It has been a year...

I find it hard to believe that somehow I have been in Chile for a full year. I never would have believed it if anyone would have told me that I would be working in a copper mine, writing for an English newspaper.

It is hard to really get a sense of how I have changed in the last year. I think that when your living in such a different situation, a foreign country, the military, whatever, and coming from somewhere completely different like a flat university town, there is really no good point of refference to see exactly how you have changed. I really use people for all that, but the people I know here don't know me as I was before coming. So it really is difficult to say how I have changed, besides being able to understand an increasing amount of Spanish, I think that isn't all, and that much more is in shift and I won't really get a sense of that until I set foot in Iowa City once again.

I reall have been lucky, I have met some really cool people so far in Chile, from Carolina, to those I met traveling through Peru, crazy artist types selling jewewlery in La Paz, English teachers, Chileans of all sorts of different types. I have been able to see some pretty cool stuff, from Machhu Pichu, Lago Titikaka, the copper mine, the ocean on a regular basis, I have now lived in a large city for the longest period ever, one day I will have to stay a bit in a US city to compare it to Santiago.

I wasn't really sure when I left the US whether I had made the right decision, at first it was a bit difficult to feel comfortable with what I was doing, and even now I am not 100 percent stable, but I don't know if I ever will be.

So this weekend I will have to celebrate this milestone, along with my 27th birthday...