A Semester in Santiago de Chile: Isla Negra and the city center

Once again, hello to everyone!
It’s been a pretty exciting week and there’s quite some stuff I can tell you about.

So first of all: On Wednesday we had ‘feriado’, which means no school. : )

My familia and I went to the house of Pablo Neruda in ‘isla negra’. Pablo Neruda is a famous Chilean writer - he was famous all over the world - maybe you know him! :) We left at 11:30 which is early for my family here, then drove for like 2 hours or so and then we got there. It started to rain on the way out so I was already pretty happy. The house was amazing! Right at the beach, it’s really pretty and there’s SO much detail and so many decorations!! There are huge windows all over the house and I especially liked one in a bedroom looking over the pacific. :) The house was really interesting too! It rained the whole time and not the Portland kind of drizzle, but actually pouring making-you-wet-to-your-bones kind of rain! :) We had to walk some outside too and I was soooo happy!! I got SOOOOOOAKED!! Then we ate in the restaurant of the museum and it was really cool and yummy too! :D On the way back it still rained - the drive back was super cozy! In Santiago it kept raining at night. This means that Thursday morning it was SO pretty!! You could see the mountains better than ever and there was hardly any smog! All the rain had washed it down. And the MOST AMAZING THING: The mountains were covered in snow!!!!!! I spent all of Thursday morning at school just looking out of the windows staring at them. They were unbelievably beautiful!

I’m taking driving classes now; I think they’re pretty fun. And they are WAY cheaper than in Switzerland. So on Friday I had classes, my second one so far. : ) And I have classes every day this and the next week too.

Afterwards Lea and I went to 30 minutes of gymnastics, but then Andrés picked us up and we went to see Ignació play with his band. Ignació is Andrés's older son. It was right next to a ‘feria’ - a market - so Lea and I walked around some in there too. Afterwards we went to eat and had some delicious pizza.

On Saturday I slept in and didn’t do much until we went to the movies to watch the new X-Men movie. I liked it even though I hadn’t seen any of the other ones.

Today I left the house at 7:30 in the morning. Leo and Mathi two boys from Lea’s class told us they would show us around the city center. It was an amazing day! Today is the ‘Día del patrimonio’ so all of the museums were open and you got in for free. After some problems with the metro in the early morning, I met the others at ‘La moneda’ at 8:30. We started out by looking at it but decided not to wait for what seemed like 2 hours to get into it. Instead we went to a museum underneath the Moneda. It was a really cool museum and one of the things I liked most was a mirror in which you could see the universe (look at the pictures). Later we went the old building of the congreso nacional. We just walked by and realized that you could go in there if you wanted to so of course we decided to go. : ) It was unbelievable! There were paintings, windows like the ones you would find in churches and lots and lots of decorations and detail all over. We walked from room to room in a group and in every room there was a different person that would tell us about the room. The room I liked most was the library and then one room that had the most comfortable looking couches! : )

Then we went to the plaza de armas, on the way we saw a couple of closed down streets for bikes, it’s the same thing that they did in Portland! Apparently on some Sundays they close down various streets in the center and whoever wants to can bike, jog or roller-skate around. At the plaza de armas we went into the church. It is huge and really pretty too. Afterwards we went to look at some old stamps in the main post office and then to another museum. That museum was huge but we decided not to stay for too long so we just had a short look around and then went up to the tower. The view from up there was amazing!

Then our last station was the cerro Santa Lucia. It’s a hill in the city center of Santiago; we walked (Lea and Mathi had a race : ) ) all the way up to the very top and had another great view of the city.

That was our last real stop, after this one we went to eat some pizza at a domino’s. The whole day Leo and Mathi were great tour guides and told us all there was to know!

Another amazing weekend went by and tomorrow is the start of yet another week. But as it turns out there's only 6 more weeks of school to go...
Miss you all!

Lena