LA COPA MUNDIAL!!!!!!!!!!

Quedan 11 días hasta el mundial. We are almost there. World Cup time is approaching everyone, and man, is it great to be in a country where everyone loves fútbol!!!!!! So exciting. The pringles cans say: pringoooooools and everywhere there are commericals and ads about the mundial. Also, literally ever since I arrived in Chile, in FEBRUARY, I have been hearing non-stop the official world cup song. I am not exaggerating, I met my family for the first time and on the car ride home my brother played the song for me. Here it is. Sorry, I dont know how to put up videos...Doesn't it just make your heart soar!? I loooove soccer--but apparently the games are going to be at weird early times and stuff because of the stupid time difference. DAMN IT. I feel like I haven't really posted much about just living in Chile. So it is starting now. I plan to take my camera one day to try to document the madness that is the metro system. Ridic. Waaaah starting tomorrow I will have exactly 1 month and 20 days before I leave chile :(.

San Pedro de Atacama!

Yes. That's right. THE DESERT. It is located in the north of Chile, in the second region (chile is divided up into regions, in all there are 15). It starts at 1 in the north, then proceeds to 12 in the south, but later they added a few more up north, haha. Anyways, we had to get to the airport at 4 am in the morning. Needlesstosay, I didn't sleep before that. When we arrived we had time to sleep because we had to drive to Chuquicamata, the biggest copper mine in the world (and I think the biggest mine in general). It was pretty impressive:

Those levels are waaaay bigger than they look. They had to be big enough to fit the most gigantic trucks i have ever seen:

There was a whole deserted ghost town near the mine. It used to be inhabited by all the workers in the mine, but then they ran out of room to put all of the earth they were moving. Half the town is already covered by huge piles of earth. So weird how tiny humans can make such big holes. Holes in the earth, holes in the ozone layer, jeez.

That night I got to realize all over again how tiny humans really are in the grand scheme of things. I went on an astronomical tour. Coolest. Thing. Ever. As anyone who knows me already know, I LOVE OUTERSPACE. Aliens, universes, stars, planets, the MOOOON, its all great. So. Let me tell you about it. We drive to this house/observatory out in the middle of the desert. This really smart french dude that knows everything gave the tour. The stars were the clearest I have ever seen. And soooooo many. The branch of the milky way was veeery visible. We soon learned however, that what we can see with the naked eye is a miniscule amount of what is out there. He showed us all the constellations, and I got to see some I have never seen before, because it is impossible to see them in N. America: Scorpio, the southern cross, etc. So awesome! I want to learn the sky! We then moved on to about 10 huge telescopes that had been chillin only about 30 feet away but no one had noticed them because thats how dark it was. I got to see the rings of saturn, nebulas, and other crazy things. I just love the concept that you are looking into the past when you are looking at the stars. All the stars are suns, there are millions of other galaxies, I am sorry, but how can there not be aliens?! They took the hubble and aimed it at what looked to be a dark spot of sky and found this:

COME ON! and that's in a dark spot of the sky.

The desert is a magical place. The landscape is just so vast. It's amazing. We went to a place called el valle de la luna (valley of the moon) it looks like the moon's surface and is awesome:

We went up on a ridge for the sunrise, but the point is not to watch the sunset, its to turn your back on the sun and watch how the mountains change colors. So beautiful. STOP WRECKING THE WORLD HUMANS, its not yours!!!!! The way we try to "conquer" space (as in dividing up territories, trying to live on other planets) is going to be a very sad day indeed.

Went to a salar (salt flat) saw flamingos! Very cool. All in all, the desert is great. I don't think I could live there though. Waaaay to dry, I thought my nose was going to start bleeding at any second, and the tiny fact that there is no water, you know. Hope you enjoyed the pictures, sorry i made this post super long by putting so many but i mean loook at them!

El salar

MATISYAHU/techo para chile

Heeey! I am doing a really bad job at updating. Lots has happened, so I will tell you in a few installments hopefully closely following each other. First, on april 20th, now almost a month ago, I went to the MATISYAHU concert with my friends stef and Dani and it was absolutely awesome. I havent done a post before this, because I wanted to show pictures and stef had them check this out!:

So cool. I recommend him. He spreads his love for Judaism through a fusion of reggae and hip hop. It was semi-awkward though because obviously the majority of the people there dont understand english, so there's kind of that disconnect which results in less enthusiasm. I felt like the most excited person there, indeed, a chilean in front of me turned around and told me, "i dont mean to be rude, but can you be quiet?" and I was just like "uhhhh, no, this is a concert" Like, seriously, what the hellz--its not like i was yelling during hte songs, i was yelling after to show my appreciation hellooooo. Then after the concert we went to get something to eat, we walk in, (dani is chileno), we are at the table and the waitress comes over, stef asks (in spanish) if they accept credit cards, with this simple question, the waitress flips out, slams the menu shut and is like, im not serving them, theyre drunk blabhlaha gringas blahbalbhblah and we were just in shock and i was like ummm first of all we arent drunk, second of all we can understand you, and we walk out. So upsetting. That is the first time I have ever been refused service and she essentially didnt serve us because there were gringas (we were not chilean). It was just so upsetting because as an anthropology/sociology major, I am very aware of social injustices. But in a way, I am glad to have experienced that. People have been killed due to discrimination, while I was just refused service, both are hurtful and should not be happening. It was especially shocking to experience that in Chile, which is seen as a very "progressive thinking" country.

Next, I went on a weekend volunteer trip about 2.5 hours to the south to a town called las cabras to construct mediaguas (temporary homes) for families whose houses were very damaged if not destroyed by the earthquake. We were divided into several groups. Our family was so nice, and lived on the edge of a watermelon patch. They insisted on serving us lunch (delicious) and once (kind of like tea time). I helped out a lot the first day, but the second day I literally did nothing because a whole bunch of men showed up, and refused to let the women do anything/probably didnt have anything for us to do anyways. It was still frustrating. Saw a dead chicken get its beak cut off, we had it for lunch in a stew, the chicken, not the beak. It was nice to get out of santiago and to be doing something to help. The family who we constructed the mediagua for had lost most of their house in the damage. The second story collapsed, two rooms completely caved in, they had a huge pile of rubble that used to be their house. Although it sometimes seems that in certain cases it would be more useful to simply start working on reconstructing the actual house, rather than build a filmsy wooden shack. Plus, people more south are still living in tents and torrential rains are happening. The whole situation is horrible, but I think if there was better organization, it might improve slightly. More about what I have been doing in the next few days...But for now just know that I really like Chile, it is different because I actually feel like I live here, whereas in the DR it simply felt like a perpetual vacation. Hmm..

vineyard/mountains beautifuuul
the crew--most of them
cute abuelito!
gato in a watermelon patch
putting up the pared