Since the first orientation, the one thing I have been looking forward to more than anything else is our Rotary planned trip to the south of Chile. The chance to see all the exchange student again and go "the end of the world" was so exciting. We started off just me and Nikolaj, the other student in my city from Denmark. We left at the ungodly hour of 9am on a Friday to take the bus from Ovalle to La Serena. It took about an hour and a half, and then when we got there we had to wait another two hours for our next bus, which was, of course, late (by an hour) so we actually waited for 3 hours. But while we were waiting, we met up with all the exchange students living in La Serena. There are 8 of them, all from the United States except for one girl from Denmark. We also met up with the students who lived to the north of us, in Copiapó.
From there, we went to Villa Alemana, just outside of Santiago, to a little resort called Valle Verde. The same resort we went to for the first orientation in August. There, we had our half-way orientation. It was pretty boring, except for when we did the talent show. I, as a last minute thing, decided to play hot cross buns on glasses of water. Of course, one of the glasses broke right before, so it sounded more like (really flat note) cross buns. I didn´t win, but I did get chocolate. We all did because the chaperones told us we were the most enthusiastic group about the talent show. I guess the year before half the people didn´t do anything, and one guy stood up and burped the alfabet. I would have been impressed, but Rotary wasn´t. A boy from Antofogasta won for a song he wrote and played on the piano. It was about things he missed from home and things he liked in Chile, and it was hilarious because it was in Spanglish. Whenever he didn´t know a word, or he needed it to rhyme, he would just put in an english word or two.
That day, we also wrote a Spanish test. The first part was just an evaluation of our exchange so far, so Rotary could evaluate us as well as our clubs here in Chile. The second part was listening comprehension. It was actually really hard, because we only got to hear the passage once, and then had to answer questions. I got really worried about that part, but I didn´t really have to, because I got 100%!
So that was about all that happened at the Orientation. On the last night, we had to stay up until 1 am for the talent show, and at that time they proceded to tell us that for whoever was going on the trip to the south the bus was leaving at 5:30am. We all woke up around 5:15, rolled out of bed and fell straight back asleep on the bus to the Santiago airport. We all woke up in the airport, though, thanks to Starbucks. For me, my first Starbucks in more than 4 months. Our flight, of course, was delayed, but we finally left, all of us excited to start the trip.
