making friends and not fainting

So these past few days have been very up and down.
Since Friday I’ve been getting progressively sicker (but as far as I can tell its just a cold) which is never fun, let alone in a foreign country away from family and in the midst of my first week at school. Thankfully during the day I feel better so I’ve been able to attend all my classes, but at night I feel terrible and get little sleep. Last night was definitely my worst moment, capping a pretty crappy day, but today was much better. Backtrack: So yesterday was supposed to be full of fun; gymnastics in the morning then ceramics in the afternoon. I honestly don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t realistic. Gymnastics started with running laps in the gym for 5 minutes, then crazy calisthenics and leaps and skips. Then we moved into stretching, ab workouts and these odd handstand exercises where you had to kick your legs out and stand on your hands over and over again. Everyone in the class was sweating and many girls were having trouble-red-faced and half-heartedly executing the moves, but I started to feel absolutely “pesimo” or abominable. The tell-tale signs of losing consciousness, dizziness, nausea and blurred vision all converged on me at once and I knew I had to lay down. I spent fifteen minutes in a corner of the gym on the floor with my feet up before I felt better. I just kept chanting in my head, “I am NOT fainting in this gym! I am NOT getting taken in a Chilean ambulance for fainting!” Thankfully I didn’t faint, but I know I came close. The only positive part was when a very cute Chilean gymnast asked if I was ok and offered his water, but I was too out of it to respond coherently.

After realizing I had to drop gymnastics (I was waaay too out of shape for that class, and I’m not ready to bring myself to the brink of fainting three times a week in order to relearn back-handsprings), I had a nice Chilean lunch with my friend Grace; we sat facing the snow-capped Andes, people-watched boys with mullets making out with their pololas (girlfriends) and I ate an avocado and chicken sandwich washed down with fresh-squeezed pineapple juice. Gotta love Chile.

Then we took a circuitous bus/metro/bus ride to another campus for our art classes. I had high hopes for ceramics, which really means I was just hoping to mess around with clay and make some friends. However, again, my expectations were waay off. First of all, the class turns out to have been full, meaning there were no extra spots and the prof was very surprised that I hadn’t tried to register before hand-yes that’s the exact opposite of what I’d been told to do, but w/e… I decided to stay since she said sometimes students drop the class so I might as well hear the first-day schpiel(how do you spell “schpiel”??! spellcheck apparently doesn’t know yiddish). Turns out only one other student was a non-art major, and she was also an American, and the class was veeeery intense. We had a page long list of materials to buy, including parts that needed extra assembly and I was just really overwhelmed. I had also developed a headache that would eventually evolve into a migraine.

Ok, so that was terrible day #1, aka Monday. Tuesday was much better. I was scheduled for Ecology of Agriculture and Livestock(I think that’s an adequate translation of “Ecologia Agropecuaria” but I’m not really sure) and then Ecological Social Movements(again, rough translation) so I decided to wear my doc martens in solidarity with the environmentalists I hoped to meet. I got to my first class waay too early which was fine with me, so I sat outside and talked with a girl who’s majoring in Fruit production! She was very nice and I thought it was an auspicious way to start the day. I was right! Ecology of Agri/Livestock turned out to be super popular and according to the teacher there were 100 students! The teacher was really young, smart, and I’m really excited about the class. At first no one sat next to me, which made sense since a) there were over 100 seats to choose from, and b) like in most Universities, these students specialize in Agronomics and basically know each other well/have well-developed friend groups so they sat with their longtime friends. However I knew that my best shot at making friends the first day would be whoever sat next to me, so I kept hoping some nice girl would. Finally, just as class started, a girl did sit next to me. Half way through the class, when the Profe was speeding through her powerpoint, the girl made a noise. It was something between a “hmph” and an “ugh”-as in, god this class is boring or god I’m overwhelmed. I looked at her and smiled knowingly (knowing what, I don’t know…) and she smiled back. Then as class ended, and I was trying to formulate some sort of introductory comment, she said, “wasn’t that fast?!” and I happily said, “Yes!! I was hoping someone else thought so, and it wasn’t just me” and then we had a nice convo which ended with her kissing me on the cheek-the standard hello/goodbye amongst friends. So, mission accomplished, I have a friend in my class!!! Seriously, appreciate how big a deal this is. CIEE told us that it was KEY to make friends (on top of the fact that this is one of my biggest personal goals while I’m here) because the students know when tests are, how to find the reading material and get it copied from the secret-confusing Department-specific copy machines, etc. etc. The message was, if you don’t befriend Chileans you’ll be lost. So, now you can understand why I was SOOO happy that Rosia(Rosio? Not sure) kissed my cheek, signifying we were at least beginning friends.