School hasn´t changed much, I am still having problems with understanding what is going on. Although I still do not understand what is being said during lecture in my Environmental Engineering class, I have found the class´s web site to be very detailed and full of useful information. Which although it is in Spanish, I do not have much trouble reading it. Also I have recieved the reading list for this class and half of what we need to read is in English, so that is very good for me as well. Lastly, the profesor gave me a break and put me in a group with two other women in the class to do homework, and I got put in a group of five for the class project. This is a very good thing, because these groups are only supposed to be composed of two and four people respectively. Since she is letting me be the 3rd and 5th now I feel that I can only help, rather than feeling like a burden because I can´t understand everything that is going on. We already started working on our first homework and my partners were great. They were very patient with me and explained things when I seemed lost. Unfortunately, my Physics class has not improved at all. I feel like I understand the lectures and I have read up to where we are in class in my English Physics book, but I am still having trouble with figuring out how to solve the sample problems the profesor gave us for our first quiz. I went to the first help section for this class but it only confused me more. Of course my Volleyball and Spanish class are just fine. Hopefully, I will start making friends in my volleyball class soon. Right now I am still too shy to really to talk to anyone.
I had a very relaxing weekend. On Friday, Claudia (one of the women in my Environmental Engineering group) invited me to a jazz concert on campus that night. We had a great time. There actually ended up being 3 acts. The first was a Chilean group singing Beatle´s covers with British accents and all (they were very good), the second was stand-up comedy act (I only understood some phrases no jokes), and lastly a jazz band (which was also very good.) Well, more than for just the show itself, I was very happy that a Chilean student invited me out to do something. How exciting maybe she´s going to be my first Chilean friend (outside of my Chilean family of course.) Then Sunday I went swimming in the country with my Chilean family at their friend´s pool. The water and the weather was perfect and the scenery was lovely. I had a very nice, relaxing time.
Just a quick fun note about the weather so far, for my first 3 weeks here it was 90ºF - 95ºF everyday in the afternoon. It sounds bad but, we did not have the high levels of humidity here that we do in the Mid-West. So I enjoyed the hot weather while the Chileans complained about it. Another thing that makes the hot weather more tolerable here is that even on the hottest day it is still cool in the morning and the evening. Just last week the weather started to cool down so right now we are enjoying the perfect temperature of a high between 85º - 75º.
Love,
Emmie
From left to right: Iris, Oscar, our hosts (owners of the property), and Danae.
