Friday, May 16

Today was a special day. In Chile, there is a national holiday called Students’ Day, and in my school, it is celebrated a lot. We were all allowed to come to school in normal clothes. A lot of people had planned to go over to someone’s house, sleepover, and get drunk at like 6 in the morning so they could come to school drunk. I arrived at school to find about half the people normal like I was, and the other half completely hilarious and crazy. A few of the girls were twerking on the wall of the classroom at 7:45 in the morning. Before school, Sebastian Gonzalez, the teacher I had chosen as my senior, came to find me and give me a present. It was a framed picture of him and his seniors (me and 2 of my classmates). It was the cutest gesture, and felt so special that he had thought of me. All the students got together in the gym for a big performance that the teachers had planned for us.

The theme of the act this year was World Cup, and all the teachers were dressed up in Chile shirts and crazy hats, they came in on floats like it was carnaval, and they danced a few songs (like Waka Waka by Shakira), and it was basically the most awesome and hilarious thing ever.

After the act was over, we stood around the classrooms talking for a while, and then a few of my friends and I went down to the football fields where each generation was having a bunch of mini soccer games. We watched for a long time and talked, and then school ended at 12:50. Fernanda, Vicente, Pablo, and I then walked into the center to get lunch. We went to this hole in the wall restaurant that served hot dogs and sushi, and we got sushi. I was a little wary of it, but it was really tasty. I really love hanging out with that group of people because they always make me laugh so hard, even if they are making fun of my accent half the time. I had to go home pretty quickly after lunch, because Sally was coming over so we could get ready for a gala together. Sally’s friend Eduardo is a first year student in the Chilean Air Force academy, and he invited her as his date to their annual gala. Eduardo’s friend Nicolas also needed a date, so Sally got to invite me. I had met Nicolas once when he came over to my house last Sunday, and he was a really cool guy, so I wasn’t nervous about going to this thing with him. I am pretty good at getting ready for formal events, and I don’t really need that much time to do what I want to do, so I finished with like an hour to spare. Sally however, was really stressed out and kind of needed everything to be perfect, and I had to work to calm her down. By the time Eduardo and Nicolas came to pick us up, we were totally ready.

When we walked downstairs, it was kind of weird weeing them all dressed up in uniform, but I guess I should have expected that. They were still the same cool guys I had met before, and after we said a quick goodbye to my parents, we had a great time talking and laughing in the car on the way to Santiago. When we arrived at the base, I was a little nervous, because this event seemed really formal and I wasn’t sure I knew how to behave appropriately in English, let alone Spanish. Nicolas was really cool about it though, and kept making jokes about how he didn’t know what he was supposed to be doing either. We walked around arm in arm, and he presented me to his friends and a few of his superior officers. I just had to smile and say hi and that I was an exchange student from California a bunch of times. There were probably about 200 people there, all of them air force people in uniform and their dates. There was a toast with champagne, and then we stood around talking and drinking champagne while listening to saxophone music. It would have been the most boring thing ever if it hadn’t been for the great company we had. However, Sally and I are very inexperienced drinkers who hadn’t eaten a single thing since lunch (because we thought the event included dinner), and we began to feel the champagne taking a little effect, so we excused ourselves to go eat a few of the hors devours that were on the tables. We laughed at how stupid the two gringas looked over in the corner without their dates shoving mini empanadas into their mouths.

When we returned to Eduardo and Nicolas, the saxophone music had stopped and they had turned the lights in the room off, converting it into a sort of discotec, with reggaeton playing. We wanted to go dance, but it was kind of awkward because reggaeton is not the kind of music you dance to when your date is in military uniform and his superior officers are also in the room. I asked Nicolas how we were supposed to dance, and he had no idea either, so we decided to go into the middle of the group of people dancing and just do what we would normally do. Now, I must reiterate the fact that I am not a very good dancer (and worse in the high heels I was wearing that night), but Nicolas may just have been worse than me. The think that made dancing with him so incredibly fun though was that he literally did not care what he looked like, and he just went all out and made a fool of himself, but he was so confident about it that it made me want to join in his dorky dance moves. We had a great time out there dancing together. We took a couple breaks when Sally’s and my feel just couldn’t take it anymore, but we basically danced the rest of the night. Around2, the party finished (they gave all the girls little animal stuffed animals with air force hat sewed onto them as souvenirs), Eduardo dropped Nicolas off at his house in Santiago (I was almost sad saying goodbye to him because I’d had such a great night with him), and then Eduardo took Sally and I back to Rancagua. I was so tired when I finally got home, that I just said hi to my parents and went immediately to sleep. I think my feet probably hurt for like 3 days after because I had danced for so long in heels (and it was against military protocol to take them off at any point during the night).