Winter Break (I´m in the Southern Hemisphere, It´s opposite from home)

Today marks the end of my first half in South America. Tonight I fly to Australia to visit some friends and then hop over to Fiji and see the folks. I know, this is a difficult life, but I´ve come to grips with it. I´m just going to try to do the best I can to make it through. Survive, day by day. It´s a rough life, but somebody´s got to do it.

I´m really excited to head on to Australia. While I´m not going to get to see the WA crew (The Heussos, Jezza, Kim), which is a bummer, I am excited to see some other friends (Jimmy, Gemma) that I haven´t seen in a while. I think seeing Jimmy is the funniest because I going to Australia to visit an Irish friend that I met in South Africa. I´ll get to his place for the first part of the Aussie run, then see the folks (plus reynnie and scottie), and then hang out with Gemma. I´m not going to get to see Gemma on the first go round because she´s living the tough life in Greece and won´t be back until I´m around the second time.

I feel a little guilty about doing this. I´ve told a few people this and they are like ¨you are going to Australia and then coming back to South America? Why?¨ I guess I don´t really have any other explanation apart from the fact that I lived at home last year (well for a while at least) and I saved enough where I could do and I´m not sure when I´m going to have opportunities like this to spend three and a half weeks in Australia and Fiji (I´ve said this before, notably to go to Fiji the first time during midterms, I got the professors to begrudgingly let me take the tests at different times. One of which was particularly curmudgeonly about it. I guess for good reason, I mean I was leaving a test to go to Fiji, not a lot of sympathy expected from that. Little did I know that I´d be going back multiple times, to the point where it has become an annual family trip). But I guess you never know when this lifestyle is going to stop, when I´ll get a longterm job. Just taking advantage of what I can, while I can.

But South America will be missed. I have, however, started to read in spanish (read malaonda by Fuguet and El Aleph by Borges, El Aleph is really good and I recommend people find it in English) and went and bought some books today to keep my spanish up for the break (because I´m probably not going to be speaking it). I´m pretty psyched on my books, I had some help in the bookstore and the guy that helped me seemed so excited because he got to help someone who is relatively intelligent but has had no exposure to any of the spanish literature so he just went around showing the best books and his favorites. We probably talked through books for 20 minutes until I selected three. None are by world reknown authors (no Marquez, Allende, Neruda, Borges, etc.) but within the latin american community they are notable. One of the books won the book of the world award (that is way more impressive sounding than the Pulitzer or the Nobel prize award). If I like them I´ll write them down so people can read some good Latin American books. Anyway, I´ll miss it here, so I´m just going to kill a couple of hours before I go to the airport by thinking of all the great things of Chile.