Summer Vacation!?!

After about three and a half weeks of a 3 hour a day class, I am on summer vacation in Chile! Our program essentially had us take an intensive (J-term) Spanish class, but now we are free to travel around South America for a month and then we start the real semester the 2nd of March.

Tomorrow morning to start, I will be flying to Punta Arenas, the most southern point you can get to in Chile by plane. There with two classmates, we will be touring Torres del Paine national park. We will then be meeting a third classmate to explore Chiloe an island with very distinct culture and food. And of course taking a penguin tour! Lastly, we will be heading to Pucon, where we plan to zip line, white water raft and I may even sky dive over a volcano!

But, back to the things that I have experienced. Last weekend, the program took our whole group to Isla Negra, Chile. It’s about a two hour drive west of Santiago, that goes through the countryside. We went to visit one of Pablo Neruda’s three houses, and enjoy some time on the beach. Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, and was the second Chilean to be awarded it yet. Neruda, a lover of the sea and all things maritime, built the home to resemble a ship with low ceilings, creaking wood floors, and narrow passageways. A passionate collector, every room has a different collection of bottles, ship figureheads, maps, ships in bottles, and an impressive array of shells. Following this beautiful tour, we headed to the beach and enjoyed getting soaked by waves and climbing on the rocks.

This weekend a small group of us went to the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolumbiano ~Precolumbian Art Museum in Santiago. This museum in particular is said to have the best collection of artwork in Santiago, and I would agree. Items in the museum’s collections are drawn from the major pre-Columbian culture areas of Mesoamerica, Intermediate / Isthmo-Colombian, Pan-Caribbean, Amazonia and the Andean. The museum has over 3,000 pieces representing almost 100 different groups of people. The collection ranges from about 10,000 years ago. And more importantly for me, the majority of the collection was incredible examples of ceramic work.

Well, I better finish packing for tomorrow!

~Ciao