much better

Introducing the new, more stylish Barullo. More little changes to come. For a summary (I just typed "resumen" which is summary in Spanish...) of the weekend: Friday night I went with Vale to her favorite café, Granos y Hojas. It's a very cute little boutiquey type place, with fantastic hot chocolate and an impressive array of tea and coffee for sale. I really liked it. After that, we went for a couple of pre-gringo-party drinks, then to Líder for our contributiong to the party, then to the party. It was technically Jesse's birthday, but it turned into a real live Michigan-Wisconsin gringo party, with beer pong and flip cup and everything. But with a Chilean twist, seeing as a lot of Chileans came and there was also longaniza on the grill, and pisco sour. Vale had a great time, too, which was good because I had been a little afraid that she'd get overwhelmed by the gringo-ness. I forgot, however, that she works with 20 and 21 year old North American college students for a living.

We woke up at 4 in the afternoon on Saturday and did practically nothing before popping Zoolander in at 11 and falling asleep right after it ended. Sunday, however, is proving dramatically more productive. I got to Rodrigo and Cecilia's around 12:20, thanks to an endless wait at Cantagallo for the local bus. The class went really well, Ricardo and Dani are both good students in their own way. Ricardo is hard working and enthusiastic; it's obvious he really wants to learn English, but he's not as receptive to the sound of it as Dani. She dallies and drags her feet, but she's got a great ear for pronunciation and I generally only have to correct her once or at most twice before she says the word with barely a trace of an accent. Vale got here around 1:30 with Cecilia, having gone first to church and then to the grocery store. Now we've all eaten lunch and the coffee is just finished. Oh, and today I also read a very interesting essay about the convergence/divergence debate in developed capitalist democracies. I think it's also the first thing I've read in which the authors come out and say, "we're institutionalists," and also give unambiguous, easy-to-remember names to the institutions they're attempting to describe. Refreshing. Anyhow, still got lots of reading left today, but now it's coffee time.