Night Life of Viña del Mar

The parties of Viña del Mar are quite numerous and quite long into the night. Pretty much every weekend, I end up going with Pelao, the 24 year old who I live with, to some house party. The drink of choice of Chile is Piscola which is a mix of Pisco Rum and Coca-Cola. It's pretty much what everyone drinks. If it's beer, then it's Escudo. The parties are centered less on drinking games and more on conversing and just talking with other people enjoying the company. After a couple hours, you might go to a club to go dancing or something. One could be walking home very easily at 7:30am just because that's when the party ends. And a night is not complete without going to MacDonald's or eating a completo (the hotdog with avocado, tomatoes, and mayo). MacDonalds is basically the only place you can find food at 6:30 in the morning, and that's where all the Chileans go. If I don't go out with Pelao, I'll go out with the many people I'm friends with in AIESEC. They're always doing something which makes things exciting. The only problem is there's never a chance to sleep.

Freshman Week

The Week of Mechones is basically like the week to celebrate the first years that are just now beginning their university experience. All classes after 2pm were canceled and at night their would be parties for the freshman. One tradition, is that all the freshman have to be doused with paint and have their clothes ripped and go barefoot to the street to collect money. And they have to collect a certain amount before coming back. It's not really as bad it sounds and they seem to make it a fun experience. So if you saw a person who looked like a colorful mess, you knew they were freshman. On Thursday of the week was the big day. Beginning at 11am, ten thousand university students from the universities of Viña del Mar and Valparaíso all gathered for one huge party on a beach 30 minutes north of Viña del Mar near Concón. Tons of people were there drinking away and playing music and enjoying time with friends. People were walking around selling shots of rum and selling sandwiches and everything. I went with my friends from Chorus and had a good time. We got to know each other pretty well. I don't think I saw another gringo there the whole day, but then again I'm sure there were a few. (All the gringos from my Study Abroad Program had taken the week off to go to Torres del Paine in the south of Chile) At about 2pm a train was coming with the tracks that basically went through the beach and all the 10,000 people. So all the inebriated people ran after the train and brought it to a halt and actually boarded the train and were jumping on the canisters of coal. That wasn't very good. It didn't pass until about 6 hours later when the Carabineros (Chilean Police) came and forcefully removed the people so that the train could pass. When darkness fell, the party continued and a large number of people headed back to Viña del Mar. But due to the mass of people that were trying to get back, there was a huge traffic jam so it was basically faster to walk than try to wait for a bus because the buses weren't hardly moving. So there was a mass of people walking in the street back to the town. There were large transport trucks in the traffic jam, so tons of people jumped on the trucks to get a lift back to town without having to walk. On one truck, there were probably 40 people. And the truck drivers couldn't really do anything to stop the people from boarding the back of their truck. I finally made it back to Viña in the night.

Mi Familia Chilena: My Chilean Family

After the Orientation, we finally got to meet the families that we would live with. I live with a family of 3: the mother, the father, and the 24 year old son. The family is incredibly nice. The mother, Angelina, is a house-wife, making all the meals, taking care of the house, keeping up with the gossip of all the family friends and relatives, doing the wash and all that. The father, Rolando, is a executive of a local company that is in charge of the parking meters of Viña del Mar. I'm really not exactly sure what he does, but yeah. He goes to work in the morning, comes back around 2pm for lunch, and then returns to work at about 4:30, and then comes back home around 11pm. His work is about 40 minutes away in a nearby town called Villa Alemaña (German Villa). The son, Pelao, is a 5th year Industrial Engineer Student at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso. There are two other daughters that are both married and live outside of the house. Fernanda, the oldest, lives in Santiago with her husband and two children of 3 and 5. Loreto, the middle daughter, lives in Viña del Mar with her husband, near to her parents, and works in a nursery caring for the children. The house is about a 8 minute bus ride from the center of Viña del Mar and about a 15 minute bus ride to where my classes are in Valparaíso. I eat all my meals in the house which isn't a problem because Angelina makes really good food. Rico! Breakfast is either cereal and milk or bread and jam. Lunch is the big meal of the day which generally always has cut tomatoes with salt and cucumbers with vinegar, cut avocado (really good) and lechuga. Some things that might be eaten during lunch include mashed potatoes, beef, completos (hotdogs with mayonaise and avocado and tomato)

Return back to Valparaíso

On Monday, we pulled into the port of Puerto Montt at around 7:30am and all of us headed our separate ways. The first thing that I absolutely had to do was do my laundry. I hadn't done laundry in more than 16 days which was absolutely too long. I was fine before Torres del Paine, but then I was 9 days in Torres without doing laundry, and then when I got back to civilization I hopped right on a boat without time to do laundry and went another 4 days without laundry. So my jacket smelled strongly of smoke from the campfires at night and overally, 16 days with intense physical activity most days is a little too long. Surprisingly, it was quite a challenge to find a laundromat. The first one that someone directed me to didn't exist anymore, the second was closed, and then after 2 hours of asking people and be directed to random places where there wasn't a laundromat, I finally found a place to do my laundry (thank god). I can't tell you how happy I was to have clean clothes. In the night, I got on a bus to make the overnight (11 hour) trip from Puerto Montt to Viña del Mar.

Later in the week, from Wednesday to Sunday, my Study Abroad Program, IFSA-Butler, had their orientation in Olmué, Chile which is very near to where I was from my week long AIESEC Conference in January. When I arrived on Wednesday to the orientation, the majority of the group had just flown into Chile from the US that day. It was a fun 4 days, relaxing in this small town of Olmué. We had our program sessions preparing us for studying in the university in Valparaíso and how to avoid getting stolen from. In the Study Abroad Group, there are about 30 people. 13 of those 30 are from UNC Chapel Hill, but I had only met 4 of them before we had gotten there. There were only 4 guys and 26 girls and all 4 of the guys were from UNC-Chapel Hill. I'm not really sure what that means or what the cause of that is. The food was absolutely delicious at the hotel, and they always had more than enough.