Day 3: Airplanes and Salsa

Today was another extremely busy day. Our lecturer, Jose, used to be a s student that would guide groups like us around before he became a professor at the university. Jose discussed some aspects of Chilean culture such as art and writers as well as natural disasters. Two influential people were Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Minstral. We will be visiting one of Pablo Neruda's houses, La Isla Negra, sometime this week. He had a very interesting take on how to help Chile develop economically and won a Nobel Prize. Jose also talked to us about some social issues present in Chile today. We learned a lot about their education system and how students are protesting to change things to how they wish it would be. The protesting actually closed down USM for a little bit. I thought it was interesting to see how involved the students really are with their education because US students aren't nearly as involved. The presentation also included Chile's geography and how life and climate were so different. Now that I am in the country, it's a bit easier to grasp for some reason. I feel if we had discussed it while I was in America, I wouldn't have appreciated as much that the same country that has the driest desert is the same country that is close to Antarctica. We ate lunch in the cafeteria again and then took another bus ride to Santiago to visit LAN Airlines. Our guide, Luis, talked to us about the history of LAN, its different airplanes, and how LAN has expanded into different countries with alliances and expanding on their own. After LAN, we had our final salsa lesson. I remembered some of the steps from the last time, which was somewhat of a good sign. Some of the kids that joined our reggaeton lessons came back and learned salsa with us. Our group has more girls than guys, so when we paired up for partner dancing, I danced with one of the Chileans. He was much better than me, and made an honest attempt to help me figure this out. It was a little difficult with the language barrier to do it because he knew what the instructor said before I did but we still had a good time.