Goose

If you have ever been to a foreign country you know that there are difficulties with communication, adventures with food and transportation. Chile was no different for me. I was in the country of Chile for seven days doing what i love most and that is snowboarding. I have snowboarded for about seven years now, but i have always been confined by the lack of snow in the summer. Not any more……this past winter my mother Birdbrain told me that she thought i should do sometime wholesome this summer……now i have no idea what she thought i would pick, but i thought to myself….heck ill go snowboarding in the summer. So i talked to my cousin tim and was like hey ask your mom if you can go to chile with me for a week…..he did. Just like that we got the ok and we were off.

This time around there was nothing exciting in the airport to tell….so ill skip to the good stuff. We arrived at Portillo Chile about noon on Saturday the 7th, after 27 hours of travel. I go up to the front desk greeted by a nice hola, i say hello hoping that by some miracle he speaks english. He greets me back by saying hello…..thank god….He does the check-in and starts to ask if we are from the states and whereabouts. I tell him that i am from Massachusetts. He was like nice i grew up in mass, what town? I say Acton and he nearly falls over in disbelief. I grew up in Harvard he tell me. So here i am like 5000 plus miles away from home and standing next to a guy that grew up no less then ten miles from where i live. Strange.

I won’t bore you with my snowboarding stories i’ll let the pictures do the talking on that front. But let me put it to you this way, people have always said that a picture was worth a 1000 words……well i am going to tell you an experience is worth 10,000,000.

Every night there was live music in one of the bars in the hotel and every night my cousin and i would go there and grab a table and then meet up with some of the people that we met. We would talk about things like the iraq war and politics and what we want to do when we get out of college. But the best conversation we had was about the toilet. Yes i said it, THE TOILET….i am sure that you have all heard the phrase that the toilets flush the other way in the southern hemisphere. We got into this very large debate about what way they go in the United states because none of us could remember, and then we all went to the bathroom and flushed a toilet to watch the way it spins. If you can, imagine 4 guys busting in to a bathroom all just to watch what way the water went…..it was quite comical. We could never finish the debate because none of us knew what way the water spins in the states. So we went back to bar and enjoyed the music.

My whole week in Portillo was the most amazing experience of my…..i would go back any day in a heart beat. I feel like i could write for days but its so hard to put in words the friendships i acquired the rides i had and fulfillment i gained…..i can put it in words i………………….wow…..just wow.

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