Exams and Ski

PHOTO ALBUM 1: Ski Trip (link)

The semester has finished with exams in two of my classes, in Fundamentals of Social Work and Sociology. I was 0.1 points away from not having to take the Sociology final exam, but unfortunately I had to take it and study pretty hard. Although, all is well now, free for the 20 day break or so. My friends wanted to hit up some skiing near Santiago for some vacationing after the semester, so 7 of us went to one of the ski resorts for a couple days to ski. The place was very beautiful and it’s right on the border between Argentina and Chile. It’s actually the only border crossing near Santiago, so all of the shipping trucks have to go right by the ski resort through the Andes to get to the border crossing. It’s actually a big problem because when the border is closed because of too much snow (which happens frequently), the trucks cannot pass and the trucks have to form a mile long line on the side of the road waiting for the pass to open back up. It’s a problem in terms of traffic as well as trading considering the goods do not reach their destination on time. It was nice to see some snow and bet back on skis after such a long time. I picked up pretty well although I was skiing with professionals, literally. One of the guys raced professionally back in the US. Where we were staying, I had reserved a bed in the cheapest part, but they didn’t have any more of that so they upgraded me for free to a bunk bed room with a private bath and a employee of the resort at my service 7:00am -8:00 pm. It was quite a nice upgrade while all my friends were stuck in the other place. I felt like I was more in Brasil during those days because about 80% of the people at the ski place were Brazilian. There were a number of times where I was listening in on Brazilians speaking in Portuguese and the Chileans speaking in Spanish and there were no problems in communicating considering the similarities of the 2 languages. As you were going up on the ski lift, sometimes you were directly overtop the road and the large shipping trucks that carry materials over to Argentina or trucks from Argentina carrying materials to Chile, to the port to be shipped off to Asia or on the coastline of northern South America or Central America. Also, there were tons of Army people with their special gear doing trainings and I don’t even know what. Some were doing the pizza all the way down the mountain, while others were professionally zig zaging and zipping all over the place. It was quite humorous to see the army men all geared up professionally doing the pizza all the way down. The mountains weren’t crowded at all which made for some nice skiing. I did the challenge of some black diamonds which I did alright with. I certainly wasn’t zipping down the mountain, but I was able to avoid falling more than once or twice which was sweet. We returned to Santiago and I said farewell to my gringo friends as they were heading off to Perú to the Amazon to travel a little more. I headed back to Viña del Mar for the week.