¡CHILE! ¡CHILE!

So it's been awhile since I was together enough to write to you. But this is going to be a sober week, I promise, so I can think a little better and may even have some semi-intelligent things to say. There were three days this week when I did not sleep at home--but that meant super-hot-knock-you-down-with-water-pressure showers at Katie's three days in a row.
I saw the sunrise over Santiago twice this week, too. The first time, on Thursday morning, I was taking an impromptu salsa lesson from Samantha (La Reina de la Salsa in Sacramento) on the 13th floor of an apartment building in El Centro (Katie and Lelia's place), with beautiful views. Then Sunday morning at 7, I rode my bike across town with my housemate Marcelo after a party in this abandoned house in Las Condes. Beautiful morning.
But of course it was a very special party Saturday night because Chile, if you did not know, won its first gold medal in the Olympics in the history of this country (there's interesting history to that, too--I'll tell you later)! So that day, they won in doubles tennis, and the streets were crazy enough to wake me up from my nap and get my ass out to party. Hence, the mini-Critical Mass with four other kids as we toured the city on bike. First we went to an art exhibit for a friend who was graduating from art school, which was super cool, and then to various people's houses, and we ended up in Las Condes, to the only cool building in that damn comuna.
And then, crazy enough, Chile went on to win the gold medal in singles tennis the next day. If I hand't been so exhausted, I would have gone out to the party in the streets at Plaza Italia, where todo el mundo is after a successful sporting event.
Yeah, so instead of sleep all day yesterday, I went out while the game was going on, to do my favorite activity in this city, which is walking and getting lost. At the party the night before, my new friend Katerina told me to check out the Plaza de Armas on a Sunday, because it's more like Lima than Santiago. Buena onda there, as it turns out. All the Peruvians in Santiago (of which there are about 50,000)--OK, I exaggerate a little--go to mass at the Plaza on Sundays, and it turns out that there are hardly any Chileans there. So there were all these market stalls with traditional Peruvian crafts, and Peruvian musicians performing, and even a couple of llamas thrown in for kicks.
Remind me to tell you about the cafès con piernas next time. I have a mountain of work ahead of me for today, and my Chilean history/culture class starts tonight. Wish me luck with sobriety!