Day Three: Santiago and Reggaeton

Today we visited Santiago, the capital of Chile. Since it is an hour and half to two hours away by bus, we left the hotel around 7:30 or 8. The plus side of the bus ride was that we all had a nice nap before we visited Bolsa de Comercio, the main Chilean stock market. They gave us a presentation about the Chilean stock market and a brief overview of how it works, but because I've never studied the topic before, I was fairly confused about the entire system. An interesting development we learned about was MILA, a joint stock market between Chile, Peru, and Colombia. After the presentation we headed down to the trading floor. One main difference between the American and Chilean stock exchange is that almost no one uses the trading floor at Bolsa de Camercio. The brokers mainly work from their offices because the entire market can be accessed online.

After we finished looking around the trading floor, we went to walk around the center of Santiago. La Moneda, the building that the Chilean president works from, is only a block away from Bolsa. There are police guarding La Moneda, some on horses, but there are still some stray dogs laying on the lawn and sidewalk surrounding the building. There are stray dogs everywhere we've been so far. It seems almost impossible to walk down the street without seeing at least two or three dogs. From La Moneda we walked to a beautiful cathedral that had a lot of stained glass. After spending some time looking around, we crossed the street to the Chilean National History Museum. All the signs describing the paintings and artifacts were in Spanish, but with the help of some fellow Plus 3 students whose Spanish is better than mine, I was able to get a grasp on the history of the nation.

By the time we finished looking around the museum, it was time for lunch! We took a bus over the the fish market that has some restaurants inside of it. We went to Augusto's and had some delicious seafood. Our last stop in Santiago was Cerro San Cristóbal, a really big hill with a statue of the Virgin Mary on top. To get most of the way up the hill, you need to go up an incline similar to the Duquesne Incline, except it was much steeper and longer.

The view up the incline. Midway up the incline there's a spot for the two carts to go around each other so both can run on the same track.

 At the spot where the incline ends, you're high enough to see all of Santiago. But there is so much smog from the city that the view is very hazy. We took some group photos and then begin the walk up to the Virgin Mary. To reach the top of the hill, there are a lot of steps to climb and a walk through a silent prayer garden. The view from the very top is beautiful, although not too clear because of all the smog. We then quickly headed back down to the bus so we could drive back to Valparaiso and make it back in time for our next dance class.

Joanie and I on Cerro San Cristóbal with a very hazy view of Santiago.

Our dance class today was reggaeton, a dance style very different from salsa. The dancing was very energetic and more tiring than our salsa class yesterday. About halfway through our lesson, some students from USM were standing around the space we were dancing and watching us. Our teacher just invited them right in to dance with us and they looked like they were having just as much fun as we were. After class we took the public bus back to our hotel in Vina. The buses in Valparaiso/Vina are smaller than the public buses in Pittsburgh, and also drive much faster. Taking these buses to and from the University is certainly an adventure. The dance class was our last structured activity for the day, so we were on our own for dinner. 


Tomorrow we visit our first company, LAN Airlines.