La Serena, a Soccer game and Sanchez

In the short amount of time that I've been writing this blog I've learned two big things. You can be the guy in his room writing a blog but not doing much more than that. Or you can be the guy out doing things, all sorts of exciting things that unfortunately usually don't include being diligent with your blog. It's a difficult balance to be anything in between. I've found that when I come home tired and just decide to go to bed, I say to myself "I really should be writing my blog". And when I finally get down to writing it I say to myself, "Look at yourself, you're all shut out in your room writing a blog!" For this reason, this entry will be unusually long because I guess I've been the guy out doing things for a while and finally now I need to switch to the blog writing guy.


The last week has probably been the best week so far so I'll start from last weekend. It was Thanksgiving weekend in Canada, and although they don't celebrate it here, we did have 

La Serena

Monday off, not too sure why. My family decided to go to a city about 6 hours to the north called "La Serena". We stayed in a cottage that was about 5 minutes away, it was really nice, plus there was a pool about 10 steps away and a fusball table about 15 steps away (Taka Taka). During the weekend we ate the amazing seafood that you can get on the coast of Chile, along with visiting the sites around the city. It was a really nice trip, a great way to "celebrate thanksgiving" with my host family and their family friends.
Tuesday night, Chile was playing Peru in soccer in Santiago, as one of the qualification games for Brazil 2014. My host dad had asked me if I wanted to go, which I obviously had said yes to so we were set to go that night. When I got out of school at lunch, my family got a call from Alexis Sanchez. If you don't know who he is, Alexis Sanchez is a soccer player who plays for Barcelona, and is probably the best player in Chile. Due to that fact that soccer is religion here, he might as well be president. He also happens to be my host family's nephew. I got to not only meet him but eat lunch with him and get lots of things signed by him. Although this may not seem like a big deal to everyone back home this was an amazing thing for me to do and any Chilean who hears that I've met him is instantly jealous.
That night I went to the match with my family. Chile was up 3 nothing and in complete control of the game when Peru scored two quick goals and soon we discovered that a corner of the stadium had been reserved for the Peruvians who now were making their presence felt. Luckily, Chile got a goal, see below and ended up winning the game 4-2.

I loved going to a real soccer match in Chile, im sorry but TFC will never cut it again. Between chants of Chi Chi Chi le le le, and some others that if I translated them, i'd have to make this blog 14A. 

Some of my classmates post-guerra

That night we got home at about 2 in the morning so I went to school a little late. When I arrived I was confronted with "la Guerra". My school, much to the displeasure of the teachers, has a tradition where every year, the grade 12s and the grade 11s have a war of water, paint, and possibly flour or even oil. I walked into the school courtyard and about 100 students in smocks, garbage bags or even hand made turbans hurling water balloons and paint balloons and flour packets at each other. This was a whole new level of culture shock I don't think ill ever experience again. It turned out to all be in good spirits and actually was really fun, although the black paint in my hair took a long time to get out. 
Other than that the week was pretty quiet, not much to talk about. I am having an incredible e time and if my blog posts become more and more infrequent, and longer and longer, its a good sign.



Later days,
Stuart