Santiago

This weekend I went to Santiago with six other girls from the program. Santiago is the biggest city in Chile, located an hour and half east of Valparaíso (more or less on the other side of the country). It’s surrounded on one side by snowy mountains, on other sides by the cordillera, foothills. On the day it wasn’t pouring rain, we climbed (funicular railway-style) Cerro San Cristobal, which is a hill from which you can see the whole city—and get an idea of how huge it is!

We also visited the Palacio de Bellas Artes, the main art museum in Santiago. There was an interesting mixture of modern and classic, sacred and not-sacred art. Also a whole gallery filled with children’s drawings and photographs that were apparently going to be displayed in Japan. The next day we stopped by La Moneda, the government building where Salvador Allende died during the 1973 military coup. We couldn’t actually go inside, but we could enter the courtyard; there were some strange modern sculptures, which I wasn’t expecting.

Possibly the most interesting part was that I got to stay in my first hostel, and now I think I’m spoiled forever because it was really comfortable, spacious, and architecturally beautiful. Called La Casa Roja, the hostel used to be a private mansion; it had a big kitchen and we bought bread, cheese, avocados (staple Chilean food!), manjar (caramel, also a staple Chilean food), etc. and ate in the dining room. It was relaxing and we met a guy from Canada who is teaching English in the south of Chile. There were people there from Australia, Germany, England, and other places, too. Also the first night, we went to Calle (street) Pio Nono, which was packed with people at 2:00am on a Thursday, and got empanadas, of course. We found a place called Empanatodos, and I wish I could transplant it to Viña del Mar; or, even better, to Bryn Mawr.


I’m going to have another quiet week because the two journalism classes and the one art class I am now hoping to take still don’t start until next Monday. The picture is of the History building, which I think is pretty but hard work to climb when I have class at 8:15am—an hour that is quite early for most Chilenos and thus for me too while I am here.