Say among the nations, "The LORD reigns."

Well, I was informed that I should blog and update again (you know who you are! haha). And I realized it had been much longer since I posted than I thought... so here goes. Nothing too thought provoking probably, but hopefully some interesting stories for ya'll.

Since my last post, quite a bit has changed in my life here. One of the most exciting events was my trip to a nearby town called Pucón with the other CMU girl. It's a pretty touristy town but since summer is officially over and we went tues-wed it was pretty dead. The town has just about anything to do that you can think of including: white water rafting, climbing a volcano, zip line/canopy tours, hot springs, shopping, the beach, bike riding, and horseback riding; just to name a few! Of course these all take time and/or money so we didn't do them all, but we did take a cool canopy tour and relax in the natural hot springs which were a balmy 39°C. :) We also stayed in a hostel owned by a super nice couple and ate some delicious food! We even ran into some fellow gringos and got to talk to them for a little bit. Only downside of the trip was that I lost my cellphone (I'm pretty sure it fell out of my pocket into the bus seat, and of course I didn't notice until it was TOO late!). But overall, a super fun trip - feel free to check out the pictures to your right!

I've also started to meet more people and my classes finally started! We now have two more guys start living with my family here who are also studying at the University - so in case you are counting that's now 5 guys, me and my host mom in our house! Thankfully it's not too crowded and there's definitely always something going on which keeps life entertaining! I also met a guy from England who hung out last semester with the girls from CMU. We went out to a cool restaurant Saturday night that I hadn't been to yet and then to a sushi place last night with Rachel and one of his coworkers and her fiancee, who is actually Dutch! Both nights were a lot of fun getting to know new people, trying to figure out what my last name means (I couldn't remember, but we found it!), and learning about British accents and parliament! And with the start of classes I'm slowly meeting new people - both American and Chilean.

As far as classes go, I say they started but in reality I've only attended 2 classes so far, and I only have one more this week! We picked a list of about 8 classes each and then were planning on going to each of them this week and then deciding on 4 classes to take for the rest of the semester. Of course, at this point (last Friday) they still hadn't posted the schedules yet so we also had to plan for possible overlaps which would elminate a class or two. So, first thing Monday we headed to the U to find our schedules. That wasn't too hard once we finally found out where they were. Then we went to our first class - Precolombian America! It was an okay class, and I was a little reassured by how much I could understand but not very interesting and definitely not one of my first choices. Then that was it for the day. I had 2 classes to go to today, but the first one was cancelled because the prof was gone on medical leave (at least, that's what I gathered.. hah) so I hung around the U and then went to my second class, Intro to Anthropology. It wasn't bad but still isn't one of my first choices. I have that class again tomorrow, and then I'm actually done for the week! Hopefully next week I'll be able to go to all my classes and get them figured out - right now I'm hoping that I'll take/like History of Chile, Contemporary Latin America Literature, Creative Writing, and a psychology class. Whatever my classes do end up being though, I won't have class Thursday or Friday... so that should be nice and very conducive for travleing - I keep hearing about more places to go!

I think that's a good summary for now.

Chao