This week in Chile...

I'm finally getting into the swing of things here. Classes have gotten out of the introductory stage and into the actual material that we'll be covering for the rest of the semester. The length of the introductory time has been one major difference between classes at Columbia and classes here. We spent two weeks basically going over syllabuses, introductory background material, and listening to professors going off on totally unrelated tangents (including, in just one class, a rant on awfulness of English food, Christopher Columbus' wife, and the Alien movies). To be fair, this happened to a greater extent at La Chile than at La Catolica, which is one of the many differences between those two schools- Catolica is much more in the mold of a US school, with a beautiful campus, studious and serious students, and focused classes, while La Chile has a little more of a hectic feeling, with less central organization and a more political student body.

The political bent of the La Chile students (and ones at other public schools) has been really evident this week, in the form of various protests and riots that have taken place on campuses around Santiago. This week is the anniversary of the murder of a student organizer during the Dictadura, which many Chilean students are using as a reason for all sorts of protests (including, among other things, for educational reforms, cheaper bus fares, anarchist rallies, and of course anti-Iraq).

The rallies got off to a start yesterday, and your humble blogger managed to inadvertenty get a front row seat to them while waiting for a bus. From out of nowhere, 20 or so hooded students walked out onto the street with signs, banners, and bombas Molotov, and began to throw them at a McDonalds across the street from the university. The police (who know the drill and had already taken up positions in front of the arcos dorados) responded by throwing tear gas at the protestors, who resourcefully picked them up and threw them back at the police. Figuring it wasn't a good idea to be 50 feet away from all of this, we decided to walk up the street to the next bus stop. Unfortunately, the protestors beat us there, as they had already taken up positions in front of a guanaco (water cannon truck) and were trying, it seemed and without much success, to light it on fire. We stood next to an overturned street sign and watched for a couple minutes as the protestors got soaked, but had to run away when the guanaco did a 180 and pointed directly at us, menacingly dripping water from its hose. (I would love to post photos, but Monday also happened to be the only day I didn't bring my camera with me. Alas.)

The side effects of the protests have been many, all positive- the cancelling of a quiz for tomorrow (that I hadn't dont any of the reading for), the cancelling of my only class on Thursday (which happens to be incredibly boring, US history in Spanish), and ample opportunity for make-up photographs. Also, it's given me and a friend a perfect excuse to escape Santaigo for the weekend and go to Mendoza, Argentina. I'm not really sure what's there, but it'll be nice to escape the polluted air and noise of the city, even it just means chilling and walking around for a weekend.

That's all for now, I'll post more when the protests get exciting and when I get some pictures. Ciao.