Week 11 - I'm..I'm on a boat, everybody!

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This week marks our class' trip to the south of Chile, where we toured Puerto Montt and San Rafael Lake. It was a heck of a time. This is our 2nd and final trip where all 20 of us will be together.

Tue, Oct 27
2 more days until our trip to the south! In class we talked about our weekends, as well as what we should to to prepare for our upcoming trip. We were going to take a bus to Puerto Montt, stay there for a day, and then the next day get on our cruise. That made a lot of sense, because after a long bus ride to Puerto Montt, we are going to need to take a rest. There was an option to go in a really comfortable bus for about $4 more, but most of us figured it was worth it so that's what we did (with the exception of a few students deciding to take the cheaper bus). I mean, the trip was over 8 hours during the night where we would want to sleep!

Wed, Oct 28
Today, we had class from 10 to 12. It was interesting and I learned a lot of spanish from narrating stories in spanish. I am getting better at describing things in spanish because of this. Afterwards, instead of going home, I decided to stay in Concepcion.. I went to Wayan's Gyros with Brad and Evin, and afterwards, we all got halloween costumes at some clothing store. Mostly everything was cheap, and even though it wasn´t a costume shop, it served us pretty well. We didn't spend a whole lot of money and still came out with decent looking costumes with our creativity. I also got a haircut today in the university. I went to some underground place where there was a single barber, and I was his only client. That made me a bit nervous at first! His style of cutting hair was different; he would heat up his scissors with a 'bunsen burner' type device, and then preced to cut my hair. It came out really good though, and I only payed $3!! What was interesting is while he was cutting my hair, chilleans would come in and buy cigarrettes off of him. So, he would cut hair and sell cigarettes while doing so! People would come in and buy 1, 2, or 3 at a time. They must have been a kind of cigarette not sold anywhere else. We had class at 3pm today, and then afterwards I headed home where I relaxed. I also told my parents about my trip, they weren't too happy with the fact that I waited until TODAY to tell them, but oh well. They were still happy for me having the chance to take a trip down to the south :D.

Thu, Oct 29
Today was our last day of class until our trip! We had class at 9am where we had a different professor, since our usual one was sick. Nevertheless, it was an interesting lecture.. and we listened to some latin american music as well. In our noon class, we talked about pronunciations and words that are unique to Chile, and how they can be different in other cultures. I found that interesting. After class I went home and had lunch. My host parents told me that Puerto Montt had some of the best seafood, so I will have to eat a lot while I'm there! Apparently, it is the number one salmon exporter in Chile. After lunch, I spent an hour packing. I then relaxed for a while, had dinner at like 8, and then my parents brought me to the bus terminal at around 9. We were early, so I had a chance to buy some snacks for the trip. I was surprised at how many 'mini-markets' that were still open at that hour. There was a line of 6 or 7 on the street of the terminal. We got on the bus at around 10:00. The bus had 2 levels to it, and we were on the top. The beds leaned back almost to where you were flat on your back, and they were comfortable. I watched some chinese movie dubbed in spanish. It was such a strange movie.. action but with fantasy attached with it... anyways it was something else! It was entertaining, nonetheless. Since sleeping on the bus was not too hard, the only thing thing that bothered me about the trip is that we could not see any of the countryside. My host parents told me that it would be beautiful, and that it is too bad we are traveling at night.

Fri, Oct 30
Today, we got to Puerto Montt, where it was 7am and freezing! I guess this is what the south feels like! Anyways, we got a few taxis for the 16 of us, and got to our hostel. It was pretty nice... had a kitchen so we could make breakfast.. and the beds were really nice! I stayed in a room with 3 other guys. Them 3, as well as 6 or 7 others, went to nap because they didn't seem to have gotten enough sleep. I, however, went with the other 5 to buy food to make breakfast. Oddly enough, nothing opened till 9:30.. so we walked around Puerto Montt a while. They had this sweet statue, a skatepark, and some historical statues, which were along side the ocean. We got eggs, ham, cheese, tomatoes, bread, orange juice, yogurt, and cereal/milk for 16 people for only 17mil (32 dollars roughly). That is 2 dollars per person, try to beat that price in the states for breakfast! Next, we hired a tour guide for the day. We first went to the top of Puerto Montt, to view and take pictures of everything. We then went to a city neat Puerto Montt, called Puerto Varas. We went to a gift shop there. I bought a couple things for my family as souvenirs. They had some nice clothing there, and it was all relatively cheap for toursity stuff. There were 2 volcanoes that you could see from Puerto Varas - Osorno and Calbuco. You could see each from different parts of the area; we saw one when looking out into the ocean (well, it is really a lake which then leads into the altantic ocean). Later, we all took a fishing-type boat on some lake where you could get a view of the second volcano. It was nice to go on boat.. it reminded me of the lakes in Minnesota. Pretty sure there are no volcanoes where I'm from though! We then went to a ranch in the country, which had a lot of land. We saw llamas and sheep there! It was a really nice place! The llamas were actually from the north of Chile, but some were brought and kept in this ranch so that people could see them. There were about 20 of them! Llamas have to be the strangest-looking animals! I was scared at first, thinking that they would run after me if I got too close, but they ended up being gentle. You could even pet them safely. We got lunch after that. I had a charrosco.. a common sandwich in Chile. Afterwards, we to a park, where you could see the rapids from a lake. It was amazing, especially with the volcano in the background! It was so cool, I wanted to stay there forever! I could have spent the whole day just looking at the rapids. We then went to 2 different ports on the lake. One of them had some boats off the shore, but I liked the other stop better. This lake is the 2nd largest in South America. It looked really cool to see later in the day when the clouds filled the sky. The volcano was also much easier to see this way. Another thing to note is how calm the lake was, like the ones in Minnesota can be! All in all, we did a lot of traveling today in Puerto Montt. For dinner, we figured we better try some of the seafood here, haha. We stopped went to Angelmo, which was a good 15 minutes from our hotel. There, we noticed all of the restaurants around, with people outside wanting us to come in and eat at their place. There were a lot of restaurants, a long with tourist shops. There was also some kind of garage, which is where all of the seafood seemed to be exported to. It reeked of raw fish, so I didn't walk around there too long. After looking around a lot for the best price, we went to a restaurant where an entire meal would be 3mil (6 dollards). You could pick from fried fish, salmon, ceviche, curanto, and a couple others (shellfish with pototoes and sausage). Mostly everyone got the salmon, except Eric, who got the curanto. The salmon plate was excellent - it was the best salmon ever! And they served a lot of food for 6 bucks! I compared that to the not-as-good salmon I had at Vina del Mar.. and that was 22 bucks! Eric was the only one that got the Curanto.. and his plate was huge as well! It was all very good! My night was not over then! I went to a discoteque that night with Karl, Trevor, and Eric. Let's just say with Karl looking the most gringo, he is the person to hang out with. It was not hard finding girls to dance with, since who wouldn't want to dance with a gringo, haha. Let's not go into details, but I could definitely get used to it down here. In the US, it is much harder to accomplish this so to speak! Think of how most Chilleans have not seen many Americans, only the movies.. and all of the actors in movies are made to look flashy. So in a way, they create an image for Chilleans that most Americans are like that. Pretty cool for us gringos.

Sat, Oct 31
Heh, nobody would wake up this morning, except for a few of us, and we were NOT going to head to the supermarket to buy everyone breakfast like before. Plus it was already 11, and we figured we wouldn't have enough time. We had a ship to catch :D. We all took taxis to the port, in Angelmo, where we waited with all of the other passengers. About 90% of them were all in their 50's and plus. We had some spare time though, so I got lunch with I got fried fish at some small restaurant. I wasn't expecting much here a this somewhat sketchy restaurant. I was wrong! Evern places like this seemed to have AMAZING seafood. They give you a lot of mashed potatoes too, haha. Afterwards, we had time, so we checked around some of the touristy stores. We saw a store that sold live ducklings! Haha they were only 3 dollars each.. we were going to buy one, seriously! But then the owner knocked some sense into us and we realized that it would probably die if we brought it on the ship. It was a heck of an idea though. I mean it is a duck, ahaha. Besides that, most of the touristy places had a lot of the same materials, everything seemed to be made out of wood or leather. It was cheap stuff, though; Chile must be abundant in those materials. Anyways, we headed back to the port, where the captain gave a speech. I remember him mentioning our group from Minnesota, since the majority of the other passengers were Chillean, and for the most part they had never gotten to know Americans before. During this 4 day trip, they most likely will! We got on the boat, and got went to our rooms and unpacked. Our ship didn't leave right away, but it did within the next few hours. This type of ship transported cars and semis along with us passengers! Of course, we stayed in the upper part of the ship, where the vehicles were kept in a different area that we couldn't access. Around dinner time, the ship took off. I sat next to the rest of my classmates. The food here was not the best, but better than I expected. They supplied everyone on the boat with a lot of food! I guess that shows what expensive cruises can get you! For breakfast, you got bread, ham, cheese, eggs, cereal, yogurt, fruit, juice, and tea/coffee. For lunches and dinners you would get the main entree along with fruit, soup, salad, bread, juice, and desert.. I don't know what else you could ask for! That night, we celebrated halloween of course! I didn't have much of a costume, so I just wore a Chile Jersey and went as a soccer player, haha. The rest of the group mostly had some decent costumes. After dressing up, we chilled in our rooms for a while, and then decided to all go to the main lounge all at once. This is where the ship had it's parties at night, and most of the passengers attended. Remember now, these passengers are mostly Chillean. What us foreigners did was go out there all at once; displaying all of our costumes and acting pretty foolish haha. We danced around, and the Chilleans were all laughing and having a good time. We basically created a party. We made a dancing circle where we would follow one another in a circle and keep dancing. Some of us pulled in some of the Chilleans that were sitting down watching.. and they joined us! It was so crazy, and awkward at the same time, but I just went with the flow. Everything that went on was like spontaneous, spur of the moment, type thing, something I'm not known to be in advocate of, so it was fun for a change!!! After that, we each had a chance to talk on the microphone saying our costumes, honestly what an experience to be the spotlight. Remember, most of these chilleans had never seen Americans so we were basically standing for the whole country. We felt special because of it, and it brought the best out of us. There was karaoke that night too. Out of our group, A couple girls did a song by MJ, 3 other girls did YMCA, and 1 did a spanish song she knew by heart. Really, to do a karaoke song, you would have to know most/all of the lyrics, so no one else really volunteered (My time to shine came later in the trip). It was a great night overall though!

Sun, Nov 1
Today, got up, had breakfast, and went out to take some pictures of the sight. I took a lot of pics of mountains with snow on top of them, because it looked so cool. After breakfast, I took a nap a long with the the other guys staying in the room. When I woke up, I noticed that we had stopped in a port, called Puerto Chacabuco. We all got off to check out the town there. There was practically nothing to do there, and hardly any people! I guess it was a town primarily used for transporting between ports. After walking around for a while, I decided to go with Eric to try and climb a mountain that we saw. There were many hills leading up the mountain. While climbing up the first one, we noticed 4 chilleans playing soccer, so we figured we could join them, which was fun. Eric, some chillean and I lost horribly to 3 other chilleans.. they put the US in our spot when it came to soccer. Afterwards, Eric and I tried climbing some mountain, where we spent about an hour finding our way up hills. At that time, we finally figured that there were way too many trees to get through, so we gave up after getting up a certain ways. It was an alright adventure though, I have to admit. After that, we somehow found everyone else.. but it wasn't hard because of the small amount of people. We had to wait a couple hours.. so we went inside a terminal-type building to get some warmth, but even inside it wasn't very warm. We played linbo to pass some of the time, haha. Nothing really went on that night, the fun came the following night.

Mon, Nov 2
By the time I got up, we had arrived in Laguna San Rafael. It was quite a sight.. from a distance I saw a huge glacier, and near the ship were pieces of ice scattered everywhere. It was cold and misty. You could see a fog out in the distance where the ice was. In Spanish this is called a ventisquero, or snowdrift. I was so fascinated by the pieces of ice and occupied taking pictures, that I missed breakfast, haha! Anyways, the ship stopped there for a while. Everyone was going to get a chance to get up close to the ice bergs by going on a smaller boat. Our shift was at about 11:30. We all put on super warm clothing and these life-jackets, and we fit all 20 of us in one boat. The cold was different - it rained on and off, and the temperature stayed at a consistent 30-35. I'm surprised it never snowed, though, yet I could see my breath! There were chunks of ice everywhere! At first, we cruised fast, but then we had to slow it down as we approached the icebergs, so that we didn't hit a piece of ice and turn over! The icebergs were different that I had excepted. They had different shades of blue - some more visually appealing than others. The bigger icebergs had snow covered, and part of the snow was blue, while the rest was white. The glaciers also gave off a cool reflection in the water. The complete calmness of the water helped in this. Not only were the colors of the glaciers different that I expected, but the shapes were too. The wind pushing against the ice over the years gave off a fire-shaped ice mass. In other words, they were like frozen waves (check pic). Being in that boat surrounded by chunks of ice, well it felt like I was in Antarctica. Even though I wasn't, it was crazy how far south I was. They told me that the place was similar to what Alaska was like. We finally approach the big glacier, where the pieces of ice had originated. We were lucky, we got to see part of the glacier collapse and fall into the water. So cool! After seeing the glaciers, everyone was anxious to get back and get out of the cold. On the ship, they were serving whiskey with glacier ice! Haha, It was funny seeing how all of the chilleans drank it, but none of my classmates did. I guess they are more accustomed tot it. I didn't have any because I knew that it would taste pretty awful anyways, lol. I suppose I should have been a little open-minded and at least TRIED it, but oh well. Later that night, the boat was having a halloween party (yes, I guess the chilleans celebrate it 2 days later)! So, we dressed up the same as we did last on our halloween! They had certain contests and traditional activities this time. One was where you would try and transfer an apple from someone's neck to ther other, so it would make it look like they are making out, which in fact they weren't. Another fun thing they did was place a balloon on their lap while someone else would sit on them.. that was funny! A third activity is where someone would wear a large bag, while someone would try and stuff as many ballons as possible in them! They also had talent and dance competitions, as well as best legs competition - this is the one I was in. I represented us 20 students. I wore these tight shorts and pull them up to where one could see my hairy legs. For some reason, hairy legs is what the judges wanted. I was then free to do whatever with them.. so I danced in front of everyone for a good 2-3 minutes! Haha I sure was inside the spotlight! That gave me a lot of attention that night and after. I can't put a number on the amount of people that came up to me and gave recognition to me throughout the trip!! It was worth the embarrasment! Great night!

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