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