Classes and Some Other Things That Have Taken Me by Surprise

I love my classes so far. the profs are super chill and the material so far has been in english. my interpersonal communication class is only me and my friend erin so today was mostly conversation about the slides of information that we read. i love that! i have been craving good conversation but it is difficult to have at my house because of the language barrier. so english conversation is something that i have come to cherish. even conversation about communication at 10am when i havent eaten breakfast yet is a special time for me (and i do not like to do ANYTHING before I have eaten breakfast). but i am a little bummed because i think i only get to take 15 credit hours while im here so i wil have to drop my international relations class. this class is my sueña (dream)! it is solely talking about the world and culture and economics. and the professor is super chill and knows a ton of english slang, which is hillarious. so i think im going to talk to lizette and see if i can maneuver things so that i can still take the class. its strange to me that while im in this new culture learning a million new thing every day, is when i am most desiring to be a student. i would have thought that i would have been so overwhelmed with chilean things to learn that i was going to dread classes but it is exactly the opposite. there are about 5 classes that ive heard people talking about that i wish i could take. but alas, my schedule is full, my time is strained, and my brain is close to bursting with new information.   

And here are the other things that have surprised me:

-I have started to crave oranges. I began eating them here out of necessity but then they became one of my favorite foods
-my mom seems to be prejudiced against chineese people. everytime a chineese person does an event in the olympics she does what we all did when were kids pretending to speak chinese `shing shong wha wong`. she just mutters fake chinese jibberish and then laughs at them. i have begun to love her for this because its just too funny.
-my mom reminds me sooooo much of Aunt Sylvia. when she talks about her granddaughter her voice inflection sounds exactly like Aunt Sylvia does when she talks about Aiden.
-i learned this morning that chileans dont cook with a lot of onions or garlic because garlic breath and onion breath is absolutely repulsive to them
-the worship music at the church here is amazing. they have an entire chorus of people that sing, a full band, and screen that projcts the lyrics of the songs. for some reason i expected them to play cheesy 90s american worship songs on a cd player
-yesterday there were 2 women with cement and a ton of bottle caps decorating some giant cement flower pots near the metro. in the states this would have been considered graffiti and they would have been fined. here they collect tips for their work and the people consider it art