fail. as my mom walked in to the house i put the match to the thingy that lights the hot water. (well as much as i love fire and have the bad habit of playing with it but i do know how to start the gas thingy i´ve done it before) well just as my mom enters the kitchen a huge flame from the gas thingy shoots up. nothing caught on fire it was a quick flame than over and nothing else but my mom was treated to the sight of a very scared slightly quivering Leah clad only in a towl. needless to say i dont touch the hot water thingy at all, ever, never ever ever. now my mother lights it for me. i shower with out water only when my mom is home, or i use cold water. now on to other things, like pigs head. last weekend i went to the country with my family again. this trip was my mom brother and sister, brother, two couples (family friends)(and their adorablely amazingly cute daughter) and my moms ex husband and his girlfriend. (is anyone else screaming akward at the top of their lungs? cuz i was) but like i said before divorce works different here. the ex´s stay nice and friendly for the kids. well one of the families brought a pigs head to cook. no i am not kidding. my moms ex husband and his friends took funny photos. i am a good little exchange student i tried it. i dont like pigs head meat. it doesnt taste like regular meat. its just icky. but it happens. it was interesting. also sense its a farm there is sheep. the last day we were there for our last night a sheep was butchered adn we used a spit to barbaque it for lunch that day. it took literally for ever to cook. sheep tast

My poor host mother... what will she do...

For years my family in the States has become accustomed to my strange night habits. Unfourtunatly my host mother has not. Sometimes I don't sleep well and at home when this occurs I sometimes go out side or aimlessly wander in the house or get a snack at two am. My family in the states is used to this and pays my night time wanderings no attention. Well Monday night I couldn't sleep. After lying in bed doing nothing for about an hour I got out of bed to use the bathroom and than I planned on doing some extra sit ups to waste the time and hopfully use up my extra energy. Epic fail. I sleep on the top floor with my little sister. My host brother and mom sleep down stairs. My floor creaks, my mom is a light sleeper. As you can probly guess she woke up with a near heart attack at the sound of my floor boards creaking. (Mind you she did have probable cause, it was about one thirty am) She went to the bottom of the stairs and yelled up asking if I was ok. After assuring her I was she proceeded to tell me to go to bed. So I tried, I really did, epic fail again. so I decided to read for a bit. That didn't help either. In the morning I got a stern lecture about going to bed at a decent time and had to explain that normally I go to bed at a slightly more decent time. Also as I mentioned before my mom is a complete neat freak... She could make the average drill sargent cry. We are slowly driving each other crazy with our different ideas of clean. I NEED a bit of mess in my life and my mom likes everything perfectly orginized. We're coming to a compromise though. It took negotioatizons worthy of the UN but we manage. She also started me on drinking tea. Before I came here I used tea only for tea bagging my hands when I ripped chunks of skin from my hands in gymnastics. Now I drink it. I have yet to figure out how this came to occur.

I thought of coming up with a witty and creative title but than decided it was to much work.

I love Chile. I could write a novel of why i love chile but that would take a long time and i really don´t have the pacentice. but a short list of why i love chile is that latino men go to school on how to give compliments. not literally but still. when i go to the centro by myself or with a friend you are garuenteed as a young women to be hailed with wolf wistles or coments such as bonita, preciosa, hermosa, linda, belle, or in my case as a gringa, linda gringita or littlerally cute little gringa. none of these are at all ment in a piggish or sexist way. it doesnt matter what you look like in chile. if you are a woman and go out into a busy street you are garuenteed to be complimented at least three times. who the h-e-double hockey sticks in the states decided that it was rude to wolf wistle a woman? i want to find him or her and punch them. my already over inflated self confidence has seriously sky rocketed these past three months. (american boys could learn so much from latino boys)also because of the "machimso" aditude in chile the men open car doors, regular doors pull out chairs ectr. ectr. for women here. this weekend i went to a party with my friend katrine, it was the birthday party of the son of a friend of her family. well we went to the disco and one of the guys drove. not only was my door opened but i was helped out of the car, up the stairs and when waiting to get in the girls were put in the center of the group so we couldnt be jostled by anyone. now i may be a self proclaimed feminist but its nice to be treated like that every now and than. its nice being treated like a lady. just sayin american boys could take a hint. we ladies are not made of glass but you can treat us like we are. but on to other topics. for my advanced english class we, as i think i mentioned in a different post, wrote short stories for a nation wide contest. i had to write three (the maximum number allowed) because as you can imagin writing in english is slightly easy for me and my teacher wanted to make me work. well two of my three stories ended up in the top twenty. i dont know which places yet but the award ceramony was yesterday in santiago. i couldnt go because there just wasnt the time to arrange it, i found out about it monday. first prize is a lap top and second is a ipod after that prizes are given to the top ten and the other ten are honorably mentioned. there are no rules about an exchange student entering or winning so its possible i won one of the prizes. (i can here the complaint letters now if i did. even in a new country i still have the power to piss someone off :) just kidding) i think i would have found out today in school but i was unable to go. i was sick with the same stomach bug as last week. but i figured out what it was. the milk. the really good fresh whole milk my family gets. when i was younger (like first grade) i had a slight case of lactose intolerencey. i could not have plain milk. i could have ice cream, yogurt and all that jazz just not plain milk. well as it turns out i still cant. my system gets quite angry with me. i only just found this out now because my first family bought this type of semi condenced milk thats common here. i can have that. but really whole milk where you can see the cream on top plays havoc on my system. it also took so long to figure out because i rarely drink milk in the first place. but have no fear. all i have to do is not drink the milk. kinda like dont drink the water in mexico but here its only me, not the entire exchange student population. go me and my retarted body!

A Quick Summery of My Weekend, Being Sick, and Stuff in General

So as I said i went to the country with my family last weekend. i got one detail wrong, it was my moms ex husbands familys place. here divorce is different. Ex´s are often good friends and go on vaccations together and stuff. i think in alot of cases this is a much better system. i mean think about it. the kids dont have to see mommy and daddy screaming at the top of thier lungs. just saying. i know this wont work with all families and here it doesnt work with all families but still just saying. it was an amazingly relaxing weekend. we left saturday and went to Pedro (my moms ex husbands) moms house because she needed help with some stuff so the entire side of that family turned out to help. i met several of my cousins all of who are close to my age. Monsue is 16 and lives litterally a stones throw away from me, Vale is 18 and lives on the other side of the city and Fabian 20 who is Vale´s brother. my cousins are really cool. today me and Monsue are going shopping :)Over the weekend at the country i got to ride horse for a bit. the saddles here are like an english saddle a bare back pad and a western saddle all got together and had a baby. i had to adjust my style of ridding. i rode a huge mare who looked like a cross between a norwigen fjoird and a draft horse. how the heck a fjoird ended up in chile is beyond me but they did. (and no thats not a spelling error it is spelt fjoird.)i also went sun tanning. i have been doing that quite a bit here. in summer when i go to the beach i dont want to be the whitest girl on the beach. i already get stared at for being blonde. well i did get a tan and i was really excited about it cuz i never tan... than i realized my tan is everyone elses normal color. so no i am no longer albino i´m just she looks like her skin doesnt see much sun white. but hey maybe now i wont glow in the dark. we came back monday cuz it was a three day weekend. than tuesday night i got sick. it wasnt a big deal just a stomach thing but seeing how it kept me up all night even though i felt better in the morning it was decided that i would stay home and sleep. i quite literally slept from seven am to about 3 pm. it felt so amazingly good it was most likely in some religions a sin. random blurp, i have met like 4 mormon missionaries, (forginers learn in two weeks to pick out pple from their home countries plus the little name tags help to) it was really interesting i thought cuz chile is very much a catholic country so it was fun asking them about the missionary. and talking english with an english speaking person can be really really nice also. now about my new family, they are amazing. the house here is alot smaller than my first one but thats very much ok with me. we dont have a nanny which is also very very very ok with me. my little brother introduces me to every one as his new sister and last night my sister and little ten year old cousin played dress up with my cloths. i got some really cute pictures and some from this weekend when i gave Javi (my little sister goes by her middle name Javiara) my camera and told her to take pictures for me. as soon as i go to an internet cafe again i will upload more photos to that sight of my moms. and get that link... gotta do that to.

The plan in Chile to make me fat and how its working

this is a quick blurp about chillan food... it is amazing. half the time i have no clue what i´m eat, whats in it or what its called but i dont need to know. the dessert here is to die for and is served at almost every meal. for example leche nevada is this pudding and i think some marange dessert... it is epic. this villina plus something i cant quiet figure out what pudding is put over this fluffy white stuff that i dont know what it is. but either way it tastes like heaven has come down to earth. there is also empanadas which can be served in a number of ways, a chillan sausage that is epically good (they get those from all the germans here i think)i have offically fallen in love with all food here and have made a pact to eat everything put in front of me even if the side effect is slight weight gain. but i am exercising more so it all cancels out. on another good note this as country as it gets girl has been citified. not really i still miss being able to go out with out fifty five neighbors noticing exactly what time i get home. but i can now find my way arround chillan on my own. mostly. i can catch a collectivo taxi or collective taxi which is like fifty cents to the centro and i know my way arrount the central area of the city. i can also take the micro (a bus) or a regular taxi to and from the centro. a collectivo taxi is kind of like a bus in a taxi cab. they all have a rout which is shown on a sign on top of the cab. the sign states land marks that they pass for example hospital or the names of the schools they stop by. its a really cheap way to get arround the city. in my new house i live about a block or less from where the collectivo drives by. for about a buck i can take a collectivo to the centro and back to my house. this has made my life so much easier in the fact i dont have to ask for rides when i have to go buy shampoo or something like that. i can now after school change my cloths and go meet a friend for coffee in la plaza de armas. i really miss having my own car but being able to have independance this way has been amazing. i also can explore the city on foot and not worry bout getting lost. if i do all i need to do is flag down a collectivo or a taxi (a regular taxi is usually like four bucks or so) and be brought right back home. but you know what they say you can take the girl from the country but you cant take the country from the girl. :)