Getting to know the church

Saturday night and Sunday morning have been dedicated to getting to know our nearest neighbors and new family. Saturday evening Wimon and Aldebar, one of the men of the church, took us on a tour of the building. Casa ACU makes up about a third of the old El Chana coffee company building. The rest of the building is the El Chana Igelsia de Cristo and some apartments that one of the preachers and sometimes other members of the church live in.


After we toured the lower floors, we headed up to the roof. It was right at sunset and was really beautiful. I've included a picture of El Cerro that is the monte in Montevideo. It was a really warm evening and was a perfect time to be up on a roof. Although, I must admit to being a killjoy and telling some of the boys to quit climbing on things and contemplating jumping from one high scary thing to another.

When we came back down off the roof it was time to hang out with the youth of the church. It is not a big youth group, but there are several students willing to hang out with us even though we speak bumbling Spanish. What's nice is that the youth has now reached the age of the ACU students. Most are now between 18 and 20. Diego and some of the others started introducing our students to mate. Our students liked it better than I expected. Several went out today to buy their own mates.

If you have a bunch of high school and college age students together, clearly you should feed them pizza. And oh man was there pizza. I felt like it was a bit like the story of the 2 loaves and 5 fishes. We all ate until we were full and I think there were still 12 basket fulls leftover. :) The Uruguayan kids did a good job spreading out up and down the table. It took a bit to get everyone talking. But everyone soon got braver and the fun commenced. I was sitting across the table from Natalia with whom I am Facebook friends. We have chatted online several times in Spanish and sometimes English, but once we were sitting across from each other, it took awhile for us to get started. Of course I was talking to myself saying, "Ok, Autumn, you can do this. Just open your mouth. You have to break the ice." Once I did, things were good. We took a picture of everyone together, unfortunately my only picture is a little blurry, but you get the idea.

Today it was soooooo great to be back at church. It was really fun to see everyone. I know I understood things better than last time I was here especially at the beginning. I'm still really struggling with understanding people in general. A lot of it is that I have such a hard time focusing when someone is speaking directly to me. Too much panic... I know I've only been back 3 days... I'll get better. :)

After church, the Walkers, Rachel, and I went to eat then to another ferria. It was fun walking up and down looking at all the random stuff in street market. Then we headed to a grocery store named Disco. From what I can tell the Disco's are the nicer grocery stores, some of them are really fancy. The funny thing about the one we went to today, is that we could never find it last time. People tried to tell us where it was, but no one found it.

Tonight we are going to have a devo with the youth from church and have an English church service later. Tomorrow we start classes... I'll actually have to start earning my keep.

The ACU Games

I know I already wrote a long entry today, but I just briefly wanted to share a bit of the fun silliness we had tonight. I'll tell you more about our official activities which were also fun later.

Most of the students, Rachel B., and I had watched the Disney version of Robin Hood. For some reason after the movie, we ended up in the exercise room.

First there were things like a chin up contest between Josh and Ben. Rachel W. decided that bowling needed to happen with the little plastic bins.

Matt and Kate had a weight lifting contest.

Rachel W. and Kate practiced a little ballet.

Then the real silliness began. It started innocently enough with just kicking around a little ball, maybe trying to keep it in the air. Then someone decided to make it a mixed cultural experience so we started kicking around a futbol and throwing around a football. And then at some point a big yoga ball was added. Anyway, it was so fun to see everyone just laughing and carrying on playing elementary type games and just having a great time together. They were really impressed that Rachel B. and I played with them.

For all the great cross-cultural experiences, I think these are the sorts of things that really make study abroad fun.

Getting to Know You

Days 2 and 3 have been about getting to know each other and the city of Montevideo. Friday morning we had a hot breakfast, then had a house meeting. We discussed fun stuff like rules and policy of CasaACU. The students did great. Afterwords, Wimon lead us in a time of discussing what we are excited about, scared about, and how we can deal with our fears best.

Some of the students at the base of the statue of Artigas, the national hero.

After lunch, we headed down to Ciudad Vieja, the Old City. After pointing out some of the key sites, Wimon broke the students into groups and let them go. The had a list of things they were supposed to see for one of the classes. The students got a chance to look around and explore the our area of the city. Ciudad Vieja is a straight shot down the main road, 18 de Julio, to CasaACU... but it is two miles.

I hung out with Rachel. We visited part of the old city, including the cathedral. Then we walked down to El Rio de la Plata and sat at the on the wall overlooking the river. Then we started back down 18 de Julio. We stopped at La Ciagale's so that Rachel could have the great experience of ice cream in Uruguay. We got to sit out on the deck in beautiful sunshiny weather and people watched. It then hit us that we were being paid to be there. Its a tough job, but somebody has to do it. After awhile, we headed back the rest of the way back to the house.

Later in the evening, I decided to head to the grocery store to pick up a few supplies. As Rachel and I were walking out, several of the students were coming in. When they heard where we going they asked to tag along, so we had an adventure at the grocery store. While there the students decided they should fix dinner together, so they figured out supplies to have pasta and a sauce. I think they had a really good time figuring out how to cook and eat together.

For dinner, Rachel, the Walkers, and I went out to discuss business. Believe it or not, while we discussed many topics, we did actually discuss business. We went to a really good parilla and ate meat, meat, and more meat.

Saturday:
This morning we went to Punta Carretas Shopping and the ferria near by. Punta Carretas shopping is a high end shopping mall. The ferria is an open market where one can buy all sorts of things, clothes, crafts, mates (mat -ay a drink, not a person to marry), fuits and veggies. After walking around a bit, the Walkers and I came home and had some soup Rosalinda made. It was really nice. The students came back and we all sat around and talked.

Eventually this afternoon, I had to sit down and work on getting stuff ready for class. Que triste. My computer, the projector, and my writing tablet are all communicating, so I'm ready for class on Monday. Maybe I should look over my notes a bit more...

It has been another gorgeous day. The students are doing so well. They seem to have a great attitude thus far, which really makes things fun.

Tonight we are touring the church building then having pizza with the youth from church. It should be great fun.

Safely Here

Well, we made it. The trip in several ways was more exciting than we expected, but also better, so we can't really complain.

Everything went without a hitch getting to DFW. When we went to check in however we had some trouble with the fact that our plane tickets made it look like we were going to be in Uruguay for more days in a row than allowed without a visa. This isn't really a problem because we are going to other countries, but it led to a couple of tense hours while the study abroad office worked things out. It was all good in the end and we just did our waiting outside of security instead of inside. We did miss out on lunch... ah well. I was really blessed to have Rachel Brown, the student coordinator for Study Abroad, with me. It was really nice to have someone to take much of the burden off when it came to the whole drama. But for as tense and worried as we were for a couple of hours, we made it to the gate with 10 minutes to spare!

The flight to Miami and our time in the terminal finally getting some food was uneventful.

Our next two flights were both flight 943. So we were supposed to fly to Montevideo with a stop in Buenos Aires, which was going to give us a three hour layover in B.A. Well just as everyone was getting seated, the pilot comes on and says that there is some issue in B.A., so they were going to fly us to Montevideo first. That meant that we were going to arrive 4 hours earlier! Luckily they told us in time that I could contact the Walkers and Kevin to be sure the Walkers knew to come get us. Ah... the beauty of an iPhone.

The flight to Montevideo was fine. We all made it out and through passport control just fine. A few of us had some of our bags looked through because they thought we might have non-prepackaged food. None of us did, so it was fine. One of Dara's bags didn't make it. It should be here tomorrow. The Walkers were there to pick us up. I was really excited to see them!

On the way to CasaACU, we stopped at a park that overlooks the city to take pictures. Oh have I mentioned that it is gorgeous here. It is unseasonably warm and is in the 70's. After visiting the park, we headed on to CasaACU where we had room assignments and lunch. Mariella and Beatriz (who is filling if for Raquel) had empadas ready for us. That always makes life better.

After lunch we were broken into teams to do a scavengar hunt in the local area. I tried to not to help my team too much... but we did win. I'm not sure whether I was an unfair advantage or not. :) I did do the whole challenge with out a map.

Its a little surreal to be walking around the neighborhood. In someways if feels like I never left. I'm really blessed to be back.

Tonight we are going out to dinner and then we get to SLEEP!

Here We Go Again!

This is just a quick post to say that you've found the right spot. :) I'm in the office trying to finish up lots of last little things. Its funny how I thought I had a lot of time to do everything, so I kept goofing off... well now its time to finish up.

I have 16 students going with me. It seems like a really fun group. They seem pretty laid back, so that will make things nice.

Our schedule for Wednesday is:
Meet at school: 10 AM
Departure ceremony: 10:30
Actually leave campus: ~11 AM
Flight #1 DFW-Miami: 5 PM
Flight #2 Miami - Buenos Aires: 11:10 PM
Flight #3 BsAs - Montevideo: 12:15 AM (Thursday)
Arrive in Montevideo (if flights aren't horribly delayed): 1 PM on Thursday!

It should actually be almost exactly 24 hours from when we leave ACU to when we arrive in Montevideo, that is if we don't have any delays.