Happy Halloween!

how I celebrated Halloween

(10/29-11/1) Monday when I woke up Eli and Claudia reminded me that I was supposed to go shopping with them to pick out shirts that the girls are going to wear during the Flamenco Futbol game. So we left once I threw some pants on. We went about 100 different places and weren’t having much luck. Everything just wasn’t quite right. After four hours though, I had to leave them because I needed to cook my dessert for the night which was going to take a lot of time. I decided to make cinnamon rolls from scratch which sounded like a good idea at the time. It took a long time and it was really hard. They tasted pretty delicious though. Most people seemed to like them, just some people thought they were too sweet. Cinnamon rolls are not common commodity in this country. We ate mashed potatoes with meat, cheese, hard boiled eggs, and onions for dinner. I might have talked about this before because it wounds disgusting but tastes delicious. They call it pastel de papas. For the remaining Donce’s here, the staff decided to let students give their testimonies. The first student went Monday and his name is Plass. I didn’t catch a lot of it because I can never understand this guy, but the parts I did catch were very emotional. You could tell it was hard for him. Tuesday was pretty slow. Not much happened in my world. We had our Café a lo Gringo meeting and our Exchange Student Meeting and both were good. After that is when my day picked up. We had a Café a lo Gringo event at a pizza restaurant! We called it Pizza a lo Gringo. We invited all the El Oasis students who wanted to practice their English to come and have dinner with Katie and I at a restaurant. At first it was kind of frustrating trying to order pizzas for 20 people and having to find someone to share a pizza with that wanted the same toppings as you. It took about an hour just to get the food handled. Once that was taken care of the night was great. The conversations were good and the students really enjoy talking in English. It was weird though because it was kind of difficult to just talk in English. It was a blast though. After we got home we did Insanity and then I went to bed. Wednesday was an insanely busy day. I woke up a little later because I had a bad night sleep Tuesday night. I blame the full moon. Anyhow, once I woke up I went and mailed some letters at the post office. Then Katie and I went to a nearby church that a lot of El Oasis students attend to volunteer at Noche de Luz, which is what they call it instead of Halloween. We painted some clowns and angels when we got there for about 2 and a half hours, but there was a pretty awesome pizza break in the middle of that. Once that was over we pumped up 200+ balloons, set up chairs, found costumes, set up games, and a bunch of other random jobs to get ready for the night’s activities. It was supposed to start at 7 but Chileans use Chilean time so it started at 8. It was really fun though. Everyone had a costume and the little kids were adorable. I dressed up as an ewok from Star Wars...sort of. I found a bears head and called myself an ewok. There was a sketch, a ton of games, and songs. Everyone got a lot of candy and these awesome fresh fruit cups. After we cleaned up and as we were leaving they handed all of the workers a bag of candy! It was awesome. We got home at about 11, oh and we rode bicycles which I just remembered. I don’t ride bicycles a lot so I just figured I would mention it. We did Insanity and we went to bed. Thursday we went to this HUGE market with a friend of ours from El Oasis. Her name is Nani and she picked us up at our house along with her mom, dad, brother, aunt, uncle, and two cousins. The market was really awesome and I got to buy a few things. Including a jersey for myself that I didn’t even know I wanted until I saw it. We spent about four hours there. I appreciate Nani and her family taking Katie and I to the market, but the next time I would rather a smaller group. We kind of got rushed or slowed down depending on the situation. It was still a great time though. We got back to El Oasis and I immediately made the brownies. I forgot to do the Café a lo Gringo stuff I was supposed to do so I rushed to finish all of that as well. I did it all in perfect time though, with a few minutes to spare. Café started and we did a telephone theme like what types of things to say if someone were to call you on the phone. The first game was called telephone. It’s a classic where someone starts it off by whispering a sentence in someone’s ear and then it goes around the entire room until at the end when that person says it out loud. It never really makes sense at the end but it’s fun none the less. The second game we gave them situations and had them create a dialogue with another person about the situation. It was fun hearing what they had to say. It was good. Tertulia started after that and we ate pasta, which was delicious. This Tertulia was another Break Out because we finished the Our Father series last week. It was cool, there were three different sections with different students who talked about why certain missions were import to them. Oh yeah, the theme was missions. One station was talking about a mission trip to Bolivia El Oasis is going on in January. Another station was about the home for boys that a lot of students here work at. And the last station was a student who was talking about going to Globalscope because she leaves in December to go to Thailand. It was neat hearing what all of the students had to say. After Tertulia I spent a lot of time playing ping pong with the boys upstairs. It’s something I recently found that I enjoy doing here a lot. Then all of a sudden, the cops showed up! Apparently they had gotten a noise complaint. It was so strange. They went away though and things resumed as normal. That was the week! 

Pizza a lo Gringo!

me and some of my Chilean friends

me as a very angry ewok

me and my candy