Time for School...not

The beginning of this week has been nice and busy for me so far. I like it. Monday morning was orientation for Universidad de Chile. My program group has now been cut virtually in half since other students are attending La Catholica. However, the entire program has a mandatory class from 7-9 Tuesday/Thursday on Chilean culture with a number of guests speakers and field trips. Should be very interesting, I get 5 UC credits for it, and it satisfies an area studies requirement I need for my major. Excellent.

I arrived at the Business and Economics campus in downtown, one of the many campuses situated all over the city of Santiago that makeup the university, and did not realize that there would be many other Students from around the world attending this orientation through other programs. Tufts, Stanford, France, etc...there were a lot of gringos and foreigners in the house. We all sat through a series of PowerPoint presentations explaining the history of the university, library system, how to register for classes and afterwords were chartered on buses over to the Macul campus which holds a good portion of the faculties...it is TEN MINUTES from my house. Score.

The campus seemed pretty interesting. Rugged, large, lots of classrooms and space, graffiti, diverse student population...I even got offered a swig of some boxed wine being shared amongst some Chilean students as our group passed by (of course I took up the offer). At the end of the tour, we returned to the Econ campus downtown to pickup a book of the courses being offered this semester. I then proceeded to give myself my own tour of the Architecture campus next door, beautiful and active since their classes had started that day. There was a large book sale taking place on the campus; picked up Teddy Roosevelt's "The Rough Riders)" (english) about his 6 month participation in military campaign in Santiago in 1898 as well as Gabirle garcia Marquez's "Relato de un náufrago" ('The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor', obviously in Spanish). After, I headed to a downtown cafe to look through the course catalog, and on the way to downtown I was strangely offered a position to be a model by a Chilean company. I kindly turned them down, lol.

I headed back to the same building the next day to have a one-on-one meeting with a professor of La Chile who has been helping exchange students with class selections for a number of years as well as to pick-up my university I.D. card which is ironically my only form of identification other than passport since I lost my Santa Cruz Id and driver's license. I decided to take a Geography class with an economic emphasis, one on the Chilean copper industry, one themed around middle eastern conflicts with the west, as well as a Chilean history class centered around the indigenous population during the conquest. Classes have been delayed another week and a half because of the strikes, but I received the excellent news that the director of the undergraduate program at La Chile has emailed all professors to request that the international students be allowed to finished the term as scheduled (Dec 6) rather than having to wait out the rest of the semester depending on the specific department. I was worried I would have to be in class potentially all the way up until Dec 20th. Phew. My class schedule is subject to change if I see other classes I like, but for right now I am happy with it. Later that day I tried to pick-up my National Chilean I.D. card, but there was a mix up with my name on an important form. For some reason the registration office put III as my maternal last name. I went back to the office to have that fixed, and the process had a 2 hour wait. I'll head back to the ID card office tomorrow to request my card again, but I will most likely have to wait another week for it to be printed. Drag.

Well that's all for now. I am getting excited for my ski trip this Friday with the program, especially since it is only $24 dollars for lift ticket and transportation to the mountain (group discount). I am thinking about taking a bus to Mendoza, Argentina this weekend to go skiing, but it depends on the whether, price, and my motivation. We shall see. Take care, cheers.