the south

I´m sitting in an internet cafe in a town whose name I have utterly forgotten at the moment. I´m going to keep this short and write more later, but here are the highlights so far: Friday night we bussed from Stgo to Concepcion. Eight or nine hours on the bus, I slept less than an hour. Saturday was fun, we saw some pretty things, went to a neat private botanical gardens in Lota, ate lunch in a restaurant on the beach, saw some other cool things and then got to our hotel. Ate dinner, then I started feeling bad, but soldiered on to a bar with a bunch of others. Left just after midnight and walked back to the hotel and commenced expelling everything in my digestive system. I had lots and lots of diarrhea all night, barely slept, woke up in the morning with more and then also threw up, just for kicks. It was delightful. So on Sunday, while everyone else went for a hike and to some Mapuche people´s house, I lay in bed, rehydrating and eating white rice and crackers. Fun times. But I felt better after that and ate with everyone last night. This morning we piled onto the bus again, went to a Mapuche school in the countryside, where we met a bunch of 5-8 graders, gave them some soccer balls, talked to them (I talked to a kid named Daniel, who was for sure the class dork; needless to say I liked him) for a while and then listened to them sing a Mapuche song and then sang ¨Twinkle, twinkle¨ and ¨This land is your land¨ to them (and raucous applause). It was all a little strange, I´ll write more about why later on. Lunch, gorgeous views of ocean and coast, one more stop for a little roadside crafts shop, back to hotels, shower, internet cafe. Now I´m going to stop, because I just passed the quarter-hour mark. Anyhow, point is that I´m having a good time and I really like the south; it´s gorgeous.