August 11th

First week of school: DONE. Kind of. Funny story, actually. As previously mentioned, we're currently enrolled in two different universities, la Universidad de Chile (la Chile) and la Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile (la Catolica). La Catolica is a private, obviously Catholic, university that is very well regarded. La Chile is the university of Chile, is state-funded, and is considered the best school in Chile. It's also completely crazy. As evidence, I submit this video, which we had to watch at two separate orientations:

You don't have to speak Spanish to be intrigued by the music selection/editing. So that was one of our first impressions of la Chile. The second important impression was when we went to the first class, a history class about the 18th century and the professor just didn't show up. We were there for 30 minutes until some Chilean students came in to say that he had forgotten classes started that day and he'd see us on Wednesday instead.

On Wednesday, there was nation-wide student protest advocating for education reform so of course there were no Chilean students in class, just us Americans, which I can only assume is why the professor chose not to show up for a second time. So hopefully he comes to class on Monday because this Wednesday is a national holiday and it'd be nice to see him at some point in the first two weeks of school.

The best la Chile story is from a friend of mine, BJ. He was told class started at 8:30 so he got to campus at 8:30 only to find that class actually started at 10. So he waited around until 10 and then he was still early because the class actually started at 10:15. So once the professor showed up he was expecting to actually have class. But no, that's not how la Chile works. Instead the professor wanted to know what other classes students were taking so that he could schedule that class at a convenient time for everybody. So they decided on a time to meet  at which point everybody would decide when classes should meet. Seriously, this school is crazy.

Aside from the crazy, it's been good so far. I'm currently signed up for the previously mentioned history class as well as a ceramics class that takes up eight hours a week but should be fun.