Holidays

I think my best holidays has been in Parral, it's a town near Talca and Chillán. Parral has always been my vacation spot. I used to travel with my parents and brothers, we traveled to a place a little far from the village and we camped in a small forest next to the river. We set up tents, fire, makeshift kitchens and that was it, we cooked in the fire and ate under the trees and then went swimming in the river. When we made these trips we went with my uncles and cousins, they are too many and they are all men! I am the only woman! but even so I forced them to include me in their adventures to the forest. Now it has changed a bit, because my parents and my uncles bought plots near the place where we used to camp, right now my uncles and my parents are building their houses in that place to move. Anyway we continue traveling to Parral in the summer, the big difference is that now we stay in the small houses they have built, but we keep going to the river to swim, I enjoy with my cousins and we talk too much all night long seeing the stars, as there is not much light you can see hundreds of stars, it is beautiful.

A country I would like to visit

Since I lot of time, I’ve always wanted to visit Japan, it’s a very beautiful and interesting country. The culture in that place is so fascinating and the landscapes it has are hard to believe that they are real, but maybe it’s better if I explain why I think this. When I was a little girl, I only know superficial things about Japan, like they ate sushi or they practiced sumo (which for me were just fat men pushing each other). I remember that one day I saw my brother watching “anime”, it’s a style of animation. he liked a lot, then I started watching the tv with him and I love it what I saw. Programs like Pokémon, Digimon, Sailor Moon are memorable, they had romance, adventures, drama, mystery and made you want to be part of that world. After of that, I discovered beautiful movies, like Sent to Chihiro no kamikakushi or Hotaru No Haka from studio Ghibli. The magical stories they tell are amazing and are things I’ve never seen before in my life. They talked about magic and social problems, but in a beautiful and innocent way. A child could never understand until the grew up. I realized that these TV shows and movies have a something in common, they were created by Japanese. The I began to study more about their culture and traditions and I discovered that they are as magical and special as the stories they create. They respect and appreciate little things that in my life I never stopped to thing, like the morning sun o small sounds that we use to express like “mmm” when we saw a delicious food or the simple fact to doing something that gives us life without the need to give us “success” in life, actually they don’t relate success to money or marriage like the adults from Chile. The success is obtained by doing what gives your life, there is a term for that, called ikigia. I want to live in Japan for a long time, it’s my dream. I want to learn from them, to be able to appreciate life and the small details of our life and give up my ego (this is something that is also related to ikigai) and stop thinking that I must have expensive things to be successful. I want to learn to be humbler, to connect with nature and with different religions like them and to be able to use that magically fill the world of a child as wwll as an adult.