This rolling stone has no moss, and is rocking hard!

OK, first things first. Chile experienced a 7.2 earthquake early this morning. I woke up to Lorena saying "Abajo de la puerta! Abajo de la puerta!" which means "Get under the door!" My bed was shaking underneath me in a manner very reminiscent to the Exorcist, and there was a great thrumming in the air. Standing up didn't help much. Metaphorically speaking, it really shakes your world to feel something you always thought was stable suddenly, well, shaking. And doing it quite violently. After about 30 seconds it subsided, then came back weaker an hour or so later. Caused by a volcano, it itself caused a tsunami in the south, where I'm going to be in two days. Now that I've had that experience, thank you much, I'd like to not have it again! It was pretty cool though.

So I am back from Buenos Aires, and feel like I've lived a few seasons over in the past few weeks. A nice pleasant early fall in Santiago before we left, we jumped into a humid summer in BsAs, and now in Santiago it's winter. Sitting in my house, I'm wearing gloves, a scarf, jacket, and thick socks. It's quite good to be back though.

BA was pretty much the shit. (In a good way, you old fogeys!) I got my feeding problems figured out with my host girls, and after that we really started to hit it off. I spent many evenings sitting in the tiny kitchen drinking mate and trying to follow their jokes, teaching them english, gossiping, and asking for all the Argentinian slang. Here is a picture of the of them: Casandra on the left (we were the closest... she's studying medicine and when she comes to study in the States, she's going to visit me. She also gave me a big map of Argentina with a list of places to go, under the conditions that I come visit her on my way back through to return it, and so we can ir de hota!) Verónica is in the middle (can you say funky?) and Maia is on the right (she was gone as often as she was home... definitely a free spirit. Also carried her mate around all day in it's own special leather case. There's got to be something addictive in that yerba... no Argentine is seen without it!) We had a really good time together. It's strange how close you can get to people in only two weeks, and how much of that intimacy was achieved in the last two days of being there. I'm definitely going to keep in touch.

One thing about being in BsAs... it is good for your Castellano Confidence. They speak slower there than in Chile, and actually pronounce syllables. Upon arrival in the incredibly dirty city, all of us suddenly felt like everything we had learned suddenly clicked into place. De repente we were having conversations without really thinking about it, and not having to ask people to slow down or repeat themselves. The accent was a bit difficult to understand at first - with the 'zsh' for 'll' and 'y' and the 'vos' instead of 'tu' - but then it was equally hard to get rid of. I find it fascinating how much your situation has to do with your learning process. I picked up the Argentine accent and am now using it here in Santiago, not because I'm trying to hang on to it, but because it is engrained in my head. Because I was in a learning phase while there, and was making huge progress in my speaking abilities, the habits of the speakers around me influenced my speech much more than they would have if I had waited to go to BsAs until the end of the program. I still say 'ayer' and 'allá' and various others with the accent, which is fine by me.

I guess I had better inform you all of the major decisions that have gone down in the past couple of weeks. First of all, I have decided 10% to study graffiti in Santiago. When I described my thoughts and worries about both choices to René, he told me that from what I had said, I needed to stay in Santiago. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I was immensely more excited about studying art and society, and that I just wanted to go to Chiloé to live away from the city, and that prospect was very distant, blurry, and unknown. I can travel there to see it, and my ISP should be on something that really interests me. The more I came to terms with my decision, the more confident and excited I felt about it. I kept making realizations about people I could talk to to acquire various perspectives, and the interesting things they could share with me. The cincher was yesterday, in Santiago, when we were leaving the library. On a whim we decided to check out this public art exhibition we could see from the street, and when I first walked in I thought "This stuff is kind of in the style of graffiti, sweet." Well, it was an exhibit designed to take graffiti from the street to the exhibition room, highlighting four artists and including a whole section on the creation of a joint mural which was located - hey! - across from the library. (partially shown in the bottom picture... I might get to meet the people who did that!!) And it runs through the end of March. Can destiny smack you any harder in the face?

The other decision I have made is to stay in South America for another month. I was originally going to come home around June 23 to move into my new house and start an internship with Carolina Adventures at UNC. After falling in love with the Southern Cone and realizing how much I want to see here, I have decided to stay until around July 20, getting back to the States in time to go backpacking in CA, move in, and get things settled before school. I still have to hear from Lizzie to see how mad she is at me, but this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (maybe). The plan is to buy motorbikes (or a car, not as cool) with my friend Kira and make a loop through: the south of Chile (Temuco, lake region, Puerto Montt, Chiloé), the south of Argentina (Bariloche, Angostia, Bahia Blanca), the north of Argentina (BsAs, Iguacú), then race through Paraguay and Bolivia to make it to Peru (Macchu Picchu for sure, and lots of other stuff we haven't planned), then come down through the north of Chile (salt flats, Atacama desert, the observatories) to make our flights in Santiago. Big loop, only about six weeks to do it in. We will make it work.

It's very strange to think that I have only been here for two months (UNC is in their final week of classes) and that the actual educational/hard work part of my semester hasn't even started yet. It's strange to think that for a whole month I will be directing my own education, my own research, my own Spanish, my own integration into a strange society. It's strange to think that for a month and a half I will be wandering around a foreign continent, almost flying by the seat of my pants, speaking another language, and seeing places I never even dreamed off. I have three more months here, and after two it has already stopped being a country I am studying in and has become the place where I am living. What will it be to me when I am getting ready to go home? I don't know the moment when Chile went from being exciting vacation country to being the place where I am comfortable, but eager to learn more. When I was sitting in the sun room the day after I got back to Santiago, I could feel it. Everything looks different now. I feel like I am approaching the streets, my days, the people in a very distinct manner than before.

In BsAs I had to good fortune to meet up with a few of my old Pittsboro buddies (who in truth continue to be buddies to this day): Eliza Jane Harris, Mason Philips, and Amos Vernon. It was quite good to see them, and not only because it gave me the excuse to eat savoury meat and drink delicious wine. Not having seen Eliza for so long was a bit unnerving, and I have to admit I was a bit nervoud to see her. She's been having this incredible exotic experience for four months, and I for two months, and we're both going to change, right? And we both did, but we both didn't. It was awesome to see her, beyond words! Mason I saw in Valpo, but of course it was fabulous to see him again, and Amos I haven't seen in ages, and he is the same but so immeasurable different, of course. We

spent two great nights together, chatting like old times and just enjoying the English company of familiar faces in new settings with a different glint to their eye. I could tell we had all changed, and it was awesome.

Here is a picture of our director and his wife while we were waiting to be assigned a plane in the BsAs airport during the worker's strike... aren't they adorable? He's pretty much the most amazing man, and she's equally incredible, and they go well together.

BsAs was very inspiring, as a whole. Our 'classes' were much more intriguing than a lot of those we've had before (the few actual lecture-type things we sat through) and all of our visits and experiences were mindblowing on some scale. I could go on for hours about the amazing things these schools and alternative facilities are doing, how they're overcoming the problems of poverty and such, how the government is ACTUALLY HELPING PEOPLE, how peoples' spirits never die. I could tell you about the computers that were brought in to the poorest neighborhood in BsAs so that the people could learn to be secretaries, or the children accompanying their mothers to hair-dressing class, or the girls who asked me to draw them pictures, or the little boy who kept asking where I was from and pretending to look it up in his math book, about the school that was full of marble sculptures done by the students, or the 15 year old who was almost more eloquent than me (and especially so in Spanish!). I could tell you about the houses without roofs and the kids living in the streets, who still come to school and who WANT to learn, about the 95 year old woman who not only possesses amazing clarity of mind, but also organizes a political movement and marches every Thursday afternoon demanding the return of her disappeared son of 30 years ago. Where are these things in the States? Why can we not all join together in a cause that unites us to be strong, inspired, motivated, powerful, human? Why do we insist on fracturing ourselves into useless details and gray areas? Can we not just stand up for our rights as human beings? The right to live and love? To eat good meat?

This next picture is to continue my discussion about the amazing people you meet without knowing it. Here is our director, René, and his best buddy and our subdirector in BsAs, Claudio. We all thought Claudio was a really amazing and caring guy, but a little bit short of the description 'cool.' While waiting in the airport to go home, René shared with us a little something that changed it all completely. I don't know if any of you have heard of a huge escape from a major prison during the Pinochet reign, but there was one. More than twenty high-profile prisoners (read: people who disagreed with the big P) worked for months to dig a tunnel out of prison. Yes, Shawshank Redemption style. It was complete with ventilation, a light system, and incredible feats of mechanics including but not limited to: hiding dirt in the ceiling (spaced perfectly so it wouldn't collapse), digging through the less than 3 meter space in between road and metro, and a length of more than you want to think about. These amazing people achieve this, escaped, and then headed on foot over the Andes into Argentina. Last Wednesday, Claudio finally received notice of the end of his exile from Chile. After 21 years, he is finally able to enter the land of his birth. And we didn't know any of this. Also, both of those men were once around 130 pounds. Don't believe it? Neither do I.

Now I want to talk about a universal theme: love. Guess what, Dad! Nope, I haven't fallen in love, but there is great danger of it happening to a couple of people on the trip. One of the girls in the group - Kira- met an Argentinian in a bar one night, talked to him for about 12 hours straight, and hardly left his side while we were in the city. He has invited her to come work with him at a snowboarding resort this summer, and if that doesn't happen he's going to come traveling with us (Bahia Blanca is where his family is from.) And it's not like a fling, which is both scary and exciting at the same time. Another girl - Greta - just had her pololo confess his love for her. The idea has been planted that she should get a job for the summer here and live in Santiago. It's a strange situation... when there's love in a continent that is not your own, you've kind of got to grab it by the horns and make it tell you what it wants, otherwise you're a goner and you might never come back. Either way you look at that sentence, it works. It's been interesting to see it all happen... we never can tell the moments that change our lives until one day, nothing is the way it was.

I think that's about it for me. Tomorrow we fly to Temuco to stay for five days with rural families and learn about the intensely different culture of the Mapuches. I can't wait! After that... we're all off. The work starts. Also the passion. I can deal with that. It's weird to think that after Friday, I won't see Darren for a month, and after Monday, five of the others. When you see people every day for two months, that sort of thing can't be expressed by the word 'shock.' I'm sure we'll all be more than fine though. That is the nature of our relationships!