As promised, here´s what happened on the family reunion to Ojo de Agua. Um, it was awesome. I wish I would have been able to speak more Spanish there, but I was focusing so hard on understanding everything that I didn´t have time to formulate my own thoughts most of the time. I guess that´ll come later, right? =) We left Santiago a little after 8 Sunday morning and drove the hour to Ojo de Agua. The actual event was a joint graduation party for two cousins who were both really nice. There was quite a bit of family there, and people trickled in and out all day.

One of my host sisters named the farm ´Animalandia´ with very very good reason. We´re talking love birds, cockateels, guinea hens, chickens, 17 turtles, 3 pigs and 13 piglets, a couple of goats, and hundreds of roosters. Why roosters? you might ask. Well that´s mostly due to the ´national sport´ (besides baseball) of cockfighting. So all over the property are single rooster wire cages, most of them with a rooster inside. The noise at that place! I´ll tell you what. More quiquiriquis (how you cock a doodle doo in Spanish) than I´ve ever heard in one place. My host sisters´ uncle is into cockfighting and from what I gathered has his own ring. This is something that repulses and fascinates me at the same time. Of course, it´s a huge waste of roosters that could be used for meat or eggs. But it´s possible that the roosters can sometimes be eaten after they die in the fight, in which case it wouldn´t be as terrible. I tried to figure this out, but no one I asked knew the answer to the question. I´m still not a fan. But I´m debating going to a cockfight, just to do what the locals do.

Anyway, the best part of the day was definitely the fact that Doña Dedé showed up, stayed for several hours, and talked almost exclusively to my host family and me. It was interesting to talk with her about things that weren´t directly connected to what everyone talks to her about, namely the killings of her sisters and what´s happened to her since then. But I got the picture to forever display in my future Spanish classrooms. She´s 83, but you´d never guess it by talking to her. I could write more, but I feel like it´s sort os a topic that either you care about or don´t, so if you are interested in this, we´ll talk later. =)
But yes. Overall it was a great experience. I´d do it again. Except my host sisters aren´t really what you´d call good drivers, and I had pretty decent stomach aches going both ways from their puslating of the go pedal and their frequent abrupt stops for pot holes. Oh, shoot, and while I´m going at it, they always put the radio on scan and leave it there for 10 to 15 minutes at a time. So I´m going crazy int he backseat listening to 10 second clips of music. Yeah, but if that was the worst part, I do suppose it does show that I am bad at predictions. Just like I predicted in Saturday´s post. =)

And since I realized I haven´t posted many pictures on here, and I haven´t shown anyone my host family at all , you get a bonus picture. Here I am yesterday in Ojo de Agua with my host sisters. Angelica is on the left and Carmen in the middle. They´re both going to New York on Saturday for 2 and a half weeks. Not so happy about this, haha. They´re fun.