Its been a month

• Mmann's Profile
• About this blog
• Entry from Santiago

Trip Start Jul 17, 2005 Previous
Entry Trip End Dec 23, 2005 Next
Entry

  Santiago, Chile
Monday, August 22, 2005

So its been a month since I have been here. I finally have my classes picked out after visiting about 10 different ones. I am taking macro econ 2, a class about chilean poverty, and a class about prostitucion in a Chilean historical context. All in all I think it should be good and challenging.

This past weekend I went to Valparaiso with the rest of the gringos. It is a such a beautiful city but unfortunately we did not get to stay very long. It is the second largest city in Santiago and was originally founded by the Spanish to be a port. All the houses are built onto these big hills and they are mandated to keep the outsides looking like they did before, so the houses often timese look a little run down but they are very nice. Oddly enough in this city the rich people dont live at the top of the hill, they live at the bottom. It is often hard to drive up the streets so they have these really old, and kind of scarey, elevators people use to get themselves up the hill. I have posted pictures too. We also visited Pablo Neruda's house in Isla Negra. It was very interesting. His bedroom there has the best view of the water. Also inside are many of his collections of bugs, butterflys, and shells. We ate lunch on the beach and we were so kindly greeted by on of Chile's many street dogs who thought he would "join" us for lunch. When I say join I mean steel our food and pester us.
Also on Saturday we went out to Bellavista again. This time we went to this really nice bar that had good live music. Also we went salsa dancing. It was an interesting time. We meet some very interesting Chileans there. Unfortunately I still need a lot of practice learning how to do it correctly. Some of the women there were making fun of me.

Yesterday I hung out with Magdalena and our new Chilean friend. We met her at a reunion of all the foriegn students and all the Chilean students looking to study abroad at Catolica last week. Here there are over 1000 foriegn students, most seem to be from Germany or the US. Anyway she was very nice and invited us over to have once (kind of like tea) at her house. It is nice to finally start making real friends who are not gringos here.

Well that is all for now... Check my pictures out!

Print this entry Share Santiago hotels

Previous Entry Next Entry