I'm a star!!

Hello dear readership!!

I write to you on a momentous occasion...I finished with finals!!! All I have to do is turn in an essay tomorrow and I am done done done. Chilean style. I am beyond proud of myself for writing no less than 5 full length papers (5 pages and up) all in Spanish in the past 2 weeks. Today I had my last exam and I just finished up the last paper.

This week has been a lot of lasts. I had my last day at the school volunteering and had the last of my classes. All have left in Santiago is really this weekend! It is impossible to believe how fast the time has gone by. Have I really been here almost 6 months? However long I've been here, this place never stops surprising me! Yesterday, I was in a movie!!!

Through a Chilean friend I heard about an American movie being shot in Santiago that was looking for gringo extras! I thought what the hell and sent an e-mail in. Whaddaya know! I got chosen! Me and another girl on the program named Heather went yesterday and spent the day on the movie set being extras! The extremely funny part is that the scenes we were filming were supposed to be at Columbia University in New York, but since they were already in Peru shooting and it's way expensive to film in New York they decided to film all the NYC footage in Santiago! The scenes we participated in were the scenes at "Columbia", actually on the campus of La Universidad de los Andes in Santiago, Chile. Anyways, we ended up in 3 different scenes. We'll see if they make it into the final cut! Either way it was a fun experience (and they payed us!). In case you're curious the movie is called "The Green Inferno". Even though I'm usually not a big fan of horror films I'm gunna go see this one for sure.  The picture is of me and Heather in the special shirts they gave us to wear...Sadly we didn't get to keep them.

In other news this weekend I will spend mostly packing up. I leave for a week long trip to Peru on Sunday with my friend Margaret and my room needs to be all packed up before I go. After I get back I have a few days here and then head back to the USA. It's a mixed bag of feelings. On the one hand I can't wait to get home and relax, see my family and eat the wonderful food offerings that the US of A has to offer. On the other hand I've come to feel comfortable here and even when I'm frustrated or getting tear gassed I'm learning so much. I'll miss that my first and last conversations of the day are always in Spanish (and most of the conversations in between come to think of it) and just the fact that I'm here living in Chile. And I'll miss my host family so much. Lots of opposing feelings.

But before leaving South America it's off to Peru! We're flying to the north-most part of Chile and then busing it to Cuzco. We'll go to Machu Picchu (!!!!!) among other things. I promise at least one more blog post this semester telling all about it!

SO, to all of you at LC right now GOOD LUCK ON FINALS!! And as always please send me any questions or musings to smiller@lclark.edu.

Love from Chile,
Sara