Day Four: Visiting LAN!

We’ve only been in Chile for four days, but it feels like so much longer. Today we began the day with another public bus to USM, where we had our first lecture on Chilean culture. We discussed Chile's geography, history, political system, art, and literature among a variety of other topics. It was an interesting lecture that reminded us of how unique the country is. Once we finished our lecture we ate lunch at the cafeteria and then hopped on the bus to head to our first company visit.

Part of the building where we have lecture; it's an interesting combination of closed ceilings and open air.

Our first visit was to LAN Airlines, based at the Santiago Airport. LAN is the main airline in Chile, and most of South America. We met with one of the company's engineers and he presented some very interesting topics. We learned that LAN has one of the most modern fleets and is making many innovations to their fleet. Through research they found that adding "winglets" to the end of the wings on a Boeing 767, they could reduce the amount of fuel needed by the plane, and thus modified all their 767's with this change. LAN is also adding new planes to their fleet that are made from a composite material instead of entirely metallic planes. The metallic planes are heavier, can corrode when at seaside airports, and cause the air inside of the plane to be very dry. By using the composite material for the plane, these problems can be decreased or eliminated. We did not get to see any of the planes up close, but the visit was still interesting and informative.

Once we thanked our presenter and left LAN, we headed back to USM for our second salsa class! We started with a short review of the steps we learned on Monday and then moved on to some more complicated ones. After practicing the steps by ourselves, we paired back up with our partners to continue working on dancing together. While this does feel more like salsa, I think it's more difficult than practicing alone because you need to coordinate the movement of two people into one smooth dance. We ended the class with a "free dance" when our teacher simply turned on the music and told each pair to go ahead and dance around the room, continuing to use our basic salsa skills. The class was more challenging than our first, but it was still a lot of fun.

Tomorrow we visit Bosques del Mauco, a mushroom company.