Oct 27, 2008 21:58
OK, so here it is. Chile was.....not a very good travel. Most of the plans that Prof. Hale made fell through and his Chilean colleagues pretty much abandonned us. But even besides that, we spent about 7 of our 10 days in the city of Concepcion which according to his travel book is the ugliest city in the country. There is just so much cool stuff to see in Chile from the wine country in the North to Padagonia in the South, I still can't believe we wasted so much time while we were there. We ended up going to a workshop at the university that was entirely in Spanish. We were forced to make presentations which were completely pointless. One time we were told that we should buy snacks if we needed food on the bus ride, only to find out later that he really meant that we should buy food if we wanted to eat the next day. One of the guys got mugged on the first night there. I had some really weird and unexpected issues with friends. And utlimately I didn't really learn about anything- no culture, no history, not even too much about the water systems in Chile.
But I can tell you where to get great Peruvian food in Concepcion.
So it wasn't really all bad. The travel group was really good and we did have a couple of really good days, like when we went to a little beach town on the Pacific (which coincidentally was arranged by the mother of a Franklin alum and not the professor) and the day that we took a bus to Chillan (on our own). So there were some highs, but there were a lot of lows. Just...not too good.
Anyway, we're all back to classes and life as usual. Trying to move on from the whole travel disaster.
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Oh and Ashlie Butler (graduated 2 years ago, remember Jacci? Stef?) is a contestant on the CW show Stylista. It's kind of weird seeing someone you know on TV.