La Serena Day Dos

We woke up very early on day two in La Serena in order to get the Punto de Chorros, a nature reserve on the coast, to see penguins and whales. The drive took about an hour and a half and we got to Punto de Chorros in time to catch our boat. Unfortunately for our whale watching plans, there had been plans to build a hydroelectric power plant in the nature reserve and the day we were there was the day the official announcement came from the president that the plans had changed and they were not going to build the plant. The people in the town were understandably very happy, the plant and its emissions would have killed a great deal of the wildlife that lived there. Presidente Sebastian Piñera was coming to Punto de Chorros to make the official announcement, greet the townspeople and get some badly needed good publicity. Because of security reasons, our boat trip was canceled. However, we did get to see Piñera up close and personal. He arrived in a helicopter and then walked the short way to the beach to make a short speech before getting on a boat to the island where the penguins lived. On his walk, there was virtually no security, I could have walked up and shook his hand if I wanted. My friend Hattie walked up and did the Chilean kiss on the cheek greeting with him and introduced herself. The people of the town were very happy to see him and were shouting “gracias” and trying to shake his hand all at once. It is incredible to me that the president of Chile was so accessible, that would have never have been possible in the U.S.

El Presidente

The chief of the navy was also in Punto de Chorros for the announcement and he ate at the same restaurant as our group. While we were waiting for Piñera, some people in our group were climbing around on the big boulders that were in the water. My friend Jeff was trying to climb up the side of one and the rock broke in his hand and he fell into the ocean. His clothes were soaked and everyone had left their bag at the hotel. Maricarmen and he walked into town and stopped at a random house to see if they would dry Jeff’s clothes. They lent him some of their clothes while Jeff’s dried and after Piñera left we went to their house/store and all ate empanadas. The people in the town were so friendly to complete strangers.
After meeting Piñera, we lounged on the beach some more and then headed back to La Serena to get dinner. That night we went bar-hopping and then got to sleep in later the next morning.
The next day we had breakfast at the hotel and then left in the bus to go to the beach at Coquimbo, the next town over. We hung out at the beach and had lunch at a swanky hotel buffet before catching out plane back to Santiago.
It was an amazing weekend, even though I didn’t get to see any penguins.

llama

The Pacific

La Serena Day 1

This past weekend I traveled to La Serena, a town that is a 6 hour car ride north of Santiago. I got up early Friday morning and met my group at the IES center and then we all took a bus together to the airport. The flight was only 50 minutes, and we arrived in La Serena at around 10. The airport there is so small, there are no terminals to disembark on, you just walk out onto the tarmac. We were then picked up from the airport by a bus that took us to Valle del Elqui, a beautiful green valley where farmers grow grapes for wine and pisco. La Serena is on the coast and is also in one of the narrowest regions of Chile so it is also in the foothills of the Andes. It was a bright, sunny day and the drive through the valley was gorgeous. We stopped at a small hydroelectric dam that provides all of the electricity for the region that La Serena is in. We bought cactus ice cream and drank papaya nectar with aloe. (It’s supposed to cure anything) It was so nice to be outside of Santiago because the air in La Serena is amazingly pure, which gave our lungs a chance to breathe some clean air. After the dam, we got back on the bus and visited the town center of Paihuano, a tiny town of less than 1,000 is in a small valley to the south of La Serena. We stopped there to talk to the town planners and get a feeling of small town life in Chile. People tell me that in order to experience the “real” Chile, I need to leave Santiago and travel around the rural areas. They are right. It is a different Chile outside of Santiago. Life is very relaxed and people are very, very friendly, every local that I passed on the street said hello to me. Some people are also very poor, but they don’t seem to mind. After the town, we continued to drive into the valley and stopped at a restaurant that the program director, Maricarmen, knew and ate the most tender pork that I have ever eaten in my life. The restaurant overlooked a wine vineyard and from your seat you could gaze back up the valley. After the restaurant, we went and toured an organic pisqueria, which is a place where they make pisco, a grape liquor that is very popular here. It is one of the only organic pisquerias in the country; they only make pisco in March and April, harvest time for the grapes. At the end of the tour we got to drink different aged pisco, it was very strong. After the pisqueria, we drove back down the valley and stopped at Gabriela Mistral’s house, the female Nobel Prize winning poet from Chile. By now it was about 5:30 and we drove to Vicuna, another town near Valle del Elqui. We had dinner in a restaurant and I will always remember the waitresses because they were the nicest waitresses I have ever had. The called all the boys “mi amor” and would chat to us while we ate. Just another benefit of small town Chile. After dinner it was dark and we drove up to an observatory outside of town. There are quite a few observatories in this region of Chile because they have pure sunshine 320 days a year. At the observatory we listened to a presentation about the universe and the stars we were about to see. Did you know that the milky way galaxy has over 100 million stars in it and that there are at least 100 billion more galaxy’s in the universe? If you went to a beach and looked at all the grains of sand, and every grain of sand represented 10 suns, there wouldn’t be enough grains of sand to represent all the stars in the universe. After the presentation we went to look at stars through a two meter long telescope. We saw the Southern Cross, which is the equivalent of the North Star in the northern hemisphere. Our guide would focus the telescope on what we thought were two or three dim stars and when you looked through to telescope there would be 300 in that same spot. We then went up into the actual observatory and looked at Jupiter and other stars through the electric telescope. After realizing how small and insignificant we actually are, we got back on the bus and drove to our hotel in La Serena, arriving around midnight.

Pisco Sour

$4,000 bottles of wine

Ari and Hattie

La Luna

Valle del Elqui

Skiing in August? This is College!

Yesterday I went skiing in the Andes with three American friends from my program. I woke up at 6, ate a quick breakfast and grabbed the lunch that I had packed the night before and went to catch the bus to the ski rental shop.  My friends and I met up at the shop at 7:30, picked out our gear and paid $20 for a van from the ski rental shop to drive us into the mountains to Valle Nevado, the ski area we wanted to go to.  (To call it a resort would be giving it too much credit.)  The trip into the mountains was beautiful, we drove into a valley to get out of Santiago and then went over the top of one mountain and to the top of the next.  At one point, we went through 39 switchbacks in a row, there were signs on the road that counted every one!  Once we got about halfway up, we were able to look back and see the city, complete with a heavy blanket of smog, that we had left behind.  After an hour and a half, we were finally at the Valle Nevado.  There are a couple of hotels there, a lift ticket shop and a ski rental shop and nothing else, as it is located directly on top of the Andes.  The day started out with no clouds and great skiing.  We met a group of American snowboarders at the terrain park who were having a "summer camp in the Andes".  NBD.  After lunch, heavy clouds rolled in, which forced us to ski slower. We finished up our skiing and met back at the van at 5 to head back to Santiago, just as it started to snow.  The descent was very slow, as the roads weren't plowed and we had to stop to put chains on our tires.  Besides the us four Americans, there were a Brazilian couple, a single Brazilian, and an Argentinian father and daughter in the van with us.  We were all able to communicate in Spanish, which was great because we needed something to pass the time with because the trip down ended up taking three hours!  All that time I have spent following soccer came in handy, I was able to talk with the Brazilians about the sport.  Despite the treacherous trip down, I had a blast yesterday and am happy to be able to say that I have skied in the Andes!

On top of the Andes!

View from the lift

On our way up the switchbacks

First Post

Well, I have been living in Santiago for two weeks now and I finally have my blog up.  These past two weeks have been busy ones.  The first week was orientation with IES, the program with which I am studying here in Chile.  We had classes on the language of Chile, the culture and riding the public transit.  The Spanish here is different from what I learned in the classroom in the States, there are Chilean slang words to learn and the ever present "po" added the the end of many sentences.  "Po" doesn't have a particular meaning, a common time to hear it is when someone says, "Si po", which just means "yes" but with "po", added to the statement.  There are stray dogs all over the city, one was even on the bus I was riding today.
My Spanish gets better everyday, the biggest improvement is in my ability to understand what someone is saying to me.  I went to my first class at the Universidad de Chile on Thursday and was able to understand everything the professor was saying.  I will try to update this blog every 2-3 weeks and upload photos.  Ask me questions if you want to know more!