Thursday, July 3

Today was an interesting day at school. Sally and I decided that it would be fun to see each others’ schools, and today she came to mine. It was a little awkward at first, but I just introduced her to all my friends during breaks and she sat with me during classes and it was fun. The only thing I don’t like about having my exchange student friends meet my Chilean friends is that the Chileans always end up comparing us. Who is prettier, who speaks better Spanish, who is nicer, stuff like that, and it is really annoying and unfair especially when they have only met the other person for like 2 seconds. It happens when I meet other people’s friends and when they meet mine and none of us like it, so we basically avoid introducing each other, but sometimes it is fun, like it was today with Sally. After school, we didn’t want to sit through language, so we decided to try to leave early. The guy at the front desk saw me coming, said that if I didn’t have a note there was absolutely no way he would let me leave, and turned us away immediately. We went out the front and decided to search the perimeter of the school (which is completely walled in) for a place where we could escape. We found a couple interesting spots, but I was pretty chicken about it because I was imagining how embarrassed I would be if we were caught. We went to the back of the school behind the track (we had to pass by Maxi running on the track and all the teachers eating lunch in the cafeteria) to a hidden spot with a low wall that came to a little above our heads. Sally looked over and said it was a lot, so she threw my bags over the wall and boosted me over. I looked and saw that in fact it was a person’s house and that their front gate was locked, so we would have no way out once we jumped the fence, but my bags were already there, so we had to try out luck. We jumped over, and as we landed in the person’s backyard, we realized that there was a big dog there. Sally started yelling for the person in the house. A startled and confused woman came out, we explained that we were exchange students escaping from school and had had no idea that this was a house, and she opened the lock on the gate for us and let us out. We ran down the street, filled with the adrenalin and terror of what we had just done. We went over to Louis’s house, where the exchange students from Rancagua were going to have a “last get together”. We made chicken burgers and sat around Louis’s table and talked about life for like 4 hours. I gave them each (Louis, Sally, Katie H, and Nigel) photos that I had printed of us with letters on the back, and flags from the rotary club of Laguna Niguel. We said goodbye around 7 and Sally and I went back to the San Martin house. We cooked brownies, talked to Monse, and watched Back to the Future with Maxi. Around 11, we went to sleep in Sally’s room.