man,i'm bad with updates.

Aside from plannig trips and saying goodbye to friends, I haven't been doing anything too exciting lately so I'm just going to write about my plans for the next few months instead: Next Monday December 11th is Jenna's last day in the country and my last day in the house so we're going to throw a despedida party that night and then I move out the next morning! god that's soon. I'm going to take 10 days and travel alone to the north of Chile to La Serena, Vicuña, Atacama valley, and then to San Pedro de Atacama . La Serena has areas of really cold water in the ocean off the coast that are so cold that Antarctic penguins live there. vicuña is supposed to have the most beautiful sky in the world and is where Gabriela Mistral is from and in the Valle de Elqui there is a really nice observatory. There are really neat salt flats north of that before you get to the desert and then there is the desert! (Any grapes you guys in the US are eating right now probably come from around here). Apparently the world's highest volcano is also there, something i just read. The Atacama desert (about 24 hours north of chile) hasn't had recorded rainfall since the spanish conquest and is the dryest place on earth. I'll be there around the summer equinox which is when the Altiplanic Inversion happens causing huge rainstorms in the mountains that rush down the dry gorges and flood everywhere. yes! In the desert there are lots of mummies (well i guess they're not there anymore) but they are from a few thousand years even before the ancient Egyptian ones! There is also Antofagasta which is a big city in the desert with lots of beaches and rocks and San Pedro de Atacama has a dry salt lake and hot springs and lots of caves that you bike through the desert to get to and is near Valle de la Luna which is supposed to be really creepy like the moon and has geysers which burst out of the ground at sunrise every morning because of the drastic temperature change. I doubt I'll make it past there but above that is also Iquique and Arica and then bolivia! So there are a lot of options for places to go during those 10 days. Then I'll come back to Santiago the 22nd and leave with 8 Swedish people to spend 5 days in Pichilemu on the beach for christmas. Then I'll come back to Santiago on the 28th and go to Valparaiso for the 28-1 for New Years. Valparaiso is apparently the place to be for New Years and they have tons of festivals and free concerts and music and theatre going on the whole week before. Then on the 3rd or 4th I'm going to Ecuador with Beth to wwoof on an organic farm there. I haven't decided which farm yet so I can't say where in Ecuador or exactly what I'll be doing but most of them have vegetable and fruit gardens, do a lot of reforestation and seedsaving of medicinal plants used by the Quechua people in the area and have community projects too. more on that i guess when I decide where I'm going. I'll be there until around the 25th or around the last week of January and then 2 of my Swedish friends, Ola (yes, his name is hola) and Carolina, are going to meet me somewhere in Ecuador, where we'll spend some time travelling and then cross into Colombia and travel there until the end of February. So far I don't know what we're doing there yet except visiting the sister of a woman i live with who lives in Colombia on the border with Ecuador. Then the last week of February we'll take buses home for a week stopping in Peru and Bolivia a little bit to break it up. Then first week of march I move to Buenos Aires (or possibly stay in Santiago and get a new apartment), parents hopefully come visit the second week of march for a week or 2 and then school starts again the second and third week of march! man, i am going to be broke.