Week 11

Well, so much for the update every week. But I will catch you up, for the most part, on the interesting events of the past two weeks. I´ve got a few things to mention, skim over some events.. but overall, life has not been too eventful lately.

I still don´t have my visa. I know that I said I had it a while ago... I went to immigration, handed in all of my papers. They told me it was all complete, I just needed to come back in 10 days after processing. Yet here I am, almost 20 days later, and it´s still not done. The corruption is endless. I have to pay for every day that I am not legal in this country, almost $1 USD.. yet this is not my fault! This is my Rotary club, who should be pushing them to get everything done.. because they don´t care how long it takes, since I´m the one paying for it to be overdue. So frustrating! Three months and I am still not legal!

Halloween was a week ago. Yes, they celebrate here too.. although it seems to be a new custom. They don´t trick-or-treat or anything, just the dressing up and partying side of things. It was on a Friday, and it was also my last day of Spanish classes. So this was a good day for me. I dressed up as a fairy, with Brodie, and we went out to a club that was having a dressup night. It was PACKED. Wearing wings on your back while sardined in a discoteque is definitely a difficult task. I also wore shoes that ended up murdering my feet by the end of the night. They also celebrate All Saints Day here (although not Day of the Dead, booo) so we got to have an actual holiday, no school because of it!

Friday was my last day of school. FINALLY, I am done high school hahaha.. Who knew it would take me so long. Now it´s the summer vacation (yes, come Christmas I will be outside in a tanktop!) and I don´t know what to do with my life. Prom and graduation are coming up soon (20th and 22nd of November), and buying tickets for both events has been a difficult task. You need to pay for this, and that, and you can invite this many people to this event, but that many to that one etc.. the good thing is, I´ve figured it all out (minus the prom date) and have even checked out my prom dress that I´m getting custom made. It´s going to be quite cute, and can´t wait to wear it in a few weeks..

I traveled to a town called Samaipata this past long weekend, with Maija and her family. It´s a slightly touristy town, approx 3 hrs outside of Santa Cruz.. famous for the pre-incan ruins at a temple called El Fuerte. She has a house there, so we drove out for the night. We ended up not being out there long enough to go to El Fuerte, but we got the chance to relax. It´s a nice, small town that´s very laid back (full of hippies) and you can´t help but just let loose when you´re there. The highlight of my trip: I found a VEGGIE BURGER there and it was acually pretty decent. You can obviously tell this was a tourist town, if they had multiple vegetarian options. For Melissa and Julia if you read this; there was even a restaurant that had Lassies on the menu (and the place was called Chakana)!! It´s nice to just get out of town for a while. And my family has even offered to take me there again, just to make sure I get to visit El Fuerte.

Other than that, we had an end of the year bbq at a classmates house, and it was my mom´s birthday (we had a huge bbq at my place). There was also the American vote, and all the American exchange students (aka 99% of them) had a little party to watch the votes come in. I, among the rest of the youth of today, was pretty stoked to see Obama get in.. I guess we´ll just have to see what he does with this in January!