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Halloween

For some reason I have a hard time understanding just how far away I am in this world from those I love. I think the fact that I talk to my mom a few times each week on the phone and the fact that I generaly feel connected, although not enough, with my friends, leads to my misunderstanding of how far away I am. This thought keeps coming into my head that I should go home for Christmas. I have to keep reminding myself that it is not plausible. Because it is about to be summer time here, the airline tickets are ridiculously expensive here. So yeah, not possible.
Last night was Halloween, and Marcela and I were laughing because I was practically back in the states. Halloween is not a HUGE holiday here but there is a good number of families who celebrate it. Marcela is definitly one of them. She decorated the house and put orange and black balloons outside the door. We made a costme for her daughter Flo, who decided to be Miss 17 (kinda like Miss teen). As the kids came to the door we, being Marcela because for the last few years I have been scared to hand out candy at Halloween, passed out candy. She ordered a pizza from Dominos (yep, they have dominos here) and we had pizza and coke for dinner. The only non-gringo thing about the night was the corn on the pizza. That´s right, here in Chile, corn is actually a popular topping on pizzas. Crazy huh?
I ended the night watching CNN and realzing that alot is going on in the States and in the world in general and I am very far away. Chile just feels removed from the world.
There was one moment yesterday when I was helping Flo get ready for the night whenI realized that the whole town was honking its car horns. It sounded like madness. My friend lives up on a hill that is generally seperated from the rest of the town, but I could hear the horns honking in total madness down in the town. A thought crossed my mind: what if there is a politicla revolution while I am here? But I don´t think so, not now at least. We are about to have the presidential elections and althogh the people are a little strange out their politics, I highly doubt there will be a BIG political revolution here. We are a democracy. Oh, and it turns out that all the honking, which lasted for a good twenty minutes, was because some sports player, I think tennis, won some game or match. Yeah, not quite something to worry about.

At the request of my mom, and I think it is a good idea, the name of the hostel in Valparaiso is Luna Sonrisa. It means Moon smile and you can look at the website at lunasonrisa.cl, the white door that you see in the picture is actually the bedroom I stayed in. Very nice.
Okay, I´m off. ¡Chao!

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