Hello!

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving break. Or in the case of those not celebrating turkey day, that yo uhad a good weekend. :)

I just returned from a month in Chile. I'm now in Rio, but will be catching a bus tomorrow afternoon for Salvador. Looking forward to two intensive weeks of capoeira!

Chile was a lot of fun. I spent most of the month in Santiago living with my great aunt Ida and uncle Arturo, with a host of cousins nearby. I studied up on spanish, managing to relearn just enough to communicate and to thoroughly screw up my portuguese. Also took cueca lessons (which was entertaining) and a little bit of flamenco. They stuffed me with good food, especially at a couple of barbeques and my cousin Claudia's birthday party!

Santiago is remarkably like Los Angeles: same climate, smog, lots of sprawl, tons of arts, and masses of spanish speakers. With the gigantic advantage that it sits right at the foot of the Andes, giving it an amazing vista and plenty of water. Other than dance classes and getting to know long lost relatives, there wasn't all that much I was interested in doing in Santiago. I visited several of the museums, but I'm just not a big fan of museums. Climbed a couple of the cerros and looked out over the city. It was pleasant. Really, I spent most of my time reading through as many of Auntie Ida's books as I could (she has a great english language book collection).

My last weekend in Chile I visited Valparaiso, which was fantastic. I mentioned my plans to travel to the coast to my flamenco teacher, and so she called up her friend, Carolina, who lives in Valparaiso and arranged for us to meet up. I had an amazing stroke of luck and hit the four day national dance festival. Carolina is a professional modern dance teacher, so she arranged for us to meet up with some friends and go to the municipal theater for a free concert. It was mostly modern, with a couple humorous pieces, a beautiful routine performed by blind women with colorful scarves, and ending with a fantastic breakdance troupe. After the concert we hung out for a while and then went to a disco where we happily danced until they closed at around 5am. I slept in very late and had lunch with Carolina's extremely friendly family before catching a bus back to Santiago. Great trip in all, but I need to go back and see more of the coast. For that matter, I need to visit Patagonia some day as well!

I finally got pictures up on my website, so I implore people to check them out so I can feel like all my work was for a good cause. ;) http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~tmartin/pics.html Oh yes, and my camera was stolen, so those will probably be the last pictures for a while, although I'm working on a replacement.

Abracoes,
Tara :)

PS. As usual, if you don't want to recieve these letters please let me know.