New explorations

So this past weekend was a very fun-filled weekend.  It all started on Friday night, which was my little brothers’ 13th birthday party.  We celebratedit at home with some family and a bunch of their friends.  It was nice for them and they loved their gifts (I got them each a soccer ball- each was like special for them) so that was good.  Saturday morning, bright and early, Mercedes and I went to volunteer with a program called Un Techo Para Chile (A Roof for Chile), which among many other things builds houses and community centers in the poorest areas of the city/country.  Most of these areas are on the hills where there is no running water and very limited electricity, which they also try to provide.  Well this weekend, we went to actually take down two of the houses they had built previously and move them to another location (because of “property” disputes).  Now when I say houses, I don’t mean a full blown house like you are probably thinking (like they do on extreme home makeover or anything like that) I’m referring to a bare minimum house, which is more similar to a shack than a house (about the size of a two-car garage to explain the size).  So we went and worked all day to first empty the houses, then take them down, which is much harder than you think because we had to be very careful with all the materials since we have very limited materials and needed to reuse everything we could!  But all in all it was a really actually fun day and I got to climb on the roof of the house and help take out all the nails and take the roof down piece by piece!  I was terrified but it was fun and I met a bunch of really nice people!!

Sunday was my host dad’s mom’s 70th birthday, so we all went to her house to celebrate with her and ate so much wonderfully delicious food!!  It was nice to meet his whole family since I had met my host mom’s family a couple weeks before.  Then on Monday, my host mom took Mercedes and I on a tour of the hills of Valparaiso.  She took us up all the hills and to see churches and landmarks that have been here for hundreds of years.  Valparaiso used to be one of the main ports of the entire world (a long time ago) but once the Panama Canal was built and cargo ships no longer had to go around South America, its popularity died down quite a bit, but still many of the “firsts” of Chile are in Valparaiso for this reason (the first fire house, Chile’s Armada, first place to buy/sell stocks [which I don’t know the name of hehehe], and many other things).  Then she took us (by accident really because we got lost) to a lake in a town called Curauma, which was so beautiful.  We ended the tour and the day with a stop to eat at a small hole-in-the wall restaurant where we bought empanadas, which were beyond delicious!  She told us that they were the best in Valparaiso but they are almost like a secret because it is a place where you have to know to get to it because if you don’t you’ll just pass it by.  This weekend is my host mom’s birthday and I’m going to a wedding that one of my classmates invited me to because she’s (obviously) getting married.  So I’m looking forward to that!!