Things I will miss

1. Public Transportation. It's fun, cheap, and environmentally friendly.
2. The view of Valparaiso at night.
3. A country of people who honestly enjoy dancing.
4. Getting to the cafeteria everyday and finding out whatever one received for lunch.
5. Talking in Spanish every day.
6. The stray dogs.
7. My Chilean family and how much they make fun of me.
8. The super thick juice. Watt's tutti frutti.... yummmm
9. Avocado on everything. Who would have guessed it would grow on me?
10. Learning about the culture of a foreign culture, first hand.
11. People making out in public. I think it's beautiful.
12. Statues of O'Higgins (their famous founder guy)
13. People thinking I'm interesting because I'm blonde.

Last week

I only 4 more days! ahhh. I think my next post will be a list of things that I will miss about Chile.
So last week I got to see two of my friends from home within three days. Sean came visit in the evening on Wednesday with a girl who is staying at the same hostel as his group. We walked around and the girl got a chance to see Valparaiso at night which is something really beautiful if the sky is clear. On Friday, my dear friend, Kayla came to visit. She was with a big group of students that are all studying for the Fall semester in Santiago. We went eat and then went to a bar for a little salsa dancing. It is so fun to see good friends when you are so far from home. It is just fun to think about how big the world is, yet still get a chance to meet up with friends.

This weekend we took a day trip to a vineyard and Isla Negra, the most famous of Pablo Neruda¨s houses. The vineyard was cool. They make Vina Mar wine in the Casablanca wine valley. I learned all sorts of information about the crafting of wine. As I think I said earlier, Pablo Neruda is a famous poet/diplomat here in Chile. He died in ´73, but Chileans still hold a great deal of respect for him. He was a bit eccentric and had losts of cool collections that we saw at his house. For example, 8 ship figureheads, 40 colored glass bottles, and a hige colections of shells including a norwhal tusk (gotta love them norwhals, google if you don´t know).

After we returned to Valparaiso, I went to a 5 year old´s birthday party with Shivani. I think the child was her family´s nephew. All the adults sat around a table telling stories and eating different sorts of food. It reminded my a lot of my memories of hanging out as a kid at my greataunt´s house, where we had a big Italian family.

Last night Shivani and I went to the Casino for a little bit just to see what it is like. Some of our friends go a lot, but I don´t understand all the fuss. Then again, neither of us know how to gamble, but the bingo was fun and the building is very pretty with original art work.

That is all for now. Chau.

My spanish has definitely improved and there are certain things that I can handle pretty well without thinking. Since Chileans have such aweful Spanish, I am hoping that I will understand even more in other countries where people don´t slur and drop syllables for fun.

More pictures

http://tulane.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2058772&l=01bf7&id=2807850

Santiago (The city of St. James)

So this weekend wewenttoSantiago, the capital of Chile. It is a beautiful city with an advanced Subway or metro system just off the Andes. There we visited the home of the executive branch, where Allende was holed up for the governments last stand before Pinochet"s soldiers took over. The buildings still have patches covering bullet holes caused when the airforce flew over the area in 73. It was really interesting to note how much more assessible their governmental leaders are. Whether through naivety or calculated risk, their leaders frequently walk the streets and their president customarily lives in their previous house with only minimal security increases and walks to work in the mornings. We also drove by their Supreme Court, the US Embassy, and the national newspaper office. We also passed the site of what will be the tallest building in Latin America (90 stories overtopping the current tallest of 45 stories)Our tour guide was half Australian half Chilean because his family moved to Australia after being exiled along with1 millionother people. (Australia was happy to take people... something about having a lot of land and a very small population, idk) He returned in 92 and has lived here since. On bad days in the winter,living in Santiago can be like smoking a packof cigarettes a day because of the smog trapped between the mountains. Luckily, we had horrible weather on Saturday which made for gorgeous weather and a view of the mountains on Sunday. We also went to the museum of Pre-Columbian Art which holds some really old artifacts with the oldest being from around 3000 BC. We also saw there the oldest mummies every discovered. Pretty cool, eh!

For dinner we went to a really nice restaurant for steak. With appetizers, salads, good steaks, wine, and dessert, it came out to around 22 USD.

We explored some other things on Sunday and took the bus home in the evening. Pictures of the trip and cultural observations to come.

First set of pictures

This should be a public link. Enjoy.

http://tinyurl.com/2rpgaa

So many stories

Lo Siento, It has been a week since I last posted. I never meant to let time pass me by. I'll just give a couple sentences about each day.

Friday
We leave the bus station from Vina del Mar for our 12 hour bus trip to the South. We went to Pucon, Chile which is apparently a beautiful place in their summer.

Saturday
We arrive in the morning and get settled in our cabins. This is the first time we've had heating in a home since we arrives, so that was nice. In the afternoon we went to a natural hot spring/pool type thing.

Sunday
Today we were supposed to climb Volcan Villarica, but the weather was too bad to the climb even if the roads were passable, so I went horseback riding with two of my friends in the hills near the mountains. Other students went white water rafting and we met back up for dinner at an Uruguayan meat restaurant. We had something called a Parrilla which is essentially a lot of meat piled on a heated serving tray. Several of us have not eaten a lot of rd meat here, so it was a trat. Also, I had relatively spicing mashed potatoes. It was the first well seasoned food in 2 weeks!

Monday
I went to a nearby "indigenous city" called Temuco. The indigenous people here are the Mapuche and our Spanish teacher recommended we go there. The place was not especially culturally significant. The most enlightening part of the experience was realizing that our teacher had a very misconstrued concept of what it meant to experience Mapuche culture.

Tuesday
Nothing much special happened. Just classes. We are learning about the reforms after Pinochet took over the country in a military coup in 73. Basically the country switched from heavily socialism to free market capitalism at its most extreme in a very short time.

Wednesday
My friend Sean Gahagan is living about thirty minutes away by train from me right now in Quil Pue, so I went see him for dinner last night. The train is only a year old and was very easy to use. Sean is working with other West Point students building houses in another small city for a month, and it was great to get to see him. h hopes to come see me in Valpo. next week.

Thursday/today
I'm sitting in Casa Central of the university right now. After I say good by, I hope to post some pictures. They'll be on Facebook, but I'll try to add a public link here for other people to see. Hasta Luego!

Eric

A quick catch up

Ok so I've finally got my computer to the area with free wireless for the first time. Below are thee reflections that I wrote on the plane and as we rode the bus from Santiago to Valparaiso.

I woke up this morning with the sun shining in my face over the Andes as we approached South America flying at 33,000 ft. After a 2 hour delay in Atlanta last night, we are nearing our decent into Santiago. While I was in the Atlanta airport, I met up with several of the other students from my program, Shivani, Catherine, Carleigh, and Lauren. We also made a friend. Sandra is a 20 something year old German girl who is going to South America by herself to backpack for 3.5 months. Oh, and she doesn’t speak Spanish. We all wish her the best of luck while remaining cautiously optimistic for her… (and thinking she’s crazy)

We spent our time in the airport leafing though the Chile guidebooks and looking up of words we didn’t know as they were thought up. It’s always interesting to see who flies with you, and this is especially interesting when you fly abroad. In addition to Sandra (the German girl), we have 2 Amish gentlemen, and about 25 red shirted (in the literal sense) people who I think are with some sort of church group. Then, of course, your fine upstanding batch of Tulane University students. Oh now, we are beginning our decent now. More in a bit!

Ok so I’m now headed to Valparaiso. We meet up with our group guide and are on a charter bus. The terrain near the airport reminds me of a very mountainous Southwest. Low lying shrubbery, cacti, I can see the huge mountains off to the east, but now we are headed to Valpo to meet our host families. We picked up phones at the airport in a fairly simple process.

Tasks for the day:
Master peso to dollar conversions in my head. 1 peso to about 510 pesos