Santiago Tour, UNAB, Isla Negra, and Pomaire

Yesterday we got to know Santiago a bit better, spending the morning learning our way to campus and the afternoon on an organized tour of the city. We started by learning how to use the Metro, which is surprisingly clean and looks pretty safe too. We took the metro to the UNAB (Universidad Andres Bello), which is where we are having our classes this summer. This is a long weekend because it is St. Peter and St. Paul's day on Monday, so we don't actually begin instruction until Tuesday. Still, we got a mini campus tour from our program assistants and ate lunch at our designated cafeteria which is the firestation close by. In the afternoon we got on a bus and toured around Santiago. There are quite a few districts that make up Santiago. I fell asleep during part of the tour (Bus was really warm and we were all very full from lunch), so I'm not 100% on the names of the districts, but I'm reasonably sure they're something close. Anyway, there's Downtown, which is where our hotel is located. This is the place with all the government buildings and large churches. Other areas of the city are Bellavista which is a sort of Bohemian party place, Las Condes which is the more upscale/rich area, Providencia which is very corporate, and San Cristobal Hill which has parks and a giant statue of the Virgin Mary at the top. You can see pretty much the whole city from the top of the hill:

It's hard to see the Andes through the giant cloud of smog that perpetually hangs over the city, but I promise they're there. The tour guide was telling us that Chile is a very polluted country, mainly in Santiago. They're doing what they can to clean up their air and the Mapocho River, but it's still bad. I believe it too, as many of us have headaches and irritated throats from all the smog.

Today we got some fresh air at the beach though, specifically Isla Negra and Pomaire. These regions are in Valparaiso, which is an hour and 45 minutes northeast of Santiago, along the coast. The famous Chilean poet Pablo Neruda owned a house in Isla Negra and we got to see it today. Neruda apparently liked the sea and liked collecting things, so his house contains all kinds of collections of shells, glassware, figureheads from boats, and other nautical things. He also collected art from different countries. We weren't allowed to take pictures of anything inside the house, but the collections were very eccentric but beautiful. The architecture was also interesting - he liked the sea so much he tried to make his house kind of like a boat. A lot of the doors and hallways are very narrow and the floors and ceilings look like those on a ship. His bedroom also has huge glass windows on 3 sides so that he could look out at the sea which is right outside his house.

The photo uploader on this blog is being really weird, so to see pictures of all these places, check out my photo album at http://picasaweb.google.com/lizkritzer/ChileTrip2009?feat=directlink. I have too many pictures to make captions for each one, but you can probably tell by the file name more or less what it is a picture of.

After we finished looking at Neruda's house and playing on the rocks by the beach, we got back on the bus to go to Pomaire for lunch and shopping. Chileans eat really big lunches (probably why they also don't eat dinner until 10:00 at night), so we had a large meal at Los Naranjos restaurant. I had an empanada with an inordinate amount of meat and onions inside, and it was very filling (this is mostly for Mom, who is probably wondering if I am getting enough to eat down here.) After lunch we got to shop around for souvenirs. There was mostly pottery, knit scarves/hats/gloves, and jewelry for sale.

It's been a big enough day for me already, but one of the girls in our group turned 21 today so we are going out dancing, etc. tonight in a little while. Chileans usually go out very late on Fridays and Saturdays, like around midnight or later and they stay out till 4 or 5 in the morning (so says Fodor's anyway, we'll see if it's true tonight). We don't have anything big to do tomorrow in the morning though, so we can sleep in after what will probably end up being a late night.