Mountains, luxury, and daily life

Things always seem to change at the last minute here, so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised at how drastically different my weekend was from what was originally planned, but it still makes me laugh. The original plan: help build a house with Un Techo Para Chile (a roof for Chile), the Chilean equivalent of Habitat for Humanity. But although the Midd program people had arranged this opportunity months in advance, Techo called Thursday night to say they had too many people and we couldn't come. So instead, 16 of us headed up to Santiago for a weekend that can only be described as luxurious. Rather than doing manual labor and sleeping on someone's floor for 2 nights, I stayed in a nice hotel with central heating (which was a big deal, since electricity/gas/etc. are really expensive here and very few houses have heat), ate multi-course meals in really nice restaurants, toured 3 beautiful parks in Santiago, and visited an organic vinyard. And the most exciting part: we could see the mountains! If you remember my previous attempt at photographing the mountains through the smog, I'm sure you'll agree that this is much nicer. Without the view of the mountains, Santiago isn't particularly pretty; with the mountains towering over the city, it's stunning. You can still see the smog, but it's not nearly as bad.

I still haven't taken that many pictures of Viña or Valparaíso, partly because I usually don´t bring my camera with me and partly because I don´t like feeling like a tacky tourist taking pictures of everything. But here´s what I have so far:

This is where I live, on the third floor. Not particularly exciting from the outside, but it´s nice on the inside, and very centrally located, on the main road into Viña.

This here is the casa central, or main building, of my university, the Pontifícia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso. It´s actually much bigger than it looks in this picture, and it has a courtyard with palm trees in the center. Just like Midd, right? Universities here are generally decentralized, with different buildings spread out all over the city/cities, and mine is no different. I have one class in this building, one in another building about a block away, and the third is on the far side of Viña, about a half an hour away by bus.

I think this is my favorite building of the university (although I haven´t actually seen all of them). It´s the Institute of History, and I don´t have any classes there, but it has a library and is within walking distance of my apartment, so it´s a convenient place to study. I´m sort of glad I don´t have class there, though, because if I was late for class, running up all those stairs would be a nightmare.

The stairs of the castle. They really are that slanted, so they´re sort of half way between a ramp and normal stairs. This is only 1/3 of the total amount of stairs.

This is the street in front of the Casa Central, where all the micros stop. Micros are the buses (short for microbus) that you can see here. If you think there are a lot in the picture, there were probably about 5-10 more behind the ones you can see. They and the subway are my main forms of transporation. They're a very chaotic form of transportation, and I'll tell you all some of my crazy experiences with them later.

I have about a million more pictures from this weekend, but I think this is enough for now. Tune in next week for: my favorite things about Chile, or micro adventures, or maybe something completely different, depending on what happens between now and then. Chau chau!