From Chile with Love!  (Sophie’s Blog)                                      September 2015

 

Dear Yall,

 

I realize that this is a little bit late but to be honest, this weekend was super lazy. I’ve been having a great time in the last month, attending school, parties, hangin out with the host fam, learning the culture, history and daily life. After attending school for about a month now, I’m having a really good time. School here is definitely really different, much more relaxed, and every day is a surprise. My classes here are the same as all of my other course member’s. We stay in the same classroom and the teachers come to us. You don’t get to choose your classes, you choose what branch of study you want to go into: chemistry, biology or humanities. I’m studying humanities which means that I have classes like philosophy, alternative religion, and double classes of history and language. I really enjoy learning about things that we don’t have in the US.  We have a really weird schedule which encompasses certain classes and ending times every day to somehow reach and equilibrium of learning. I like my class mates a lot, their very fun but, I get kind of bored sometimes. The teachers don’t always show up so sometimes for 100 minutes, we just have study time, or we just get to leave. The teachers are always about 10 minutes late to class. The casualty between students and teachers is pretty foreign (pun intended), but I like the new experience. Even though we have a lot of learning time, we spend a lot of time not learning. Talking about life, history ideas, how to raise money for these cool sweatshirts that your course gets when you’re a senior, dancing ect ect.  When I get bored, I’m glad I have the history book to read and yoga to do in those situations. But the reality is that if the worse thing about my exchange is boredom in class that is giving me time to study Spanish and things I need to learn, I feel like it’s going pretty well. I can see my Spanish progressing, being able to understand more at a quicker rate and think of words faster, not being as nervous to speak and having a bigger vocabulary. I think that I’ve dreamt in Spanish only once and I don’t count it as my “I’ve learned the language now I dream in it” dream. All I remember was yelling at Grace, my biological sister, in Spanish and talking to my host mom (also in Spanish). I think that when all of my stream of consciousness can be in Spanish ill count it as knowing the language. I’m really excited because I got to talk to my classmates about all the things they see in movies form the US that are true that we actually do. I’ve decided that they need to know how to make s’mores, and I think I’m going to have my entire class over for a home cooked thanksgiving dinner because they don’t know either. We’ll see about the second one but I have high hopes. I’m also really excited because we’ve had really fantastic weather and clear skies these past few days, which means that I can once again see the beautiful Andes Mountains and a volcano from my dining room window. But no big deal

 

I could tell you much, much more but I don’t want to bore anybody. If you have any questions or anything your still curious about, I'm always looking for things to do in class lol.

 

Thanks so much and happy first day of spring from the southern hemisphere,

Love,

Sophie