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Entertainment

Since we didn't go anywhere for winter vacation, and Mom and Dad were super busy with work, we had to entertain ourselves with more art projects. First, more beads and crafts for sale at RJE's "shop":

Here's a nice one for $300 pesos:

Much to choose from:

RJE has also been busy selling more drawings to Dad. Her cash register, as you can see, is filling:

The money's not all from sales, though. She's taken it from Dad's change bucket, which is mostly full of one-peso coins that are worth less than a penny.

RJE is a pushy salesgirl, and tricks her customers by saying that "ordering" something is not the same as "buying" something. So you have a choice of ordering one of her drawings of the Andes Mountains for only 10 pesos, or buying it for 500. Of course, it's cheaper to order it, so you order it for 10 pesos.

Then, when the drawing is ready, you have to pay the 500 anyway, so it ends up costing you 510 pesos.

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After we saw the movie "Ratatouille," I wanted to draw all the characters. RJE and I went to the Disney website and found out that the director of "Ratatouille" also directed the movies "Cars" and "The Incredibles." We haven't seen "Cars," but we LOVED "The Incredibles."

On the "Ratatouille" site, they have many videos and pictures of the characters. I drew them on paper, colored them, and cut them out.

RJE said I should have a "Ratatouille Gallery," so I hung a piece of string across our bedroom door and clipped the pictures on it with clothespins.

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Since we like to play card games such as hearts, war, Uno, etc., RJE and I had the idea of making our own card game. We made up lots of characters and drew them on little pieces of cardboard (from cereal boxes).

On the bottom of the cards, RJE wrote the name of the characters and what powers they had. Some of them can rob houses, lose things, order someone to do something, or be invisible.

The idea was that we would use these cards sort of like the card games that some boys play at our school---but made at home.

When we have more cards, it will be more like a real game. And we'll have to invent some rules.

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We went to see Harry Potter #5! In English, and the theater was fuller than for the other two movies we had seen before. It was mostly teen-agers, and no one RJE's age.

When the movie started, everyone was talking, and you could see people's cell-phone lights everywhere. Some started saying, "SHHHHH!! Shhhhhhhh. ¡Ya, po! ¡Cállate, @##$%%#! (bad word)."

Throughout the whole movie, there was a group of teenagers talking, throwing things, moving from one row to another, shushing other people, and leaving and coming into the theater. It was VERY annoying.

I liked the movie, better that Harry Potter #4, which was not well done. Some of the characters in #5 didn't look how I'd imagined them, though. They are all so much OLDER!

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Have you ever heard of a water? This is a new Chilean word I've learned. If you ask someone here ¿Dónde está el water?, it doesn't mean you want to drink some water. It means "Where's the toilet?" A water is a toilet!

Dad says the word comes from Water Closet (W.C.), as bathrooms used to be called in English a long time ago. I learned about el water in a joke that the jokester in my class told. He's always making up all kinds of awful, disgusting jokes. They all have at least one bad word in them. And if it has a toilet in it, it's not a clean joke!

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We bought some pants for me because the one pair I'd brought from home was starting to look too worn out. I got two pairs because all the sales here are 2x1 sales. The pants are different here. They have a different cut, very low on the hip, as if they were panties instead of pants. Mom says it's "the new youth fashion," very low to expose the belly and the tattoos that so many people have right above their butts.

This is what the pants look like:

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In Virginia, we are never exposed to smoke, smog, or the exhaust from buses.

Here, it is a different story. Every time you go out for a walk that you are trying to enjoy, you can smell the exhaust from cars and big buses, smoke that is just in the air, and a lot of dirt. Here are two photos of smoggy Santiago, with a brown cloud all over the city:

But what gets on my nerves the most is when there are people walking right in front of us, smoking a cigarette and blowing all the smoke right into our faces as we walk behind them. We often have to cross the street to walk, smoke-free, on the other sidewalk. Also, there is a lot of cigarette smoke at the crowded bus stop we pass on our way to school.

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RJE is becoming very popular, being invited to a lot of her friends' homes, even to a sleepover! Her Brazilian friend says that when she grows up she wants to be a singer and live in the United States, and she is always complaining to her mother that RJE already knows English and that it's not fair. RJE's Brazilian friend will have to learn English before she can become a famous singer in the States.

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I just finished reading my first book in Spanish for school---"Una Niña Llamada Ernestina." It is about a boy, Ernesto, whose parents go to Germany for work.

While his parents look for a place to live in Germany, Ernesto has to stay with his grandmother in Santiago, going to a different school, where he meets a girl called Ernestina.

Although she is young, she says she is writing a novel about her father's adventures on different planets.

The book is 172 pages long, and I had to underline many words that I didn't know. But I was able to understand what was going on in the story. In August, there will be a test about this book in my Language and Communication class.

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