Hiking around

Teaching is still going well, after I realized that there is only so much I can do to help students learn three weeks of material in one class. I had students who showed up for two or the six classes and well, big surprise, they did terrible on the first quiz. We'll see how my intermediate students fare tomorrow during their first quiz.
Last weekend I headed to Viña del Mar for some hiking at La Campana. It's located roughly between Viña and Santiago and provided us with a healthy challenge as we attempted to summit the peak. Unfortunately it took us longer than expected to navigate taxis, buses, subway, and then another bus, so we had to stop about 2 hours short of the top. But we plan to head back in a couple weeks and do some camping at the bottom so we can head up first thing in the morning. Of course we celebrated with a big bbq Saturday night and had a great time enjoying the food and drinks.

(The hiking crew, senior picture pose)


(This was taken during what may very well been the end of third quarter in Madison for "Jump Around"

(Christmas card 2009)
In domestic news, Angie and José-Tomás moved into the apartment so we now have a 1 year and 3 month year old in the house providing entertainment at all hours of the day. It's really fun. Angie is Oliver's(my "brother") girlfriend, and José-Tomás is their son.
This Sunday I'll be going to the Chile-Brasil soccer match which should be wild. This is a World Cup qualifying game. I know that doesn't mean much to most American's, but in the rest of the world, it's a huge deal. The tickets have been sold out for a couple weeks now, and only about 2,000 $300 tickets are left. The game starts at 9:00 pm as well, which will make it even crazier. Normally the big soccer matches are in the early afternoon to avoid problems with drinking and partying(think Badger football games) but they scheduled this game for late because historically Brasil is not as comfortable playing in cooler temperatures. Talk about home field advantage.
The flowers are out lining the streets, and everyone is getting super excited for the September 18th celebrations. Since day one, I've been told about how amazing that week is, so I'm joining the rest of Chile in building up excitement.


(The clearest I've seen Santiago in six months. This is after a day of rain. August 28th at 8:30am. By 2:00pm the smog was back)