A half marathon and a sister

Well it's Monday and our class is now from 9-1 for the remaining two weeks, which made for a far too early alarm awakening but a much more tolerable temperature during class. I suppose the two main things that happened today, as you may have gathered from the title of this entry, are that I officially registered to run the Santiago Half Marathon on April 11th with several people from my program and my host sister who I had yet to meet returned home from her vacation.

I will first elaborate on the running aspect. I had kind of toyed with the idea of wanting to look into seeing if there was a half marathon somewhere down here while I'm here, but I had also kind of accepted defeat and figured I was going to majorly slack off on the running I have been doing so well at keeping up on this year. Suddenly yesterday, all the pieces kind of fell into place while I was out with some friends who run and suddenly we were all registered and a fairly large group from EAP is running the Santiago Half Marathon! I'm really excited about this, because I love the way I feel when I'm running regularly both mentally and physically but I am awful at staying motivated if I don't have a goal so this works out great! More so than ever before, my goal is just to finish it. Obviously, there are many things that are going to take priority over this, but if I can just run 3 times a week I know I can make it happen. Before arriving in Chile, I was worried about running as far as the air quality and safety, but I've run several times (obviously not in the dark) and been both perfectly safe and able to breathe which, you know, is always a good thing! Another advantage? Registration was 12000 pesos, which is only about 22 dollars since the exchange rate ROCKED today (528 pesos to the dollar). Overall, I'm super excited! Half marathon in South America woohoo!

So on to my new host sister! I was kind of nervous to meet her, just because I had become so comfortable being at home and was worried about rocking the boat. However, she's awesome! Well, to be honest I've only known her about an hour so far, but still. She is 19 years old and just got back from camping as a scout leader about 5 hours to the south. She's really talkative and I can communicate with her pretty well, which gives me more opportunities to speak Spanish while at home which is DEFINITELY a good thing since when I'm with my friends we seem to almost always speak English or Spanglish.

Which moves me on to the third point I didn't know I was going to make but have been naturally led to. I am once again torn between staying with Claudia and moving out, but definitely seem to be leaning towards moving out into one of the Residenciales or Pensiones. My reasoning is that I don't feel like I've been speaking enough spanish, and want to live with chilean students that are my own age so that there is more Spanish in my daily life. This is not to say I don't think I've improved at all since arriving, I just think that by having more of an opportunity to speak it things could move a lot quicker.

Other highlights of today included chatting with Malia in New Zealand, a great feeling run, another (unsuccessful in terms of purchases) visit to El Patronato, and homework.

So with that, it is nearly my bed-time so that I can wake up bright (dark?) and early again. I love and miss you all! Chao!