The Call to Chile: Rainy Days

(8/17-8/19) Friday was a blast. The day started by me receiving a package from my mom and dad! It had slippers, candy, and Alfredo pasta in it. It was such a great surprise. I found out later that customs had taken the beef jerky out which made me sad. It was still a really great package though! It had been raining all week and was still raining Friday. The girls at El Oasis had planned a Pilates workout session. I’m not really big into Pilates because it’s just stretching and seems a tad pointless to me. However, I did it with a smile on face. I just want the students to know that I care and will do whatever I can to hang out with them, which includes doing Pilates. So Claudia started this video which was super corny, in English, and filmed in Barbados. The people in the video were so cheesy I had to stop listening. The Chilean students should feel lucky they didn’t understand. The video was about an hour and after that Claudia suggested we go for a run. Katie and I decided we were going to go ahead and get Insanity out of the way while they went for a run. When they heard we were going to do Insanity, they all wanted to join that instead of going for a run. Doing that made me feel great. The Chileans were dropping during the warm up, I felt so fit! It was one of the harder videos Pure Cardio which is 16 straight minutes off moving around. I only stopped twice for water. Some of the Chileans stopped for entire exercises. It did make me feel like my workout is improving a lot. After that some students hung out at the house talking to us for a while, but everyone eventually left. Katie and I had another video to do that day which was really short so we did that and then took showers. We were going to watch a movie but we were both exhausted so we made a list of movies we want to watch in the future and watched trailers for them and went to bed. Saturday was our Insanity rest day. However, we didn’t get much of a rest. Since it had rained all week, the sky was really clear and you could see the mountains all around. We decided to climb Cerro San Cristobal. We took the long way around the entire mountain which took over an hour, but the views were incredible so we didn’t mind. Once we got to the top it was completely worth it. The mountains were breath taking. It’s always so beautiful up there. After eating a small snack and resting for a bit we started to climb down. We took a much shorter path down. We got home and ate lunch. After that we hung out and Skyped our families for a while. I forgot I was cooking rice and accidentally burned it. The house was so smoky for a while and smelled like burnt rice. That was my bad. Then we watched a movie on our list called The Terminal. It was really good. Then of course we went to bed. Sunday was pretty relaxing. I got up and listened to a Podcast from Life Spring church in Statesboro. When Katie got home from Mass we went to Lider (Walmart) and a nearby market to grocery shop a little. A student had come over to help Katie with a paper she is writing for one of her classes. She stayed all day and even did Insanity with us. We hung out and ate dinner together. Then they went back to work on the paper and I watched some Criminal Minds for a bit. Also it was my day for laundry but the washing machine started leaking water so I had to basically wait in the bathroom turning the water on and off whenever the machine needed it, it was so frustrating! I did get my laundry done which was good because I hadn’t done it in three weeks and was running out of clothes. I had to clean the bathroom though because it was under like an inch of water, craziness! I pretty much just used like 10 towels to mop it up, and then I washed the towels, interesting experience. That night I also got to Skype my youth pastor and his wife for the first time which was really awesome! That concludes my weekend!