Now that I'm a year older...

I figure I should update a little bit today :)

I had been meaning to update this earlier this week but we just had our first crazy week where all the professors decide that the same week would be a great week for everything to be due. So I had two and a half papers to write (one half being a joint group project), my first business in Spanish exam based on a series of readings, and of course the normal course work of reading poetry and short stories in Spanish and interpreting those. That in itself wouldn't have been too horribly bad, but I also had my mind going in a billion different directions thinking about all of the current and future things that are big and important in my life. While I won't go into the details of that, suffice it to say poor Adam had to sit and listen to it all trying to keep up. In his words he was going 33 in a 35mph zone and I was going 80 in a 65 mph zone.

There is one thing that I had on my mind last week that is relevant to this blog and is quite important and exciting in my life right now, and that is travels. We have booked our plane tickets for a couple of the trips we've been planning in the next few months and are discussing a few others.

Next weekend it looks like we will be heading to Mendoza, Argentina. Right now it seems like a small group, but I really don't mind that. We're looking at about spending three days there, leaving Viña Thursday night and arriving Friday morning and then leaving Sunday night arriving back home on Monday morning. I don't really know the full details of the weekend, but the one thing that I will be pushing for is wine. Mendoza is Argentina's wine country, and they have this lovely system of bike wine tours that I will not let pass me by. Not much to explain about it because it's just as it sounds, you rent a bike and bike to a bunch of wineries, take tours of them and sample wine all while getting some fresh air and taking in the beautiful countryside and scenery.

Following that (for now), we'll be flying to Patagonia for a weekend in mid-October for a visit. My friend Mia is the planner for this trip and has found some pretty fun options for us to do. When we get there we'll spend some time exploring and busing to our lodging destination, and on the Friday that we get there we're going to go Kayaking and potentially horseback riding depending on our finalized plans. For the rest of the weekend we will be busing an additional hour away to stay in Torres de Paine where it looks like we might be renting tents and camping it out at the National Park. Sounds like a good deal to me!

Finally the last trip that we have booked for sure is to Peru - probably one of the trips I am most excited about. We will be spending the entire weekend at Machu Picchu and the other ruins around it. It's amazing that I have seen movies, documentaries and pictures of these places of the old empires (Inca, Maya, etc.) and now I finally get the chance to see it for myself. Unreal. If I had to choose one trip to do here, this would be it. Especially since the option to visit very likely won't be around much longer as it sounds like they will be closing Machu Picchu to the public for preservation purposes. I will make sure to take lots and LOTS of pictures of this.

We're still working on plans for Brazil, Courtnie and I are planning on staying in Rio. We were hoping to go the week/end of the 22nd of September but there are no flights available, so we still have to figure that out. We hope to still go to Buenos Aires, but that will have to depend on financial situations of everyone. Then there's Osorno still maybe, although I haven't spoken to my friend Manuel in awhile, and I'm pretty sure a bunch of people want to go up north to the Atacama. Again, another trip that I would die for, but we'll see what happens. I'll keep updating my travel plans as I make them and will of course share everything when I come back from them.

I think this is all that I can write for today without making this too long, or going into another subject. I will hopefully be updating again in a few more days. We're going to Rabuco tomorrow with CIEE for a day trip, so if there's anything exciting in that I will share it with ya'll.

As always I hope everything is going well. Love to you all.

~De