Hogwarts

Casa Central is like a miniature Hogwarts; dark passageways, courtyard, stone, tile, huge. I spent honestly 25 minutes looking for one room today. I gave up and asked a lady in the PIIE office, and then proceeded to get lost again and was forced to backtrack. I finally made it there, the meeting room for all information about the volunteer work I will do during the next four and a half months. Several times I had to turn around because I couldn't find another way of getting out of the passage I had just walked into. I always feel very gringa in there.

Today's adventures included a post-class 4-hour excursion to a place called Mastodonte, like a mammoth. The inside looked like a cave. I had Chorrillana, which is a dish of Valparaíso, consisting of fries, onions, meat, and cheese. Yeah, it was like the Westy, but possibly worse for your health. Caroline told me I was gross after I started helping other people eat theirs.

To get to this place, which is a whopping 10 minutes walk from the university, we traveled by trolleybus. Trolley! Now you know by now that I become overly excited by any new form of transportation that I encounter, so you can imagine my look of glee as I entered the world of the trolleybus. Slightly anticlimactic it was, sort of like an agonizingly slow micro attached to wires, which costs less than any other form of transportation and moves slower too. Still, a fun experience. Next time I am going to race it though.

A thought on literal translations: "Cómo se dice, I am on top of my crap?" I heard this stated as a referece to cleverly scheduling classes to fit in extra majors into one's college program, double counting, etc. "Crap" of course means stuff in a sense, scheduling stuff. And "on top of" does not literally mean on top of another object. Now, try to explain that in Spanish, keeping in mind that the literal translation would make no sense and is absolutely rediculous. And then do it all day, for everything you say. For 14 hours. Or 20. One of the most rewarding parts is saying something in a way that sounds Chilean, not American translated word for word. This is a constant challenge.

My brother, Kevin: "Yo man, have you eaten chilly yet, because its chile in chili?"

Sorry to disappoint, but the mysterious creature of the deep was found to be coypu, or nutria. I personally think that it is a new species of mutant rat, endemic to Viña. I will figure out a good name for it.