Thursday, April 3, 2014

Tuesday, March 18

Today I went to school again and had to sit through a test in PE (where I have History). I really want to take all the tests and be a good student this year because I honestly am capable now of understating all the material in Spanish, but it just sucks that I went to the North for a week and came back already really behind. School was kind of cool today though because we had our first senior activity. We all came to school in ties of random colors instead of the regular school tie. Everyone laughed and thought it was a great idea, and it made school slightly more bearable walking around and noticing people’s ridiculously colored ties.

















After school we were supposed to have art until 4:30 but I left right at 3. Nancy picked me up and I changed in the car on the way to Terminal O’Higgins. Louis, Nigel, and I had agreed to meet at the bus station to go up to Santiago and see our friend Larkin off at the airport. We were supposed to meet at 3:30 and I got there at like 3:10, so I had to kill some time doing basically nothing until Louis and Nigel walked in. We bought out tickets and got on the bus immediately. After the bus got to Santiago, we had to change to another bus that would take us to the airport. In total the journey lasted almost 2 hours, but it went by quickly because Louis, Nigel, and I had so much fun together. I love those two guys because they really are like my brothers and I can laugh and talk to them about absolutely anything.
We never run out of conversation topics, even if we’re just spending the whole time making fun of each others’ weird accents (Louis is from New Zealand and Nigel from Germany). When we finally got to the airport we were actually the first ones there, so of course Nigel decides that he wants to smoke a cigarette. We go outside and he takes rolling paper and tobacco out and starts rolling his own. As soon as he lights the thing, Larkin and his mom arrive (his mom is the president of Rotary in Santiago), and Nigel has to hurriedly put out the cigarette and act like he wasn’t just breaking a huge rotary rule. Larkin and his mom went in to wait in the check in line and we waited for everyone else to arrive. The rest of the Santiago kids all arrived together in a bus. We were about 20 in total that came to say goodbye to Larkin. We all waited in the airport talking while Larkin was in line. It was kind of a weird mix of happy and sad because we were happy to all be together again and wanted to laugh and joke and just catch up, but at the same time we were all conscious of the fact that Larkin was leaving. When he got out of the check in line, he came and talked to us for a while. We just sort of joked and talked and there were so many people that no one really got to talk to Larkin for that long which was kind of better because it didn’t allow for things to get too overly sentimental. When the time came and he had to go through security, he came around and hugged each of us, and I passed him a letter I had written him. Then we walked toward the security gate and he came around and hugged us all again and told us how he would never forget any of us, and how we weren’t allowed to forget him either (as if I could forget any of these amazing people). Then as he was walking through security, we all screamed the Chile chant, and held up our hands in this gang sign that the exchange students had made up on the south trip.
By the time he left it was getting kind of late and we all had long trips in public transportation (it seems to be a mark of an exchange student that we all know how to use public transportation better than Chileans) to get home, so we all said goodbye. It was really sad seeing Larkin go, not because he was like one of my best friends of anything, but just because he was the first of us to leave. We all arrived together, went through the struggles of exchange together, and it’s just weird to think that one of us is already gone now and in about 4 months we will all be back in our countries, scattered so far around the globe that we’ll have very little chance of ever being together again. Nigel, Louis, and I were kind of done with thinking about all the emotion and sadness and stuff, so we were almost slap happy in the bus back to Rancagua. I like being such good friends with the guys that they make super inappropriate jokes around me and we can all just laugh together, and that’s basically what we did the whole ride back.
We arrived at Terminal O’Higgins at like 10, I bought some tea because my throat was killing me and I was coughing a lot, and then Louis dad picked us up and dropped me off at my house. I took a shower and went right to sleep.

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