Blogs from Concepción, Biobío, Chile, South America - page 5

This entry marks the dates of Wednesday, October 15, through Saturday, October 18 One day Mimi saw an advertisement for an amazing deal. It included a bus ride to Santiago, a ticket to the much anticipated Chile-Argentina game, and a bus back that night, to arrive in Conce early the next morning…. All for an unimaginable fifty dollars. So I obviously hopped on the bandwagon, buying tickets from a man who said he was the bus driver and that the tickets also included a free barbecue at his cousin’s house. A bit sketchy? Perhaps. But an international game? I’m pretty sure that erased all my doubts. So one early Wednesday morning, approximately ten of us from the program found ourselves on an everyday/tiny/uncomfortable bus headed for the capital city of Santiago, accompanied by five or six ... read more

Hello again friends and family! Wow, I am not sure when the last time I wrote was but anyways here we go. We spent 3 days San Pedro de Atacama, in the North of Chile after Santiago and Vina del Mar. San Pedro is a major tourist oasis in Chile especially for adventurous Europeans. The town is tiny but is full of tourists. We did alot while we there including hikes in Valle de La Luna, y la muerte. We also got to see the worlds largest open pit copper mine, this was absolutely unreal. It made me a bit sad though to see what "progress" does to the world. The Chuiciqamata mine, is also fighting against an the indigenous groups in the area over water rights. The mine needs tons of water to produce the ... read more

So the week before last was the holidays, which might explain why I didn’t write as much as I should have. I didn’t have classes, but there were orientation types of meetings and then a lot of hanging out and exploring the city and hills. The city is situated next to the coast, but I have yet to go to the beach. There is the Parque Ecuador to the south, which is proportionally the same as chile - very long and very thin. Behind the park there are green hills that seem to have been made for a nice quick - yet steep - hike. They remind me much of the hills and fire trails of Berkeley and are ripe with towering trees and faint hints of old and crumbling stone buildings. At the right time ... read more

…As part of our classwork, all of us are required to get into small groups, interview different sorts of people and create a portfolio consisting of notes, pictures, a lexicon, etc. So yesterday (Saturday), I joined the rest of group 3 to go to Lota, a mining town about an hour’s bus ride away that hosts workers we’ll eventually be interviewing. The day was perfect, but in the morning we couldn’t enjoy it because we spent our time in the ground, beneath the ocean floor, in a mine. Dark, wet, and small, it held stories of back-breaking work, many deaths, and a political and economic history. This particular mine had been closed, but before when workers went to mine the coal, they’d work twelve hours a day, bent over in the dark. I think this means ... read more

Hello again friends and family! I hope you all are well, because I certainly am. Saturday marked my second week in this foreign country, but perhaps it is not so foreign anymore. For example, I have since learned, like a native Chilean, to hold onto my bag as tightly as possible, lest it get stolen like mine was a mere week and a half ago. It happened to be the first night when there were other fellow students present (Thursday before last), and I must have been so excited at dinner to be speaking English once again that I didn’t even notice someone slip into the restaurant and slip out again into the night. Yes, with my bag. But no worries, the only things in it that I actually cared about were as follows: 1. A ... read more