No puedo hablar ingles!

It has been a beautifully relaxing week. It's still Carnaval here (Uruguay boasts for having the longest Carnaval in South America) but this was the big week, the final week, when most natives here go out of town to escape the craziness. Some of our teachers had also gone out of town and we got a couple of classes canceled this week, which was a welcome and much-needed break. One problem, though, is that because of Carnaval week the laundry place has also been closed...so right now I'm sitting here in the last pair of clean clothes that I have, some pajamas. This afternoon it'll be open, though, so I'm more excited about the idea of clean laundry than I think anyone should be!

We've really been enjoying our relaxing week here. The other day Ashley, Sam, Ben, and I went walking around town and found a pretty little park by the beach with a small river going through it and some pedal boats for rent. So yesterday we went back with Lawson and Sara also and we spent the afternoon riding pedal boats and enjoying the sunshine. There were little islands in the river with just a ton of bunnies, chickens, and ducks running around--it was the cutest thing! People put lettuce and food on the islands for the animals, so the rabbits were huge and fat...they were actually bigger than the chickens, believe it or not! One thing I love about Montevideo is the parrots. If you go to a park in the U.S., you'll probably see lots of ugly black birds flying around, but here you can see flocks of pretty green parrots! I love the sounds they make and it makes me so happy that here they're flying free and not trapped in a pet store somewhere.

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday so my classmates who are taking the Bible class put together an Ash Wednesday service for everyone in the casa. It was really beautiful, and then I got to walk around with ashes on my forehead for most of the day! The people in the Bible class (which is almost everyone except for me and a couple other people) were encouraged to give up something for Lent, and as crazy as this sounds, most of my friends decided to give up speaking English--Lawson included! So yesterday was a very difficult and at the same time very rewarding day. By Easter forty days from now, we're all going to be so much better at Spanish! My Spanish isn't quite good enough yet that I could entirely give up English, but every day from 7-9 PM I've decided to do it, as well as trying to speak it as often as possible with my friends. Until you've spent an entire day intensively learning another language, I'm pretty sure you don't know what it means to be mentally exhausted. Learning another language takes up so much brain power that by the end of the day I honestly feel like I can't think anymore. It's so much fun, though, and I feel so accomplished when I really learn a new word or when I can carry on a conversation with someone.

Last Friday I got to have dinner with the president of the central Uruguayan bank! The ACU honors program paid for Sara, Ben, and I to go to a really, really nice restaurant that served all kinds of delicious meats to have dinner and talk with this economist, Walter Cancela, and his wife, who is an artist here in Montevideo. Aside from the conversation being very interesting--I learned that Uruguay's economy is actually doing really well right now, even though the rest of the world's isn't. They have the fastest growing economy in South America and the unemployment rate is ridiculously low, something like 3% for heads of household--the food was amazing. I really don't like to eat meat very much, but the waiters kept bringing us samurai swords stacked with every kind of meat I've ever seen! There was tons of steak and asado and even cow tongue (called "sweet meat" in Spanish). So it was really fun to get all dressed up and get to talk with such an interesting person while eating steak off a sword.

Tomorrow we're leaving to go on a group trip to Rocha, which is about five hours north of Montevideo. It's a beautiful, sparsely-populated beach area and I'm really looking forward to going. One of the places that we're going to see, Cabo Polonio, is impossible to get to unless you ride monster trucks or horses because of the enormous sand dunes! Hardly any people actually live there, but there are beautiful beaches, and I'm really looking forward to going there!

America Latina, Mi Amor.

I am in love with South America. I love the people, the history, the slower rhythm of the city, the beauty of the Uruguayan countryside, and the way it feels to relax on the beach after a long day in class. I love the smell of the rain in the courtyard at our casa and the taste of Raquel and Mariela's homemade food. I love the way it seems like there's always at least one person in our house playing guitar or singing and the way it feels to finally know my way around the city. I can't believe we're already a third of the way through our time here. Right now I think I'll never want to leave.

Yesterday we went to a palace! Well, sort of. We went to the Palacio Legislativo, which is where the Uruguayan Congress meets, and it really was like a palace! Uruguay's Palacio Legislativo is the most expensive legislative building in all of South America. It was built in the early 1900's, when Uruguay was incredibly wealthy--even wealthier than the United States (it took two U.S. dollars to equal one Uruguayan peso!). I'm not even exaggerating when I say that all of the walls are made out of marble. There are 53 different kinds of marble making up the walls in one room alone, and all of the stone used was from Uruguay. The whole palace is just absolutely beautiful. We didn't get to spend much time there because we misunderstood the time our tour started and arrived halfway through it but I'd love to go back sometime to look around, and it's only a twenty minute walk from our casa.

Mi Buenos Aires Querido!

I finally have a few minutes to sit down and write so I guess I should tell you all about Argentina! We got back home to Montevideo around midnight Sunday night after spending the past week in Buenos Aires. It was so much fun but now we all have a huge amount of homework to catch up on. Study abroad is probably the most incredibly fun thing I have ever done in my life, but sometimes I forget that "study abroad" actually means studying...so it's a lot of work too. So for now I'll try to just give you an abbreviated version!

In the past week I:

- rode a train for the first time in my life
- used up a new page in my passport
- saw the world’s largest keychain and pencil collections
- walked across the widest street in the world
- saw paintings by Picasso, Rembrant, Monet, and Renoir
- actually went to a capital building that is painted pink!

While we were in Buenos Aires, we took a train to Tigre, a beautiful little town outside of the city with a river and lots of craft markets and pretty things like that. Tigre was a lot of fun but I was actually a little disappointed by the train...I've always thought that all trains were like the ones in Harry Potter, with neat little compartments and a lady coming by to sell Bertie Botts Every Flavor Jelly Beans. It was actually just like a subway--kind of dirty and crowded and it stopped a lot--and on our way there we had to sit in the luggage compartment (where there were no seats) because we got there right before the train left. It was fun though and I really enjoyed Tigre. We took a boat ride down the river there and it was so beautiful and relaxing; the riverbank had some little houses and hostels and I think that the only way to get to them was by boat...it was cool. I also really enjoyed the craft market in Tigre--I bought a hand-painted leather purse for 50 Argentinean pesos, which is less than $15, and spent some time talking to a man who makes wooden instruments. I told him I was a music student in the U.S. and he showed me how he made his wooden saxophone and we even talked for a while in Spanish! I'm really learning a lot here and it's so exciting when I realize that I'm able to communicate with the people I meet.

Some highlights of Buenos Aires:

• Making new friends We spent some time with a youth group in Buenos Aires, just playing futbol and going out for dinner. It's cool to see how much we can have in common even despite all of the language and cultural differences. Also, Lawson and I made friends with a guy on Florida Street who makes beautiful jewelry by hand. He was from Peru and spoke no English, so we got to practice our Spanish with him. We watched him make a silver bracelet for awhile as we talked and he had a wooden flute that he let me play!
  
  
• Spending our free day seeing Casa Rosada and the Buenos Aires Zoo Casa Rosada is the Argentinean equivalent of the White House--except that it's pink! It's where the president does her work and also where Evita Peron did her famous speeches back when her husband was president. We also saw the Zoo on our free day, and even though I've never really liked zoos I had a great time. I saw an albino walabee and a hippo for the first time...I never realized how enormous hippos are!
  
  
• Shopping on Florida Street It's one of the biggest shopping streets in Buenos Aires and the streets are lined with vendors selling all kinds of souvenirs and handmade things. I bought a really awesome hand-knit shirt and of course some cool souvenirs for you guys! (Let me know if there's anything in particular that you want while I'm here and I would love to get it for you!)
  
  
• Seeing a tango show We went to dinner as a group at a really nice restaurant that had a tango show while we ate. Last week at Casa ACU, some instructors came to teach us tango and we had a blast so it was really fun to watch some professionals dancing. I really want to learn how to dance like that while I'm here!

I posted an entire album of pictures from our trip on facebook, so if you're interested you can check them out by clicking here! I love and miss you all very much!

Yemanja, Llamadas, and More Punta del Este!

It's been another adventure-filled week here in South America! We are having such an awesome experience here--I can't believe we've already been here for three weeks! It feels like we've been here forever because we've already grown and learned so much but at the same time, it is already going by so quickly.

One of the most interesting things I got to see this week was a religious celebration called Yemanja. Only about 2% of Uruguay's population follows this religion, but huge crowds of people came down to Montevideo on Tuesday night to celebrate and watch the people celebrating. Yemanja is the name of the "mother of all the gods" in this polytheistic religion and she is represented by the ocean; so thousands of people came down to the Montevideo coast right near our casa to honor her by putting their offerings into the sea. Some of them built small boats and filled them with fruit, flowers, candles and other things to float out into the water and others wore long white dresses and robes and waded out to place their offerings in the sea as well. Some people leave silver jewelry or cakes as well as the fruit and flowers--it was so interesting to watch. I thought that it was really beautiful in its own way, just the idea of honoring the goddess of the sea. However, we went to the beach yesterday after class and it was just disgusting because of all the offerings that had been left in the water a few days ago. So we probably won't be going back to that beach for a few weeks, until all of the trash has been cleaned up.

Carnaval week ended on Friday night with the Llamadas parade. Up until this year, Llamadas has been one extremely long parade starting at about 9 PM and lasting until about 5 AM--but this year, the parade officials decided to split it into two nights (Thursday and Friday) because too many people got too rowdy after drinking all night long and being out in the streets. We got to go to the Thursday night Llamadas parade and it was such a cool experience! I was going to post pictures here for you but then I decided that a video would probably give you a better idea of what it's like...I wish it wasn't so dark and the sound was better quality because there's really nothing quite like actually being there. I wish you all could have seen it!

Yesterday we finally got to go back to Punta del Este for our group trip! It was an absolutely beautiful day--a nice contrast to last weekend when we were there!--and we got to see a lot of really interesting things. A very famous Uruguayan artist named Carlos Paez Vilaro built a home (more like a castle!) on the beach in Punta del Este and named it Casapueblo. Carlos Vilaro is an extremely respected person here by a lot of people because most of his artwork focuses on blacks, poor people, the struggles and life of lower-class society, and women, and he has spent his life traveling the world and experiencing so many different cultures and helping people in need. His home, Casapueblo, is probably the most beautiful and interesting building I've ever seen. He actually sculpted it himself with the help of friends and it looks like an enormous white sandcastle overlooking the ocean. Part of it is open now as a museum for his artwork but we weren't able to go inside of a lot of it because I think it's still his home. If you get a chance, you should look of photos of Casapueblo online...it's a fascinating place. We went to a park for a picnic lunch--it was really ghetto and I think that if I had played there as a kid I would have had nightmares from all the giant, creepy statues of weird animals, but all the kids there seemed to be having a great time. It was pretty funny. Afterwards we went to the beach and spent another day playing in the enormous waves and working on our tans. Almost everyone got extremely sunburnt; I'm pretty sure we just haven't gotten used to the hole-in-the-ozone-over-Uruguay thing yet! After we got home some of us pushed our beds together and stayed up late watching Breakfast at Tiffany's on my laptop. One thing I really love about being here is living with my friends and always having someone close to hang out with and talk to. All of these experiences wouldn't be half as fun without having these people to share it with.

Today we're going to the marketplace and trying to catch up on our loads of homework! On Wednesday we're leaving for Buenos Aires, Argentina for a week! I'm really, really excited about that--we've heard that it's the "Paris of South America" so I can't wait to see it for myself. Ashley, Sam, Lawson and I have finally decided where we're going to go for our ten day spring break next month--we're going to go to Peru to see the Incan ruins in the rainforest at Machu Picchu! We talked to a travel agent and she's able to get us a really good deal so we're going to spend a few days in Lima, a few days in Cuzco, a day and a night at Machu Picchu, and maybe see a few other things in Peru. Sam wants to go back-packing up the Incan trail and I think that sounds like a lot of fun so we're going to try to do that also. I really can't get over how blessed we are to be here.

I love and miss you all so much! I hope things are going well back in the U.S. of A!

La semana pasada

Wow, what an eventful week this has been! I'm sorry that it's taken me so long to update--classes are finally starting to get a little busy and on top of that we've been doing tons of exciting things every day. So get ready because I'm about to try to compress a week's worth of incredible experiences into one blog!

I'll start with something important that's going on in Uruguay: the entire nation has been experiencing a severe drought for months now, and that's really not good considering that this country's economy and a lot of its people are very dependent on agriculture and cattle-raising. Because of the drought, a lot of animals have been dying, a lot of places are under severe water restrictions, and a lot of people have been suffering. So around our casa the past week, we've all been praying for rain in Uruguay. And finally on Thursday night, it started raining! It was wonderful to have all of the windows in the casa open to our courtyard so that we could smell the rain coming down. The people here have really needed the rain.

One problem with the rain, though: we had planned a group trip on Friday to Punta del Este, a beautiful beach town about two hours away. Punta del Este is one of the most famous beach areas in South America, and we had canceled Friday classes and planned to go there to spend the day on an island. Because of the rain, our professors decided to cancel our trip and wait until next weekend so that we could really enjoy it. However, five of my friends and I had booked a room in a hostel in Punta del Este so that we could stay the night there and spend Saturday at the beach also. Since we had reservations already and classes were still canceled for Friday, we decided to sleep in a little on Friday and then go ahead with our trip that afternoon. We took a bus from the central bus station here in Montevideo and the two-and-a-half-hour bus ride only cost us about $7 in U.S. money! I'm really grateful that things are so inexpensive here! The drive through the Uruguayan countryside was absolutely beautiful. I haven't seen anything other than city since I've been here, but I'm realizing now that most of this country is rural--completely the opposite of Montevideo. There were hills and cows and little houses here and there. I loved it. Once we finally got to Punta del Este, we walked a few blocks to find our hostel and it turned out to be just a cute little house in a neighborhood that a couple of surfer guys from Argentina rent out to people for only $25 a night. It was tiny and some things (like the toilet and the bedroom window) were definitely falling apart, but it had a lot of character and it was perfect for my friends and I. We got a six-person room with bunk beds and despite the mosquitoes that flew in through the open doors and windows all night, we really had a lot of fun. The guys who owned the place were very relaxed and very nice--even after our check-out time at 11 AM on Saturday, they told us that we were welcome to stay as long as we wanted and that we could even go out and spend more time on the beach and then come back to the hostel to take showers if we wanted. We spent Friday evening swimming at the beach in the most enormous waves that any of us had ever seen. I don't think I've ever had so much fun swimming as we did that night playing in the enormous waves and letting ourselves get pulled out to sea. It occurred to me that night that in the past year, I've had the opportunity to swim in the Atlantic Ocean on both sides of the Equator--once last spring in New York off of Long Island, and this spring off the coast of Uruguay. I have been incredibly blessed. After going to the beach, we wandered around town until we found (to our amazement) a Burger King! We were all starving after swimming that we didn't really care that we ended up spending close to $7 on a hamburger! It was the best Burger King that I have ever tasted. They use real Uruguayan beef here and season the burgers, so it's a perfect blend of Uruguayan and all-American taste like ketchup and onions. I'm not sure if I'll ever have such a good burger for the rest of my life. We stayed up late into the night talking and laughing and getting eaten by mosquitoes--I've been so blessed with such good friends here--and when we finally got up Saturday morning we decided to head out to see "The Hand." La Mano, a giant sculpture of a hand coming out of the sand on the beach, is a famous landmark in Punta del Este so of course we had to go see it and take pictures. (This picture is Lawson and I next to La Mano.) After seeing it, we all went for lunch at a fantastic pizzeria called El Mundo della Pizza before heading back to Montevideo. It was a wonderful and relaxing weekend and a great change of pace after spending the last couple weeks of our life in the city.

I guess I'm not really going in chronological order here, but another part of our week's plans were also thrown off by the much-needed rain. You may have heard of Carnaval...it's a really big deal here in South America, especially in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. The closest thing in the United States that I can compare it to is Mardi Gras, and even that isn't exactly the same. It started as a tradition among black slaves where they would gather in "tribes" and perform traditional dances and play los tambores (the drums) in groups. Now Carnaval has become an elaborate extension of this tradition, with even more elaborate costumes and dancers called vedettes who really don't wear much clothing at all. The opening parade for Carnaval was supposed to happen this past Thursday and we had front-row seats to see it; sadly, it had to be postponed because of the rain. So we finally got to go last night, on Sunday, after hearing so much about it and listening to lectures about the history of Carnaval for the past week. (We even had an influential local candombe dancer come to our casa to try to teach us how to dance the candombe, which is the traditional dance in the parade. That was definitely an experience--it wasn't easy to learn but we all had a blast trying!) Once we finally got to see the parade, it was really cool! The costumes were so colorful and beautiful, the drummers and dancers were amazing, and all the little kids who went with their families to see the parade were probably the best part. When the candombe groups came along, they would just run into the streets to join them and throw confetti at them. They were adorable. I took so many pictures at the parade--I wish I could post them all up here! This coming Thursday is Llamadas, the closing part of Carnaval. There will be another parade with more candombe and we have tickets to see it also! I'm really excited--I'm loving this part of the Uruguayan culture!

This past Sunday we got to try out another part of the culture with some of the wonderful people at the church here. It's called an asado, and basically it's like a big barbecue. Everyone here does asado, and each family has their own way of cooking the meat, and they will swear that it is the best. Asados are almost always done on the roofs of houses because most people don't have yards here in the city, so we had our asado on the roof of our casa also. I'm not really a fan of meat so the asado wasn't really my favorite, but it smelled amazing and it was so sweet of the church people to do that for us. Afterwards we had a devotional on the roof and sang church songs together. Sometimes we'd sing the same song twice--first they'd sing it in Spanish and then we'd sing it in English. It was so cool to see how a mutual love for God can overcome language and cultural barriers. It was a great conclusion to a wonderful night.

On Tuesday I took my first rock-climbing class at the YMCA. A few other girls and I have paid for memberships here and we got to go to some classes for the first time this week. Pablo is the rock-climbing instructor and he speaks English very well so we had fun making a new friend. He introduced us to all of the people in the class--all mostly guys close to our age--and told us to speak only Spanish with them and let them practice English with us. Pablo showed us how to fasten our harnesses and tie knots in the ropes and we got to climb for the first time! It was such a workout but also such a blast! We're going to start going every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday night.

I hope you all are having a wonderful and blessed time wherever you are! One thing I've learned from being here: it doesn't matter where you are because if you look at life as an adventure, it will be. I miss and love you all very much! I'll try to be better about updating more often these next few days.