I'm finally starting classes tomorrow, for which I'm very grateful. As nice as it is to have free time, there's only so much I can do alone in an unfamiliar city without getting a bit stir crazy. I'm excited for all my classes- Psychological problems of childhood and adolescence, Social doctrine of the Church (Church = Catholic Church, since I'm studying at a Catholic university), and one other religion class which I haven't entirely decided on. At the moment I'm signed up for a class on the Trinity, but it's supposed to be one of the most difficult religion classes, so I may switch to Contemporary history of the Church or Ecumenism. This is in addition to my middlebury cuaderno class(cuaderno means notebook in spanish and for now it's just keeping a journal in spanish) and 15ish hours a week with the first graders at liceo Pedro Montt.

It'll be really interesting to hear things from a Catholic perspective in my classes, which I'm sure will be very different from what I've learned so far about Christianity in Chile. My host family is Protestant, and we've talked a lot about what it's like being Protestant in a predominantly Catholic country, and their views of the Catholic church (which my host mom doesn't consider to be Christian, although I haven't quite figured out what she does consider them to be). Chichi, my host mom, just finished writing her thesis about the history of Protestantism in Chile, so she knows a ton. And I attend church with them, a bilingual church that's part of the Vinyard denomination, which is more charismatic than any other church I've been to (meaning that they talk a lot more about gifts of the Holy Spirit). It's certainly different than the Lutheran church, slightly more similar to the Baptist church I attend in Middlebury, but generally unlike anything I've experienced before. I haven't been to a Catholic church yet, though I plan to.

I think I have a fairly different opinion of Catholic-Protestant relations than most people here. My general opinion is that we're all Christian, and the differences, though interesting, are not nearly as important as what unites us. But from what I've heard so far, it seems that for hundreds of years, the Catholic church here has labeled Protestants as different and somewhat undesirable (similar to how Catholics were treated in the early United States), and the Protestants have responded mainly by saying "fine, then. we're proud of our differences!", completely rejecting the Catholics and emphasizing their differences over everything else. As a Protestant attending religion classes at a Catholic university, it'll be interesting to see how I fit in.