A Weekend of Adventures

So, I know it's only been a few days since the last time I posted, but this was definitely a jam-packed weekend. It is our last weekend before classes start (they start on Wednesday), so I feel like we're all trying to get too much done before we get busier.

La Sebastiana

On Saturday morning, CIEE arranged a field trip for us to La Sebastiana, which is one of Pablo Neruda's houses. He has two others in Chile, but this one is atop one of the cerros of Valparaiso. It was nice to be able to explore one of our cities a bit more. The views from his house were astounding. But that's one of the things about Valparaiso and Vina that I love - - no matter where you are, you always have a view of something.

Below are some of my pictures from La Sebastiana, as well as those of Valparaiso. It's such a beautiful city!



Quintay

On Saturday afternoon, I went with my friend Allison and her host family to a small town south of the cities called Quintay. It used to be an old whaling port, which is honestly hard to believe. A few of the pictures show just how small this town is. It's hard to imagine huge boats coming in with 25 ton whales.... There was a cool little museum, though, that kind of taught you about the history of the city and of the whaling industry in general. And being the history geek that I am, I totally loved that part. I'm not ashamed to admit it.

Quintay is probably one of the most gorgeous places I've ever seen. It's nested between mountains, which suddenly become cliffs and drop off into the ocean. Again, there are pictures below, but there's no way that they can do it justice!



Con Con

Yesterday, we went to another nearby coastal city. After our debacle on Friday with the bus system, I was scared of being stuck on the bus for too long and getting lost (again) in the middle of nowhere. Instead, we got off the bus about four miles too early and ended up walking for an hour or so to get to our destination. It was chilly and cloudy, and not an overall amazing day. HOWEVER. A potentially miserable excursion was salvaged by horses! For roughly $4USD, we were able to take horses on the beach for about a half an hour. Drawback? Neither I nor the other two girls that I went with have really any horseback riding experience. And it was hard to understand what the men were telling us. Honestly, I was kind of amazed that they let us just wander around freely when it was so blatantly obvious that we had no idea what we were doing. At one point, we were trying to turn around to go back to the makeshift stable when all of our horses just stopped moving. We tried yelling at them in English and in Spanish, doing crazy things with the reins... Finally, one of us kind of smacked our horse out of frustration and he started moving again. I wish they had told us what to do about that . . . . .





And today, we're working on our paper that the CIEE office assigned to us... How fantastic. I'm just eager to start classes and have real work that actually counts for something. At least my paper is on the Mapuches.

I'm pretty sure the Mapuches are going to end up being my Chilean obsession, FYI. I cannot stop reading things about them. And they're always on the news, with another rebellion or setting another bus on fire.... I cannot wait for Juegos mapuches and my history classes to learn more!

That's all for now...
Ciao!