This is just the beginning... :D

Hola a todos! Estoy muy alegre decir que estoy en Chile!
Already it feels strange to write in English. My host family (Tia Marisa, Jorge, Adriana, y Fran) only speaks Spanish, which is good. Because of this I am improving so fast! When I arrived I had to ask them to repeat things a lot and to speak more slowly. Now I can usually understand what they and my amigas are saying, and I can even sometimes understand what they are saying when they are´nt talking to me (aka talking at the normal breakneck pace). All those travel books were right, Chileans speak the fastest. However, it is exciting that I can understand! My understanding is progressing faster than my speaking, but I am speaking much better and every day I learn a ton of new words. I have my pocket dictionary and also a little cuaderno that my mom bought me to write new words in. My friends and also Marisa and Eva (my 2nd host mom) have taught Chanel and me all the Chilean swear words/insults. Chanel lives with my second host family, and halfway through the year we will swap- we live really close to each other.
The flight felt like it took forever and also no time at all. I was glad to be sitting with Benny and Elizabeth, also estudiantes de intercambio. I think I got maybe 2 1/2 hours of sleep that night on the plane. Going out to meet my host family was crazy. There were 18 of us exchange students arriving at the same time, so you can imagine the number of people waiting for us. I saw my sister, Fran, with a sign saying ¨WELCOME SARA!!!¨and ran over and hugged my whole family. I couldn´t have asked for better people to be my Chilean family. Tia Marisa, mi madre, is so kind, and my sister is unbelievably helpful. My first day I went around the whole house with her labeling everything. My room looks pretty funny because on the walls there are pieces of masking tape that say ¨muralla¨or ¨interruptor¨or ¨el closet¨. My grandma is also very nice, and funny. She jokes that she speaks English really well, and she actually knows a good amount of words. My dad is very funny too, kind of like my U.S.A. dad... ;) He is a professor of educacion fisica en the Universidad Catolica, and he runs in the mornings when he has time. My first day we took a drive through Santiago, ate breakfast at a really good restaurante, and then drove the 3 hours to Talca. I am in avocado heaven. For my very first Chilean meal, the breakfast, I had a palta sandwich. YUM. We have avocado (palta) with almost every meal. Lunch is the biggest meal here, and for dinner we have palta-ham-cheese sandwiches (what could be better?) and dessert-ish things. Breakfast is good too. Why on earth don´t we eat our cereal with yoghurt in the U.S.? It makes so much more sense. Corn flakes + milk = bland soggy mush. Corn flakes + peach yogur = perfect crunchy tasty deliciousness. There hasn´t been a food yet that I haven´t liked.
I am so lucky- the exchange students in Talca are a really great group and we get along so well! Matthew and Emily go to different colegios, and Chanel y yo go to the same colegio but different classes. Here sophomore year is segundo medio, and there is segundo medio B and segundo medio A. I am in the curso ¨segundo medio B¨. The curso stays in the same sala (classroom) and the profes change classes, except when we have to go someplace special like the biology lab or the music room. I like this system because it means we have really long breaks in between classes but we have nowhere to go, so we can just talk and hang out. My class is really fun. Mis amigas are sooo nice, and everyone is obsessed with asking me the following: do you have a boyfriend? Have you had a boyfriend before? Who do you like in the colegio? Do you think a boy in our class is cute? When I answered yes to the last one, they went into an uproar and now they are trying to get me to say who. It is very funny, because when they ask I pretend that I don´t understand the question, and they tried to explain it a few times before they realized that I actually knew exactly what they were asking, and then they just laughed and asked more. There is a big group of students that I hang out with right now, but especially Javi and Peggy. Peggy is very funny and she helps me understand what the teachers are saying. Javi is the polola (girlfriend) of my host brother, who I didn´t get to meet because he left for his exchange in Idaho a couple weeks before I came. She is also very nice. So far I´ve only understood one whole class- matematicas, and that was because a) math is the same in any language and b) I´ve already studied what the teacher was talking about with Ms. Dickman. Yay for geometry! Now I know how to say slope in Spanish. The uniform in my colegio is either the school sweatpants and a sweatshirt or a jumper with a polo shirt and sweater. My jumper is going to be ready Lunes, so this whole week I´ve been wearing what feels like pijamas. People tell me that I am famous in the colegio already. Yikes! It is unnerving to be stared at so much by people I don´t know, but I guess also an ego booster, which is actually really nice because adjusting to not being a good student because I have no idea what the teacher is saying doesn´t do wonders for my confidence.
Some things I´ve noticed:
-Here, the buildings are all jumbled together. There is a Lider right next to my high school, which is Chile´s Walmart, and the University in Talca is practically right on top of a gas station.
-The feel of the classroom is so different. The students shout and talk and laugh while the profe is teaching, and in general are pretty crazy. Also they cheat on the quizzes and copy each other´s homework.
-The Andes are incredible. It is so amazing to be able to look out the front window of my house and see these jagged snowy mountains on the horizon like something out of the Lord of the Rings.
-The people here are so much easier going. Things will happen that I know would stress out Americans or make them mad, like a fender bender, but here they just laugh and tell everyone the good story. It is so nice.
-There is graffiti on almost every possible surface.
-Another thing: what? obeying traffic laws? why on earth would you do that? My dad drives like a madman. It´s frightening.

It is pretty chilly here because I´m coming from 90 degree summer weather, but really it´s not that cold, like in the 50´s. However some people wear coats as if Antartica is moving north! There´s this awesome invention here that I want to take home with me: hot water bags to warm up the bed at night. Again, why don´t we have this in the U.S.? It´s made out of some plastic or rubber, and each night my mom or grandma fills it will hot water, and it´s like a modern version of the ember bed warmers. Today was one of the first days that it was sunny. In the mornings there is always a lot of fog. Yesterday there was so much that we couldn´t see more than 30 feet in any direction. I live in the country, but Talca is very small so we are only a few minutes drive from the city. My family doesn´t own any farm animals, but there are farmers around us who do, so we drive within feet of the cows and horses each morning on the way to school, and when the cows moo outside I can feel the vibration in my room. My family has one dog and one cat named Toto- I told my family about the Wizard of Oz.
I am already singing in the choir in mi colegio. It is actually a very good coro- they´ve won first place multiple times in the Chilean competitions. We are singing a song in Portugues and one in Latin and both are very fun to sing. I have a rehearsal this Saturday and then the next competition is on Monday, then Thursday there is another competition in a different city, Concepcion. Next Tuesday my new friends are taking me to eat Chinese food (Chilean Chinese food, que bueno!) and to show me around Talca and see a movie. :)

Already my days have a pattern: I wake up at 6:30 to take a shower and dry my hair, then I eat breakfast with Fran and Jorge drives us to school. Some days I have three classes and school lets out at 1, other days I have classes in the mornings, then a big break, then classes in the afternoon until 6. I actually haven´t been present for a lot of my classes. A couple days ago I left class to help the 6th form profe to teach English to my sister´s class, yesterday I missed class to get my Chilean ID, and today I missed almost all of math because the school dean wanted to introduce me to the profe of track, and I stayed with him for a good while watching his class with the little kids. The little kids here are so cute! Then on my way back I ran into the choir teacher, and she wanted to talk to me for a while, so by the time I got back to my classroom there was nobody in it, and my backpack was gone too, so I wandered around the school for a while looking for them until I finally found them in the math room- Peggy had brought my backpack with her. Phew! After school, if it´s a short day, I go home to eat lunch and then write in my journal while my family takes naps, then we go do whatever errands we need to do, then come back home, eat dinner (which is really light), and then go to bed. Today was my first day with the morning and afternoon schedule. I stayed at school and ate the lunch my mom packed with Javi and a guy whose name I don´t remember. Most of the names that people tell me I don´t remember. Yikes! I´m really glad I started school on Tuesday instead of this coming Monday like I was going to. Otherwise I would be very bored without friends!

My sister told me after I had taught her class that her classmates say I am nice and that I smile a lot. I realized this is true- I smile a lot here! I am happy.
I am going to bed now. Tomorrow is Friday! Viernes!
Chao! Cuidate! Estoy contenta.