Orientation 3

I woke up at the hotel and got ready for the day. breakfast was from 8 to 9:30 and I got down there at 9:30 and got a little something in me. The breakfast was the same everyday, which I really liked because it was so GOOD!

After breakfast we had a session about our host families and how we should act around them. They said that we need to keep our rooms neat and tidy, which is hard for me--- but an important skill to have. They also told us to be very kind to our nana's because they work so hard.

After this session we had a break. It seems like we were always having breaks and at every break there were cookies, tea, coffee, and juice. I was NEVER hungry at the orientation because there was food everywhere.

We then all attended a session that introduced us to the classes, schedules, and academics of our host universities. This was very interesting and presented the first real challenges we would all have to face --- registering for classes. What is so difficult about registering for classes is that you have a period to shop around for the classes you want to take. In other words, for the first few weeks of class you attend different classes and pick the ones you want to take. Yale does this by the way... my dream school. This is fairly easy when you have a good idea of what you want to take and only one group of classes to choose from, but we have THREE different class lists to choose from, all on different schedules, and all with different attendance policies. If you want to attend a class at Catolica, you better start going from the beginning because attendance is a very important part of your grade and you cannot pass if you do not attend a certain percentage or more classes. It was quite an eye opening experience.

University academics are very different here in Chile compared to the United States. A student first picks his or her area of specialization and then attends university to take classes only in that specialization. For instance, I would probably go into the school of the humanities and study only political science and public policy classes. Of course, sometimes the courses leech over into others, for example economics is taught in political science, and some political science is taught in economics, however you only take classes with the people who are in your specialization. If you specialize in political science and you need to take economics, you will still only take the classes with the students from political science. This means that the class that you enter with is the class you are with for your entire duration of university. So, if you hate the kids sitting next you in class, you better start looking for a new university.

We, get thrown into this mix by taking varying classes form many different specializations which supposedly doesn't help with the trying to meet Chileans problem we tend to have.

After this we had another break, and then we all got together for our second excursion in Santiago. Like the day before, we all were given a small slip of paper telling us our objective. My groups objective was to go to a "Red House" museum on the plaza de armas and explore it. To be totally honest, I was kind of in a bad mood this day. I was not in the mood to go to a museum, I just wanted to hang out and chill. We got to the museum and to be totally honest, it blew. The only thing that was cool was the small model, figurine, shadow boxes that were set up. They looked very realistic and it was quite impressive, but the rest, wasn't that exciting. The museum is based in a house that serves as the symbol of Chilean independence and the museum focuses on the development of Santiago as a city. Ok, it was more interesting then I am giving it credit for, but it still isn't something that I would recommend on a must see in Santiago list.

After the museum we were all pretty hungry, so we grabbed an empenada, at a stand down the street. We took them to the square where we sat on a bench and watched the people, birds, and the city go by. Backing up for a second, on the walk from the stand on the street to the plaza, I saw one of the most revolting things I have ever seen in my entire life. As we walked passed the cathedral, I saw a homeless man peeing into a trash can that was sitting next to the cathedral. It was quite the site to see.

Changing subjects, after eating, we walked through the Cathedral. After the cathedral one of the girls in our group thought we really needed to go to the library to research more about our museum so that our presentation to the rest of the group was the best. (Ok, side note, I could care less if our presentation is the best of the group! It isn't graded, it is only for fun, and all they want is the gist so if they want to see it they can. I think that this girl was crazy.) But off the library we went. We got to the library, which ended up really being the national achieves, and we ended up just chilling.

After hanging out in the national achieves, we decided we needed ice cream so we walked back to the plaza de aramas to get ice cream. We sat by this famous statue in the plaza de aramas really close to the painters in the square. The painters were really cool to watch. One person was sketching people's portraits and other artists were painting on canvas using pictures, I assume people gave them. It was really cool.

After chilling on the plaza some more we jumped onto the metro and got back to the hotel where we prepared our presentation. Our presentation went off well, I mean, we weren't the best... maybe going to the library would have helped. :) But, the people go the gist and that is what really mattered.

After our presentations we got on a bus and headed to a restaurant named DONA TINA. At the restaurant we could choose what we wanted, but they first served us some absolutely amazing appetizers, which were little empenadas. (I think I have written about these in another blog, if some of my loyal readers don't know what empenadas are, I'll describe them again, leave me a comment to tell me. Thanks!) For dinner, I had some of the most amazing meat I have ever had in my life. For desert, I had something that I really didn't quite care for. It could have been much better, but you couldn't have beat the meat anyway. It was a wonderful dinner.

After dinner, we returned and I went to my room, where I promptly fell asleep.