Rancagua

Sorry for the hiatus, blogaditos. The internet has been kind of screwy around here, but now I've got both time and internet. Last Friday, started our week long Winter Break after only two weeks of classes. After much debate and indecision concerning what to do for the week, Antonio and I ended up traveling to Rancagua with a cadet named Jaña, while Jordan went to Viña del Mar with another cadet.

Friday night, we hung around Santiago and headed to a part of town called Suecia which has a lot of discos. I did a bunch of dancing, as I am prone to do sometimes and eventually we staggered back to the school to sleep. I did get a chance to use the Chilean bus system which was pretty crowded and slow. Lots of rapid acceleration and deceleration, not cool.

Saturday we woke up somewhere around 1100, which would become a recurring theme throughout the next week. We took the bus (much less crowded this time) down to the train station and then boarded a train (very crowded, kind of unsafe) down to the city of Rancagua. We were picked up at the train station by Jaña's uncle and grandfather who took us to their house where we met an assortment of other family members who also live in the house.

Honest to God, I just sat here for about 15 minutes not remembering what the heck we did that night, but I think it went more or less like this. We went to a BBQ with a bunch of dudes from the military school. We drank lots of Piscola (Pisco and Coca-cola) and Rum. There was a singer there who sang a song in Spanish that as far as I could tell was about the act of fellatio. At some point a photographer took all of our photos and somebody bought it and gave it to Antonio and I as a present. I tried my best to convince some Chilean people that George Bush did not in fact know about the September 11th attacks before they happened. Eventually we left, but not before we all raised our glasses and somebody gave this long toast. We made it back home, drank some water, and went to sleep.

The next day was Sunday, which Chileans call Fomingo because the word for boring here is 'fomen' and the word for Sunday is 'domingo'. It was a pretty boring day as Fomingos tend to be. We woke up late, Antonio stole all the hot water in all of Chile during his shower, then we ate breakfast, then about an hour later ate lunch. Apparently it's only the military academy that serves really small portions of food, because I was pretty full the entire time I was in Rancagua, or I was starving because we went to the disco before dinner and didn't get a chance to eat. Anyway, we ended up going to Jaña's uncle's house, where we ate dinner and talked about random stuff. It was Fomingo, so we just went back to the house and did YouTube for a while before going to sleep in our heated beds, which at that point we still didn't realize were heated.

I'm going to head to the gym right about now, but be prepared for Rancagua - Part II