Enamorada de Chile

Its been a crazy past couple of weeks. On May 16, my Mom, her sister Janet, and our family friend Natalie arrived to visit for a week. We had an awesome time, and I was hugely blessed to be able to share with them this place that is now my home, this place I have come to love so much. It is really true that I have come to love Chile. The other day I was talking to my friend Justin from my program, and he was saying that he did not love Santiago right away, that it was more of a process of Santiago generally growing on him. I agreed that I felt the same. In my first weeks and months I was certainly having an awesome time, and loving the experience of being here, but I cant say that I loved the city from the very beginning. But while I did not walk off the plane in love with Chile, a general love of Chile and of Santiago has slowly sunk into me, leaving me standing here today wondering at what point my perspective changed and how it can be that this is now my home.

While showing my Mom and the girls around the city, it was at first really shocking to me when they didn't "get" Chile. They kept seeing cultural differences and responding like, "Yes, but if you did it this way..." After the first few days with them I had to change my perspective. I had had over 3 months to get used to the differences, but to them everything had changed all at once. I think I got a little too excited for their visit, because before they came I planned an intinerary for each of the days they would be here so that we could be sure to fit in everything they needed to see. This kind of stressed them out, as I set an inhuman pace and kept yelling back at them that if they didn't hurry up we would not have time for __________ (insert interesting Santiaguino experience here). I dragged them, wheezing, up hills with sights of the city, and made sure they didn't linger too long at museum exhibits. Needless to say, we returned exhausted every night to the hotel, and I think they came to loathe the itinerary. What can I say? I've got Goldsmith blood in me, and we always say that in our family we don't "enjoy" vacation, we "accomplish" vacation. And accomplish we did.

I spend the weekend on the coast in Valparaíso with my Mom, Janet, and Natalie, and they left on Sunday morning. Last week I had much less homework since I had just finished like 1,000 exams, presentations, and papers (not to be dramatic or anything). I enjoyed the week and also really enjoyed being in the city all weekend. I hadn't been home for a weekend in about a month, since the two weekends before were with my mom, the one before that in San Pedro de Atacama, and the one before that doing Techo para Chile. I am now really feeling successful in my Spanish. I can now listen to two people talk at once and catch most of it, and can write notes in my classes while still listening to the prof say something different. I dream in Spanish, and it is now such a part of me that I'm convinced I will be infinitely depressed when I get back to the States. I never want my time here to end!

Many of you have probably heard that I have been having some medical problems recently. Sunday morning around 4a.m. my left thigh went to sleep and never woke up. Obviously it really freaked me out that I couldn't feel part of my leg, so finally Sunday night I went to the emergency room after my leg being all "pins and needles-ey" for more than 12 hours. The doctors said normally something like this would be attributed to a pinched nerve, but the numbness I am experiencing is in such a large area that it would have to be 5 or 6 pinched nerves, which is very unlikely. The pattern of my numbness does not follow a specific nerve or nerves. This leads them to think that there might be more serious issues, such as Multiple Sclerosis or other spinal/cerebral legions or demilanization. I am going in for an MRI today and hoping that if there are spinal or cerebral problems, they are hugely visible to the doctors, because as many of you probably know issues like MS can go undetected for years. Anyway, I'm in pretty good spirits and trying not to freak out prematurely. We should get the MRI results about 48 hours after the exam, so I will let you all know later this week what I hear. I would really appreciate your prayers.

Anyway, I guess that's all the latest news. I keep trying to put new pictures up on facebook and the program never works, so I'm not really sure what to do about that. I hope you are all well there in the States, and enjoying the warm weather! I am definitely jealous since Chile is now moving into winter. Bendiciones!

Amy