Day 6: Friday 5/13/11

Today started at 9:30 AM, when we were told to be ready for the bus. We were scheduled to tour Pablo Neruda's house, a famous chilean poet whom I studied in high school. When we got to the small, lifeless town of San Antonio, we were told the tour was not until 4:30 pm and nothing was planned for the time being. I was a little annoyed I had to get up early for nothing, but I grasped the idea of exploring more of the Chilean countryside. After make a few loops around the abandoned city, we terrifyingly took the bus up a mountain with a dirt road. We went to the grave of another poet.. this was a little scary considering the grave was on top of a huge abandoned mountain without any vegetation or life present (except ONE little girl standing alone outside of one of the shacks). I am sure the place is very nice in the summer, but in the winter it was very quiet and abandoned. We went to lunch at a nice restaurant and were filmed for CNN Chile. At the time, we did not know it was CNN so we were a little confused as to why we were being filmed, but us being filmed or photographed seems to happen a lot here in Chile, so I wasn't surprised. I don't know why, other than because we are foreign. The next thing we did to kill the 6 hours we had to spare was visit the world's largest swimming pool. Unfortunately, the pool was drained of it's water for winter, but it was still fascinating and extremely huge. When we finally arrived at Pablo Neruda's house, the house was gorgeous with an amazing ocean view (like everything in Chile). The house was designed to look like a ship, and Pablo had a lot of unusual collections and even made his house into a museum before he died. We spent the rest of our day sleeping in the bus in between the random activities. When we finally got to Regatton class I was very tired, but woke up when we started to dance. Later tonight, we went to "hollywood pub", the casino, and 'discoteca' tonight with the Chilean students. We got to dance Reggaton like we practiced! Let's just say it was a long, but extremely fun day.