Cold Showers and Seaweed Stew

Let me start of by saying that I am a person who enjoys the shower. I will somtimes spend fifteen minutes of more just sitting in the hot water thinking. It´s something I have always enjoyed. Now, in Valdivia, I am have to sacrafice that simple pleasure. In my cabaña all of my water is heated with gas. I have to turn the gas off when I´m not home, and when I´m sleeping lest the pilot blow out and I die or something unfortunate like that. There isn´t much time that I´m home because of school. So, I don´t get much hot water. In fact, what hot water I do get can best be described luke warm to cold. If you combine this with the fact that I only have time to shower in the evenings, when my bathroom is as cold as it is outside, you get a Ryan who doesn´t get nearly the same enjoyment out of the shower as he did before. So my showers have been cut down to about two minutes maximum. Not that I´m complaining, as my dear sister pointed out to me, I am living in the lap of luxury comparitively. This is merely an observation.

Another observation I have to make is about the change in my diet since I got here. In the states I subsisted on a diet comprised of frozen pizza and burritos. Vegitables were not on my menu, except for the occasional salad, and fuit had about the same standing. However, since I arrived Estela has been kind enough to invite me over to the house for lunch every day. This is nice because in Chile the main meal of the day is lunch. Not wanting to seem ungrateful I have been eating everything that she puts in front of me. This include many different vegitables and a lot of fruit. Notably, I tried my first brussel sprouts the other day. I was not a fan, but I gave it a try. While that was a new thing for me, I think the most notable thing I have eaten so far has been seaweed stew. Now, I have eaten seaweed before, usually in sushi, so that´s not such a big deal. But this wasn´t your normal leafy seaweed, this could be better described as kelp. Thick, green, salty tubes of kelp. I was hesitant at first, it has a distincly salty/fishy smell. But, I tried it, and to my suprise it was pretty damn good.

So I am trying a lot of new things, and eating healthier here than I did in the US. I´m enjoying it a lot so far and I´m excited to continue learning new things and experiencing this culture. On friday I think that I´m going to go on a tour of the surrounding area with some of the intensive spanish students from asia. I´m excited to see what there is outside of Valdivia, I´ve been to the coast, but I know that there´s a lot more to be seen around here. That´s it for now, hasta luego.