Piquarkín

Feb 26th 11:40
So I am sitting here watching people dance. I should join them but I am too goddamn tired. Where am I? you might be asking. Well, this is an old boy scout camp that is now open to the public. There are cabins with about 10 bunks each, which, as you can imagine, get very crowed with a group of girls and their two bags each. We got here (don’t worry I took photos on the way) and then had a lunch of pollo y papas fritas. There was also fresh fruit that had a flavor which was really weird to see but defiantly appreciated. After stuffing ourselves we wanted to get some exercise. Most of us decided to go swimming but I stupidly got dressed for running and then was told I should not go. As a result of my lack of bathing suit I learned how to throw a boomerang, this turned out to be a semi-fail though. Después de eso we had a fire where we symbolically burnt our fears about our AFS Chile stay. It was a large fire for a short event. I was just forced to dance. Good night!

February 27th 3:45AM
I hope you know something is already wrong by looking at the time. My first earthquake. I woke up feeling like I was in a carnival wagon like the one in the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnasus. I thought that our cabins were movable and this was the camps way of being time efficient by transporting us while we slept. But quickly I realized that the scenery outside was not moving. Once coming to this realization I decied that we were in a earthquake and said the first thing that came to mind which summed up to be of cuss words. Most people said they felt like they were in airplane turbulence during the quake, not a caravan...
Never the less, I am safe. Everyone is. It is so frustrating not having internet because I want to tell my host family and everyone else just what happened and that I’m safe. I’m worried that either everyone will know al about it and need to reach me or know nothing about it and not believe me if I told them. AFS is luckily calling both our host families and our regular families. I hope there is not much destruction in Santiago. I should have taken a photo of the camp before because now the back of the middle canopy thing has collapsed. So those are the pictures that you will see. We just had one and it just felt like we were all on sea legs, more like California quakes. Thus far its been a fun experience I just hope that there are no strong after-shocks. And jez it’s cold.


February 27th 7:20AM
We finally moved inside. The electricity went out so they waited until it started getting light to check out this big empty room. So outside it was freezing They brought us blankets from the beds. By the end of the night everyone had at least one blanket but it was still surprisingly cold. The estrellas were beautiful though. Through out the night I counted five aftershocks none of them were anything very significant though. I left my camera in the room so I didn’t get any pictures of the piles of the bundled up exchange students or the sunrise. The sunrise was funny because I had fallen asleep to a clear starry sky and woke up about an hour or two later to milky gray sky. The sun rising behind the mountains created a beautiful silhouette. Now 6 aftershocks. I just heard that 47 people have died. Bridges (puentes) in Santiago have collapsed. The epicenter is a bit father north then Concepción and it was an 8.8 there. Here they say it was about an 7.5. The Serbian-Austrian is texting his family and they said that a tsunami is possibly coming to Viña del Mar. I’m a bit worried about my host family because I have not heard anything from them.