Story of a Gringa's Semester in Santiago, Chile.: Just can't get enough of that peanut butter! (Pucon 21-24/10/2010

Hey people! it's been an incredibly long time since I've written. And a lot has happened, but before I forget, I'm going to write about my weekend in Pucon with my friends.

We left Thursday night around 10:50pm. It takes about 10 hours to reach there by bus, so in other words a perfect place to take the night bus there. I mean we could sleep on the bus, well somewhat sleep on the bus, wake up the next day feeling, well some what refreshed, and be ready to start our day. Oh a piece of advice, don't sit in the back of the bus if you don't have to...the smell of the bathroom when the door opens and closes is horrible! we only sat there b/c we thought it was going to be close to our other friends. Well, it turned out the seats mapped on the computer screen is kinda not proportional at all! lol so lesson learned stay clear from the bathrooms on bus, unless you need to use them!

I guess I can start with who all went with to Pucón. We had a really big group, there were 8 of us: Matt ( he goes to NorthEASTERN not northWESTERN), Jessica C. (my neighbor in Chile, who goes to UWM with me), Kerry (friend from my spanish class who's from North Carolina), Mirva (a friend from Finland who I have been going to a bible study group with), Claire (a chica from milwaukee! she goes to Marquette and is here for the year(yes, milwaukee had the majority on this trip!), Laura (she's Canadian what more can you say.. def can't be cooler than that!), and Sarah (went to la serena with me and lives in Seattle) oh and me. When we got there, I called my mom to let her know we arrived ok, and that I'll see her on Monday night, and then went to the grocery store. I was determined NOT to eat out this trip. We rented a cabin with a kitchen so I had no reason to spend extra money on restaurants.

After we checked into the cabin, claimed our beds (mine was the top bunk of a set of bunk bed), and dropped our stuff off. We were out the door to look at different tourist agencies to see what we can do. Now, here's a good place to explain that Pucón isn't a lets go explore this historical site, or see this castle, or go to this pisco distileria. Nope not at all, it's a town where you go and do outdoorsy things. Like hydro-speeding (or how i like to say it Hydro-planning) It's illegal in the US, and kinda dangerous too. I didn't do it, but my friends did...also theres climbing el Volcan villarrica, and horse back riding.

So after a couple of hours of looking at tourist agencies and getting prices we headed back to the cabin to decided what to do and when we were going to do it. In the end that day (friday) Matt, Jess, Kerry, Sarah, Laura, and Mirva went hydrospeeding and Claire and I just hung out. We walked to the beach on Lago Villarrica. It wasn't a sandy beach like by my Lake Michigan, it had black pebblish kind of things. We thought it was volcanic since right to the east of us was an active volcano. We laid out in the sun, and hung out with this stray dog that was there (yes mom I got a picture of it) and talked a lot. I learned a lot about politics from this chic, and it was really cool! I'm going to have to start following things more closely with this.

So we headed back to the cabin after a couple hours, and well ended up taking naps. I was soo exhausted from the lack of sleep on the bus. When the others returned some of us made dinner, and others went out. It was mainly just a night for relaxing for me. After dinner some people we out for a drink even though they had to climb a volcano at 7am the next day. So it was Laura, Claire, and I for the night just chilling cleaning up from dinner, and chatting. And then at around 10pm.. yes, it was only 10pm (that is sooo early for Chile, usually we don't go out until then).. not even yet I don't think Jessica made her way home. She had a few drinks and ended up jumping into pool because shes daring like that. It was an interesting night to say the least.

As I was in a deep peaceful slumber the next morning at 6am, I was woken up by the sound of my friends who were getting ready to climb Villarrica. I couldn't stay mad for long, so I grab some breakfast and then went back to sleep. But about an hour after I fell back asleep I heard voices downstairs, I was thinking, what are they doing back, the climb is supposed to take 10 hours. Well, I guess there was a bad snow storm the night before and they couldn't get up there. So instead we changed the plans..