Single Ladies and Christmas time in Virginia

Ok, I should be kicked out of the blogging community for being so neglectful of my blog. It has been well over a month since I last posted and I have no excuse. I had plenty of exciting things happen, but I just didn't feel like blogging them. Now that I'm home in Virginia for Christmas with my family and my Chilean love, I feel like sharing.

Italo and I flew to Buenos Aires on Friday and spent about 22 hours in the city trying to find great Christmas gifts for my family with the small amount of money we have, but were not very successful. Then, we flew to Virginia and got in at 6:30am yesterday morning. Italo's airport experience was a nightmare and there was one point where I was hysterical outside of customs thinking my boyfriend wouldn't be let out of the airport. He was sent quickly to "C area" which ended up being a room of foreigners waiting to be inspected thoroughly. All in all, Italo spent 2 hours with Dulles Airport security proving he would go back to Chile at the end of the month. It ended up not being so bad since he's here in my house, but for a while I was terrified he would be treated horribly and would understandably never want to come back here again. Luckily, he was very relaxed and calm unlike me and we made it home by around 9:30am.

Now that we're both here, I'm enjoying everything. This is the first time in a long time my parents, my sister, our boyfriends and I have all been together. This will be our first Christmas all together and it's shaping up to be wonderful. It is so nice to come up to cold weather and Christmas decorations all over the town. My mom really outdid herself with the decorations this year because she was so excited to have us all home. The house looks amazing and feels like home. Our kitchen is stocked with delicious food you can't find in Chile and my parents even froze part of Thanksgiving dinner so Italo and I could make the yummiest sandwiches in the world.

Another thing I love about being home is watching movies and playing games. Last night, we all watched Love Actually which has become sort of a tradition for us and then Italo, my best friend A. and I kicked butt in a game of Cranium against my sister, her boyfriend, and my mother.

After dinner every night we always have champagne or more wine and inevitably sit around and quote movies and look up videos on youtube. As I mentioned in a previous blog about my sister C., she and I are master movie quoters, but we also love sharing funny youtube videos so last night turned into watching wedding dance videos to famous movie dances. The best one was a wedding where the couple did the Dirty Dancing final dance. They were AMAZING and Italo and I along with C. and her boyfriend T. are already practicing it (or, C. and I are practicing while the boys try to ignore the fact that we're already planning choreographed wedding dances). BUT, the best part of last night was another video.

Living in Chile, regardless of how much I love it, always means that I will miss out on some popular song or video or current event. This time, it means I lived in ignorance for about a month and missed the best new pop song and video plus the funniest parodies. I'm sure most people have heard the Beyonce song "Single Ladies", but I hadn't. It is such a fun and just all around great pop song. The video is great and Beyonce looks the hottest she ever has and the dancing makes you want to get up and dance (and possibly learn the dance for your wedding, haha). Now, you have to watch the original video first to appreciate the two, erm "interpretations"



ok, after watching that one, watch this guy dancing to the video:



and NOW watch Justin Timberlake backing up Beyonce on SNL (you can't see the whole thing because NBC won't allow it on youtube, but you get the idea:




So, I'm not sure anyone else will enjoy these as much as I do, but I cannot stop watching them and for anyone else who misses pop culture when living abroad, this is for you!

I probably won't blog much while I'm home (surprise, surprise), but I will post pictures of our awesome Christmas Eve party. I'll be wearing my House of Dereon shoes and my sister will be debuting her Chirstian Louboutin's (an early Christmas gift from her boyfriend T.) I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas (or Hanukkah or anything else).

Airport Thoughts

I´m waiting to board a plane to Santiago after almost a week at home in Virginia for my friend´s wedding (pictures to come). After about an hour of panicking about my bags getting to Chile, I am calm now and resting after running all over the airport in Buenos Aires. I have no money to buy food so I´m stuffing my face with the Halloween candy I brought back ¨for my students¨. I cannot wait to get home to my I., Olive, and apartment. But I am dreading going back to work because I´m afraid they took my classes away from me or aren´t going to pay me because I wasn´t here to turn in my hours. BUT, I will save the bulk of that worrying until tomorrow morning at 8am when I have my first class.

In the meantime, I can´t help but think about 3 lovely Argentine women I met on my flight from Washington to Buenos Aires. The first, I met in a panicked state while walking to my gate. She was screaming in Spanish and the information desk employee was begging for a translator so I thought I´d try out my frantic Spanish comprehension. I think I just cut it because this woman was yelling and sighing and running back and forth so I really had to concentrate to get all she was saying.

It went something like this (in translation, of course):

my girls, they took my girls!! the police...because of dolls!!! i was in New York and now I´m here and my girls!! We have to go home and the police have my girls and we bought those dolls and my pássport and I need to go to Buenos Aires!!!!

Finally, she got a call (from international police, I guess?) that her girls were being released from custody and when I saw her at our gate she was a totally different person and calmly explained that she and her daughters were basically stripped and searched and then brought into one of those little rooms all because they brought those little tiny snowglobes on. Needless to say, they´ll never go back to Dulles Airport because they were so hysterical and scared and it´s all because they accidentally brought something through security and then couldn´t speak English well enough to explain it.

Minutes before I met the first woman, I was in line at security thinking about how it had changed a lot and hired all new people since the last time I´d been there. This may have just been my particular line, but all of the employees seemed a lot meaner than usual and I heard several extremely racist comments told as running jokes coming from the NSA employees in the short 3 minutes I was there. I think it´s more than coincidence that I noticed those changes only to witness their product minutes later with the mother of the daughters who were detained.

This treatment of people is disgusting. I won´t get into details about my views on national security and the threat of terror (yet), but I have a problem with NSA´s changes after September 11, 2001, and I hate that 3 extremely friendly and wonderful women will never come back to the U.S. because of the experience they had last night.

I am grateful to have met them and then coincidentally sat next to them on the plane because they were so sweet and it´d be so nice to visit them when I´m Buenos Aires this December.

That´s about it! Can´t wait to land in Santiago!

Oh, and I voted yesterday! All I can say is take that, McCain and retarded Sarah Palin