¡Hola! The weather in Santiago has been beautiful the last couple of days! The sky is a beautiful blue, with no clouds (unless you count the smog) and lots of sun! It's by no means warm, but it's not super-cold either, except at night.

Melissa and I did some exploring this weekend. Saturday night, we hung out with Pilar, a girl from Chile who is a relative of some family friends of Melissa. Complicated? Yes. Anyways, she's really nice and is going to be studying English in Detroit this fall, so she practiced her English with us and we practiced our Spanish with her. We ate the most amazing ice cream (besides the ice cream in Rome of course) and walked to her house through a beautiful park next to the river. They have these really cool fountains with different colored lights that change - the fountains change too. It was really pretty! Then, we hung out with Pilar's family a little bit. We ate dinner at my casa and decided that we were too tired to go to the birthday party, so we talked with my family for a while and then Melissa spent the night. Sunday, we slept in, ran some errands, and then went to eat lunch at Pilar's dad's house. His apartment had an amazing view of the Andes. We also went on top of the roof to get an even better view. The top floor of his building has a heated swimming pool! Weird place for a pool, huh? Anyways, after lunch, I worked on homework and hung out with my family the rest of the evening. I had a lot of homework to do! But, it wasn't super-hard to understand, so I was fine. I am also working on memorizing 20ish new vocabulary words a day while I am here.

I'm beginning to understand the money system here. They use pesos, which are worth almost nothing. One American dollar is worth 535 pesos. Their smallest bill is 1,000 pesos, which is about two dollars. I was confused when I had to pay 300,000 pesos to stay with my family, but in reality it wasn't as much as it sounded!

Last night my hermanita (little sister) and I went up to the roof of the apartment, and I saw El Cruz del Sur (The Southern Cross) which is a constellation that you can only see in the southern hemisphere. I also saw a statue of the virgin that they have on one of the smaller mountains. Apparently, you can see the statue from almost every part of the city. It must be huge!

Well, I wish I could write more, but ¡ya es la hora a almorzar y tengo que irme! (It's time to eat lunch and I have to go!).