World Cup Game
Trip Start
Jul 13, 2005
1
13
32
Trip End
Mar 02, 2006
Santiago,
Chile
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
It seems like I was just writing the last email, so hopefully that means that I will keep this one short and to the point, as we left off on Wednesday!
I hope that you are all doing well, thanks to those of you who sent me emails with comments and the like, and I apologize if I haven't gotten around to responding to yours yet, so hopefully I'll get around to that soon, don't think that I don't appreciate them, but sometimes my internet times are sporadic!
Well let's see, after my last email things continued on their fast pace. Classes are starting to get a little more up to the pace that I'm used to at K, but the bad thing is that I don't have the motivation that I usually have back home. Being in a different country and all the traveling I want to do, experiences I have come across sort of distract me from school work.
However, that's part of the experience, and I am not going to fret over grades or anything! I have several big papers that I have to work on in the next week or so, but hopefully I'll take care of that!
In between classes on Wednesday I went to a big department store to buy my ticket for the big fútbol game that night. At the last minute Elizabeth Garlow decided to come with me. After class we rushed to get on a bus back to Santiago to meet Lauren, Brennan, Lauren and some Chileans for the big world-cup qualifier game between Ecuador and Chile. En route to the Estadio Nacional, I finally bought a Chilean flag (for like 2 dollars) so that I could wave it around and be nuts (and eventually add it to my collection.) After going through about 5 search stations with carabineros in riot gear everywhere and big police vans and tanks, and being patted down a couple times we got into the stadium. The two ends of the place are general seating so you have to get there like 3 hours early to get a seat. From about 2 hours till game time everyone was yelling
and chanting and it was a big party.
We were sitting next to the tiny Ecuador section and so we saw lots of middle fingers and swearing directed at that section throughout the game. Luckily there were a couple fences and heavily armed riot police between the two. The game itself was pretty uneventful (fome -as the Chileans would describe it) and ended up being 0-0 meaning that Chile was eliminated from the world-cup tournament in Germany. Ecuador had already qualified. I must say that I prefer hockey, as it is a heck of a lot more exciting. But the experience was incredible. I screamed yelled and whistled along with all the thousands of fans. The national chant is: CHI....LE....Chi chi chi...le le le VIVA CHILE!! And the song that they kept singing was: Vamos, Vamos Chilenos, Esta noche, tenemos que ganar! (lets go chile, tonight we must win) It was really fun and it was really depressing afterwards (remember I said that I feel more and more connected to the country these days).
After the game we went to Telepizza, which was full of American goodness, and then I stayed at Becca's house (3 blocks from the stadium) for the night and left to come back to Valpo at 5:45 am because I had an early morning class.
The weekend was a slow one, but after the previous one, I needed the rest, and it was fun to just be at home, hang out with the family, ect. We ate well, I read Paula, by Isabel Allende, we sat out in the lovely sun, and ate some good machas, a type of shellfish. I did some school work, but it was overall a very de-stressing period.
This week has been fairly calm so far, and the weather was spectacular up until today. Today the fog rolled in for the first time, and it was very eerie. The city feels a lot smaller when it's foggy, more of a mythical seaside port.
In other news I have been working on my travel plans for the end of the year, which is keeping me pretty excited, but I am not allowing myself to fast-forward my time here, because it is going way too fast...only about 1 more month of classes, which is shocking.
Well, how are you all doing back in the states? Send me an email if you have a minute! Hopefully I´ll be working on some adventures to report back in my next email! Until then... Chau!
Abrazos,
