Chau chilenos :(

Alright, this is officially going to be the last one. I leave the day after tomorrow, and I'm still not sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, I'm really excited to go home and see everyone again, and be back to hot showers and normal food and my normal life. But on the other hand, I really don't want to leave behind my chilean family and my COPA friends and the beach and the life I've finally grown accustomed to down here. Last night, my host mom came in to say goodnight to me, and she left and came back in a minute later and gave me a huge hug and said, "It makes me so sad that you're leaving us. I would be so proud to be your mother, and she is so lucky to be getting you back." And then she walked out of the room really fast because she was crying, and I could hear her crying really hard in the kitchen from my bedroom. Wow, Saturday is going to be really hard for me. I remember how terrified I was before I left to come here, and now I'm a little terrified to leave. I mean, I will probably NEVER see any of these people ever again. I'm going to miss having Raimundo and Felipe around all the time. They cried when I went to Easter Island for a week, what are they going to do when I leave? I want to take them with me!!! But, I am happy to be going home. Our group bus leaves Viña at 4 pm on Saturday, and my flight from Satiago to Dallas is at 9 pm. I get to Dallas at 6:30 am on Sunday, and then I have a 2 hour layover before heading to Minneapolis, and I get home at like 10 or 11 on Sunday. I can't believe it's over. There were really really fun times here, and there were really really frustrating and scary times here, but overall I'm incredibly glad I did it. Would I do it again? No...not for 5 months. Maybe one or two, but 5 was a bit much. But if I had to go back in time, I wouldn't change a thing about the trip, because it taught me a lot that I needed to learn, and I'll never forget it. So, on that note, I'm going to end this, and I'll see most of you in a couple days! Chau!

Easter Island...yeah, it's ok to be jealous of me :)

So, last week Heather and I went to Easter Island, which is still part of Chile, but it's a 5 hour plane ride into the Pacific and is really close to the Polynesian islands. On our plane ride there, there were only like 40 or 50 people on our huge plane. During the flight, this guy from Holland, Maarten, came up to us and we all started talking and he turned out to be a really cool guy. We ended up all staying at the same hostel with connecting rooms, and Maarten therefore became our tour guide for the week since Heather and I have clearly no sense of direction whatsoever. Our first day there, we just walked around the island and took pictures of the famous statue things called Moai. There's a huge history on the island, and I even studied it in biology last semester, so it was really cool to see it all up close. The second day we decided to rent mountain bikes and ride around the island. Maarten was like Superman on bikes, and I was a little rusty since I don't think I've ridden a bike since I was like 12. And it didn't really help that there were no real roads on the island. It was mostly just dirt paths that consisted of rocks and hills and other things that could kill me. Flying down a steep, rocky hill on a mountain bike....not as fun as it sounds. After about 5 hours, I was so exhausted and my butt was killing me from the stupid bike seat. Sadly enough, we all went to a music concert that night and ended up leaving early because we were tired...at 8:30 pm :( The next day, at least I think it was the next day I don't really remember the order of things, we walked up to this volcano on the island. I know what you're thinking, but it wasn't as bad as the last volcano I climbed. It still took us forever to reach the top, but the sun was shining and we didn't have to use ice picks to climb this time. On our way back down, we were followed by this adorable little dog named Tequila, and he followed us for like 2 hours down this volcano, and then he disappeared into the woods and Heather and I were very sad to see him go. But, the next day we were in the hostel and we went by Maarten's room and he was like, "You guys, Tequila was by my door this morning!" and we were like, "Haha, very funny Maarten," and we didn't believe him. But, 2 nights later we were all sitting in our room talking, and guess who came strolling in? TEQUILA!!! It was the weirdest thing. Seriously, when this dog left us, we were about 2 miles from the hostel...that dog was amazing.
On the remaining days on the island, we went on a Jeep tour and on a horseback riding tour. And after all of that I was in paaaaain. Our flight home was delayed 3 hours (they only have 2 flights a day, how can it be delayed???), but we finally made it back at midnight on Tuesday. Now I am officially all packed up and ready to head out on Saturday :) :(