Skiing In September

This past weekend was awesome, I got to go skiing and visit a different part of Chile for the first time this semester!

Saturday I woke up really early, at about 4:30 to go to Santiago with a couple friends.  In Santiago we caught a shuttle bus up to a ski area called Valle Nevado (which is actually a sister ski area of Big Sky in Montana...) The skiing was absolutely amazing! It was super warm and probably some of the best spring skiing I've had in years.  It was textbook corn snow (I had trouble explaining how good it was to the chilean fam because corn snow doesn't sound nearly as cool if you don't know what it is) and the conditions only got better as the day went on.

The Andes are HUGE, way different from any mountains I've ever been around before.  Where as the Rockies are pointy and dynamic these things are just gigantic.  They rise up really fast from the coast, we were able to go from sea level in Valparaiso to over 9,500 feet in about 2.5 hours! But more importantly they are just plain big.  They stretch on for miles and miles and the snow covered peaks end impressively way above tree line.

After a great day of skiing we met some new friends  on the bus ride back to Santiago, one guy was really friendly and we spent most of the ride talking about language and cultural differences.  He was pretty much fluent in Spanish and English so he gave us the low down on some more Chileanismos.  We learned that foreigners should probably never say hueon - a word that can mean both dude and asshole - because we'll probably use it wrong even if we can speak fluent spanish... it's something about cultural understanding).  We were all completely wiped when we got back to Santiago though and so we booked it to the hostel that our friend Laura recommended called La Chimba which was pretty sweet and definitely a nice place to finish our day.  For dinner we just went across the street to this Peruvian place that was recommended by the hostel.  While it was slightly lacking in atmosphere, there were lots of odd Chinese decorations and the waiter was a little overly attentive, the food was absolutely amazing.  Peru has a fair amount of Chinese/Asian influence we learned and this was definitely apparent in the dishes we ordered (lots of rice and some yummy sauces).

The next day some of the group stayed in Santiago to attend a human rights march with Danko (one of our program leaders), while Peter and I chose to go back to Valparaiso.  The march sounded really interesting but I was a little stressed about the amount of work I had to do for Monday and I was also pretty tired. Unfortunately when I got home instead of doing my homework I somehow ended up at a BBQ with my family and about 6 other families that lasted for most of the afternoon.  I'm not sure exactly when I agreed to go to this thing but my brother left specifically to come pick me up so I didn't really feel like I could say no... It was really fun though, much better than doing homework so I guess I can't complain too much!

That's all for now though, I'm tired and I'll post pictures as soon as I get a chance to download them from my camera...