What a Journey!

I'm finally back in Santiago to enjoy my last few days in Chile. I've had very little internet access for the last week and a half and haven't been able to catch up my blog. That's what I'm going to do right now!

Our team spent Monday, May 4th in the cute town of Santa Cruz. A Rotarian came by our hostal in the morning and took us first to a public high school to talk to some students in 2 English classes. It was really fun to talk to them about what we're doing and to motivate them to study abroad someday. Then we went to have lunch and walk around the town for the afternoon. The highlight of the day was definitely the spa treatment at the Santa Cruz hotel and a dip in the warm pool. The guys went to a Rotary function and the girls ate a nice dinner in the hotel.

The next day we were picked up and driven to our next home Talca. Soon after we arrived and had lunch with our new hosts, we met up in downtown Talca to visit a branch of TVN, Chile's largest TV station. It was a small studio but of course I loved it all the same. We met a really nice journalist who was just selected to go to Denmark on a Rotary GSE trip in the fall.

Day 2 in Talca consisted of visiting the regional theater and watching the beginning of play, walking around the city to see the different court systems, eating lunch at another social club and finally getting interviewed on a TV station in Talca. That was really fun! The next day in Talca we visited a dam and hydroelectic plant and had a delicious picnic on the shores of the lake before making our way to the hotsprings for some great (and cheap!) treatments and a dip in the hotsprings. We made our way back just in time for the Rotary meeting that night.

We departed from Talca the next day on a train to Rancagua, not really knowing what the rest of the trip would bring. We spent the day and ate lunch in Requinoa, a small town outside of Rancagua. In the afternoon, we were picked up by our Rancagua hosts to spend the next few days there.