Thursday, October 3

Today was Maxi’s 15^th birthday, so the first thing I did in the morning as wish him a feliz cumpleanos. Then at school was nothing out of the ordinary. I took a philosophy test that I didn’t study for, and I was actually pretty surprised because I remembered most of the answers from the lecture that the teacher had given the week before. Also, today was my friend Pablo (who I know will read this and will be incredibly excited to finally get a shoutout in my blog) and my first Nigganish Day. He is really good at English, and he always wants to speak it with me, but I never let him because I would rather practice my Spanish. So we made a deal that every Thursday we will speak in English (and also have competitions to see who can talk more like a stereotypical black person). It’s pretty fun, but I still feel really weird having a conversation with a Chilean in typical American slang. It’s just not fair that he speaks English so well and I’m still struggling to understand Spanish!  After school, I went home and basically did nothing for a while. Monse and I entertained ourselves by playing tic-tac-toe. Then after a while I went for a run and came home and took a shower. I worked on my blog and got completely caught up while I watched Maxi play his birthday present—Grand Theft Auto 5. The game is set in LA, and Maxi kept stopping to ask me if this was really what LA looked like. I guess it is more or less similar. Around 8:30, Nancy and Eric came home and we all sat down together to eat Maxi’s birthday dinner—hot dogs (turkey sausage for me) with avocado and fresh tomato (yep the hot dogs are a lot better here than in the US). Then we brought out the cake and sang happy birthday in both English and Spanish.

Then we ate some fantastic homemade cake, had a long discussion about the different measurements of poverty in Chile and the US (apparently here about 60% of the citizens make less than $1,000 per month), and, after wishing Maxi one last happy birthday, I went to sleep.