Today we first watched a video on women's rights, that oh don Peter was an Academic Director to, what a coincidence. Then a woman from CEM talked about women in Chilean history. Then we went to SERNAM the govt agency for women's rights. Then we had dinner at this amazing place. All meat lovers would be jealous of the delicious steak that we got today. And french fries, salad with oversized lima beans yumm, fresh juice, yep. The steak was sooo good, man it's been a very long time since I've had so much red meat. Then we went to the [View Full Entry]

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Whoaa I missed an entry yesterday. I know my readers must be VERY disappointed. Ha. Ha. Ha. Or Ja. Ja. Ja. Let me try to remember what we did yesterday. So we got picked up an hour later than usual to first go to this Artisan Fair in Las Condes. It was really cute, lots of artsy things. So I've noticed that they ahve most of the same things in places: lots of leather, lots of copper, lapis azul(beautiful blue stone), this greenish stone that looks like jade but I don't know what it is, lots of knitted things, jewelry, pottery... [View Full Entry]

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Today we took a long long bus ride to ACONCAGUA valley. Well first we had a lecture about the agrarian reforms, farms in general of Chile, and what happened after the military dictatorship. So we got there and first three women and a man talked about their experiences as migrant workers. They work long hours, on their feet, and women have to work through the night packing the fruits, while men work during the day in the fields. It has most importantly messed up the gender roles since women aren't at home taking care of the kids or the man when [View Full Entry]

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Today was a pretty sad day. A survivor of a torture camp during the period of the military dictatorship in Chile spoke to us. He had created this large 3-D model of the prison/torture camp, Villa Grimaldi, and it was very detailed. It had all of the buildings, little people tied to bunk beds inside the building, just miniature models of everything there. He told us about each building and what they would do in the buildings. Then we went to the actual prison camp. It was a good thing that he showed us his 3-d model because the original buildings [View Full Entry]

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We had dinner at Vacas Gordas(fat cows hehehe) tonight. The people around me proceeded to list all the Asians they know from Tufts. Ha! Very interesting names were brought up. Esp one funny joke about someone else. =P I had raw salmon with lemon on it. And passionfruit juice. The juice was a bit too sour and but the salmon was good! Like thin sashimi slices, just needed some rice. I have been eating WAYYYYYYYY too much bread. Bread comes with every single meal, goddamit, I need to eat less carbs. Maybe I'll order a salad next time. They look so [View Full Entry]

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Today we had to get up a lil earlier than usual to hear first, a lecturer on the Chilean economic model. He was a professor who was very easy to understand. Esp since he had the powerpoint presentation, his vocab was filled with familiar macroeconomic terms, and he was standing up gesturing and such. It was very interesting to me. And I also took notes =P So basically Chile is a big export country, there's huge income gap, lots of copper here. He also talked about the 3 big macroeconomic variables related to who was in power at the time, which [View Full Entry]

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We just we had dinner in the cheesiest place... "Los Vikingos" where the chairs were viking men's bodies, covered in fur, the walls were covered with animal skeletons, axes, flags of diff countries like Spain and Germany, everything was just wooden and covered in fur. It was a mad cheesy themed restaurant. I had once again another chacarero and papas fritas. hehe. That's it for tonight. Tomorrow should be another boring day.....=P [View Full Entry]

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So I have thinking a lot recently about just staying for half a year and not the whole year. Which is strange b/c it's the opposite of people usually do. But other people have made a lot of good points, albeit they come from the dbag, but whatever. It's time to put them down on paper so that I remember this later. First of all, studying abroad isn't really about the studying. That may not obvious to most people. I didn't even realize it until today. Nobody goes studying abroad looking forward to taking classes and stuff. It's all about traveling. [View Full Entry]

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Today the bus came to pick us up from the hostel(Hostelling International btw....it's really clean actually and has wireless so that's good enough for me). We went to a NGO in Nunoa where I will be living. more about host family later. The NGO is called ECO and they work with the urban poor. We had two speakers who spoke for sooooo long. Okay we all fall asleep a lot. But today I wish I didn't fall asleep b/c it was so obvious since we were sitting in a circle in front of the speakers. Sighs. We were warned to dress [View Full Entry]

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Today we had two more lectures but in English still I fell asleep. They talked about politics history etc. For lunch we had these sandwiches. Mine was soo good with the avocado yum love it - plata. Then the second prof talked the origins of chacerero***EDIT chacarero = sandwich***. Im so glad Alan told me about it =D The one thing I knew about Chilean culture before I came. Apparepntly they come from a Mapuche word cha'cara. Then went to the musuem of history. Nick and I got adapters finally. We got so lost, people kept telling us about different places. [View Full Entry]

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