Chilean Stone: Wrapping up in Viña

After much pressure from my general public, I am updating once again.

The last couple weeks have been spent generally hanging out in Viña and Valparaíso, finishing up classes, and spending time with my host family. The past two weeks have been about the only point in the semester when I've had any sort of significant amount of school work, and so I was forced to spend a few evenings writing papers and memorizing terms :). I had several tests and a handful of papers to write, but as of last Thursday, it is all done! Although my classes weren't hard this semester, it is great to be done with undergraduate college, and begin to really move on to the next step. I'm now starting to seriously think about VIMS next semester, and I've been looking at housing and other things like that recently. Classes start at the end of August, and I'll be moving into the area in the middle of August. It's exciting to be starting grad school, and I'm sure that it will be much harder but more enjoyable.

Also, the World Cup has been consuming a large amount of my time recently, especially when Chile was still in it. For those of you who haven't been following the World Cup as much as 99.999% of Chileans and the Latin American world (the 0.001% are people still in comas and wombs). Chile, like the US, made it out of group play, but got eliminated in their first game. On game days, the country is basically paralyzed, every business is closed, public transportation stops, and after every game, the entire city goes to the main plazas in town to celebrate or riot (depending on what happened). Some of the games were at 10:00 in the morning here, which is obviously much too early for any self-respecting Chilean to wake up for, so many people solved this problem by staying up the night before drinking until the game started the next day. I think this may have been a contributing factor to some of the riots.

A couple of different days I went with some friends to explore Valparaíso and see some of the city I haven't before. It's a very interesting and unique city, something they're all very proud of, especially because the entire city was recently declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Some of its most distinctive features are the ascensores, the crazily placed houses on the hills, and the random graffiti and murals that are all over the city. The graffiti is usually pretty artful, and I've added some photos of some of the more striking murals.

The past few days have been full of asados, get-togethers, and goodbyes. It's been good looking back, but I'm also getting excited for some more traveling and adventures I have to come. I am not flying back to the US until the 24th of July, so I have a whole 20 days to travel and see more of South America. As a result, I am flying out tomorrow to the Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. From there, I will travel to north-eastern Argentina, see several national parks, and then get all the way up to Iguazu falls on the border with Brazil. I'm meeting a friend from my program here in Chile and his brother at Iguazu, and we're going to hang out there for a few days, work our way back down to Buenos Aires, take a ferry back over to Montevideo, and head out back to Santiago on the 21st. It should be a great trip, and I'm really looking forward to it.