AIESEC Leadership Development Conference in Buenos Aires

PHOTO ALBUM 1: LDS Buenos Aires (link)

This past weekend I was in Buenos Aires for an AIESEC conference (link) which was quite entertaining. We found cheap flight tickets form Santiago to Buenos Aires. I was with people from 12 countries including Portugal, Russia, Czech Republic, Poland, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Canada, and Germany. It was a weekend of learning about how to be a better leader, meeting lots of cool people, doing some AIESEC dances, and just having a good time. We were in an ex-monastery on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. The parties included one that was Cowboys which made for some interesting costumes. The second night was people with costumes such as cross dressing to get some laughs and have a good time. It's always fun to meet new people from so many different countries that all have the motivation and desire to create a positive impact on society.

University Life

The university where I study, the Pontifica Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, has about 7 buildings or so distributed among the two cities of Viña del Mar and Valparaíso. There is no campus that exists, so it's pretty much like an urban campus. I'm taking a couple classes including: General Sociology, Fundamentals of Social Work, Social Violence, Spanish, and Choral Practice 1. Generally there are very few gringos (North Americans) in my classes. In Choral Practice, I am the only one which makes me stand out pretty well. In the universities of Chile, all students enter a major (or "carrera") where they take the same classes with the same group of people for all 5 years. So this makes for a tight-knit group where everyone knows everyone pretty well. This also means that classes can be rescheduled like its nothing because everyone in the class has the same schedule so there wouldn't be a problem. For the gringos (like myself), this can be problematic if we have a class scheduled during the time that the class was rescheduled. This has happened about 6 times so far. Or you'll show up to class and there will be no one there because either class was canceled and you didn't find out about it or it was moved to another room and you didn't find out about it. The communication between the professors and the students is pretty limited. The professor doesn't send out emails or notices of changes because if you just tell one member of the group everyone else in the class is going to find out because they all have the same classes, but not the gringos. One day, I showed up for class and the chileans of the class had done presentations which us gringos had no idea that we were supposed to do that. The professor was calling on people to present what they read about, and we were just lowering ourselves in our seats to try to hide behind the heads of the people in front of us so she wouldn't call on us. Knowing our homework assignments is quite unorganized because you aren't given a syllabus on the first day of class with all the homework assignments of the year. If you miss what the assignment is during class, you're kind of screwed. That's why it's really good to have Chilean friends in the class that can let you know what up. The classes that I'm taking only meet once a week so it leaves for a lot of free time. The homework load is a lot less than UNC Chapel Hill which is quite nice. It's kind of hard to understand everything that the professor says, but it's getting better.

Trip to La Serena

All the people from my Study Abroad Program took a 4 day trip to La Serena which is about a 6 hour bus ride north of Viña del Mar. We left on Thursday morning, but I of course had the unfortunate event of my alarm not working and waking up too late to catch the bus. I had to go to the bus station in the center of town to search for another way to get to La Serena. Luck had it that not 5 minutes after I arrived, a bus left for La Serena with me on it. Those sitting around me on the bus were all playing their music on their cellphone without any headphones. I arrived in La Serena after a comfortable 7 or so hours and took on the challenge of finding the hotel where the group was staying. Every person that I asked had completely different derections for me basically pointing to opposite sides of the city which made choosing the right directions quite difficult. I ran into a concert going on in the middle of the city with a line stretched 4 blocks of people waiting to get in. After finally finding where the bus stop was, I took a micro to where the hotel was. Once I finally arrived, I was greeted with the smell of asado (BBQ) and wine.

The next day, we took a bus into the city to see the sights and what was going on. We came to the city center which is a square with a large fountain in the center. Many school children stood around in the park talking with friends while other couples took up the benched showing quite public their PDA's (Public Displays of Affection). We checked out a Japanese Garden which seemed strange in the middle of a smaller Chilean town. And of course the day was not complete without an empanada of seafood. In the afternoon, we took a 2 hour trip north of La Serana to a smaller town called Vicuña where we went to a well known observatory situated on the side of a mountain far from light pollution of the city. We had the opportunity to look through high powered telescopes at developing stars, far away galaxies, exploding stars, and planets. The coolest part was to get to see Saturn where you could actually see the rings. It's wasn't just a spot of light, you could make out the form of planet and everything. After looking at the stars, the group of men that seemed to be pretty knwoledgeable about star watching and allowed us to use the telescopes, then stangely brought us downstairs for a musical show of their band. Afterwards, they tried to sell us their CD which seemed quite strange to me that the scientests just happened to make up a band too and were selling their CD.

On Saturday, we took a bus the 1.5 hours from La Serena back to Vicuña to go to a restaurant that has no electricity. They make all their food using ovens that are only heated by the sun. In the afternoon we went to a factory where they make pisco which is the rum of Chile and Perú. In the night, we celebrated the birthday of one of the girls in our study abroad program.

We headed home on Sunday.

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.