Alli Soenksen: Santiago!

Today started off brutal because we had to wake up at 6:30 am to go the stock exchange in Santiago, Chile's capital. Santiago is 2 hours after from our hotel so we got to take a little nap on the bus. The Stock Exchange itself was very interesting and we got to see a whole presentation and visit the trading floor. Afterwards, we took a bus tour and walked around Santiago. We visited museums, the cathedral, and many other famous locations. The chilean students, Javier and Javier, walked us around Santiago and took us to a fish market for lunch. I got steak! It was a very fun environment and there were guitar singers all around the market singing to us. In the market we were also allowed to go to shops and see more figures part of the Chilean culture. I bought a few things for my family :) We continued to tour Santiago and went up a huge incline to see the whole city. It was unbelievable! I could literally see everything..Chile is beautiful. We also walked up a lot of stairs to the top of the mountain and saw statues of the Virgin Mary in a large garden. When we came back down to ground level, we went to another local market and got ice cream. We picked our yogurt flavor and real fruit! I got vanilla and strawberries...it was sooo yummy. We got back to the University and had our first Reggae-tone dance class. I liked this way better than salsa because it was more fun and we actually danced to songs I know of. Once this was finished, we went to the grocery store to get some snacks and experienced our first visit to Pizza Hut! We went to bed early to try to catch up on sleep.