What to do and where to go in Santiago.

The classical place that tourists should visit is the city center, where they can find all the old buildings, museums, tipical restaurantes and bars. But I think there's a lot more than that en Santiago, like cultural centers, "picadas", and of course, the places that are far from the center, with a natural enviroment and country activities. Clearly, if someone picks Santiago as a place to visit, maybe he or she is nor interested in this things.

If a person visit a new city, he or she should know all about living in that place. So I think a tourist must travel in the subway, in the buses of transantiago, drink a "terremoto", eat a "sopaipilla" in the street, buy some stuff at Santa Lucía's fair and look up Santiago from the top of San Cristóbal's hill.

In the first place, I would recomend to visit a place called "Pancho Causeo", in Estación Central. It's a tipical restaurant, with deliciuos and tradicional food and drinks, and it's served by a family, all of them very kind, humble and warm.

To take another sight of chilean society, I would recomend to visit Cousiño's Palace, it's a beautifull and well preserved place, that shows the style of life of one of the ancient richer families in the country.

Another place they should visit is the Bellavista's Neighborhood, with all of the cultural places -including Neruda's House-, bars and place to dance and do some karaoke.

In the other hand, for some knowledge of the place they're visiting, I should recomend to go to the very very center... the "Plaza de Armas", and goto to the Historical Museum, the Catholic Cathedral, the Post Office and the town hall.

In the last place, if they want to know some nice places to take a coffe or rest a little, a suggest to go to Lastarria's neighborhood. It isn't very large or spectacular, but it's worth visiting it.

Education.

My high school experience wasn't bad, but there's lot of things that I've would change, starting on the segregation system. My school was very small, so in third year of high school, everyone had to choose two subjects of widespread curriculum and one of art subjects. The three subjects that had most of the votes were chosen for the whole course. This system works this way because the school didn't have the money to afford two teachers at the same time.

In my case, my classmates chose specialty maths, specialty biology and plastic arts. I've always preffered the humanistic subjects so I was very lost out for this decision. The only subject I liked was plastic arts, and it was one of my favourites, with history, english and language, because we could choose lot of specialtys, like dance, theater, photography, slide-work, painting, etcetera. I chose photography and I learnt a lot in this subject, starting in laboratory issues -like working with red lights, chemical substances and all that stuff- and ending in digital retouches. I think this was one of the subjects that included the most the technological issue to the everyday classroom work. Also, the teacher was exceptional. She is a highly gifted person -no kidding-, she knew art history and theory, she manage deeply every kind of art that she offer to specialize with and she knew a little bit of every subject... we could ask her for anything and she had a thuthful and accurate answer.

It's a shame I can't write like this about other teachers I had. People like her are exceptional and founding teachers dedicated and happy with what they do it's very hard.

I think that the influence of her and my history teacher was very important to make my decision when I finish high school. My school don't have a good level educationally speaking, but it's very recognized by the importance of moral and value field, so I think this is the principal issue that determinates the choices of every girl that graduates from my school. Isn't casual that the majority of the graduates study pedagogy, social work or law, all of this professions involve high level of values and social conscience.

I think my ideas in the way to improve education doesn't contribute anything new to the varied range of ideas and posibilities that the educational world have proposed already, and students specially. The usual stuff: centralize administration, taking away the manage of town councils; stop and eradicate private education; make public all kind of education, specially superior one; improve the quality of pedagogies colleges; incentivate good students for being teachers, etcetera. In this line, I think the responsability of everyone's own education is shared. A big part of the responsability belongs to the educational authorities -ministry, goverment, town councils, schools- and also a big part belongs to families and students themselves. There are people that graduates from very bad qualified schools , but they can sort selection tests very well and they can obtain scholarships, but this cases are very rare. The educational system is working wrong and all social world have to make something to make it right.

I don't know the meaning of the saying "when the student is ready the teacher appears", but I think it's related to the responsability that every student has in order to care about what he or she learn and how he or she does it. When the student accept the responsabilities and take part of its own education, the teacher can do its work.

First Term: Good and bad points.

I have to talk about the good and bad things I lived in the last term. Fortunately, there were more good than bad things.

In academic level, I learnt a lot. We had six subjects. I was interested in two of them: Statistics and Quantitative Methods, but the teachers were very bad and I got very disappointed. On the contrary, in Economics and Chile's Social History we have master classes with two eminences: Hugo Fazio and Gabriel Salazar. But the subject that contributed the most to my sociological knowledge was, definitely, Sociological Theory I. In this subject I finally could know the big theories of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, that some of my classmates already knew, but I didn't.

In the last term I went for the first time to the gym. I've never went before, because I used to think that it was for silly and vain people, but I had to take this subject, because it was one of the only choices that my schedule allow. At the end, it wasn't that bad, I increased my physical capacity, I got thinner and it makes me quit smoking.

I think the hardest challenges I had to face was in the academic field. Economics was a very hard and demanding subject for me, I had to study a lot more than others subjects and, at the end, it was the worst final mark I have had in my whole life.

Love was another field in wich I had to face some challenges, but in the good way. I had to adjust activites and schedules for having time to share with him; I had to learn how to leave the pride aside and talk in a calm and mature way to resolve issues. On the contrary of the first challenge I talked about, I think in this one I have had much better results.

Let's eat some paella!

All of my life I wanted to visit the usual places that people say they want to visit when they are asked about that: France, Egypt, Jamaica, Italy, Greece, Brazil. But a year ago from now, I have changed my mind and I've decided that I want to go to Spain.

Why? I have lot of reasons. The first of all, spanish people talks in spanish. That's a fundamental thing because -second reason- I want to study there, maybe in Barcelona. I know a little bit of english and a little bit of french, but not that much and taking classes in another language is not very simple. The third important reason is that I've recently discovered a part of my family I didn't knew before and some of them are actually living there! And, the last important reason is that I also discovered that my grand-grand mother was spanish, and she came to Chile, scaping from Franco's dictatorship. Going there is like founding my roots.

I don't know very much about Spain, only a few things that people say about it. I don't research yet. I know that the weather is very extreme; that Barcelona is a very crazy city, whit a lot of night life; that inmigration has grown a lot in the last time; that there is a conflict in the Basque Country and in some places the terrorism takes place very often.

I'd like to study in Spain because there are very good Social Sciences schools, some of my good teachers have made their post-grades there, and they are very good in what they're doing now, specially in social science's methodologies, wich are one of my interest areas.

Transantiago: Before and after.

Most people say that Transantiago is making everyone's daily life more difficult and messy. I think that's true, but in my case, I think I've been benefited in several ways.

When Transantiago started, my first impression was that the new system was slower than the old one, but cleaner and more organized. And the better thing was that finally I had a bus that actually reached my neighborhood. I've always live in a place so far from the "city" that none of the transport systems reachs it.

With the time and people's demands, the system has been changing. The payment ways have changed and now we have a Bip! card that makes very easy the pay and the trip itself. There's new routes that make the trip faster, but I (and everyone else) have to get used to make combinations of buses and subway. The good thing of this is that you pay once, not two or three times, even if you use a bus, the subway and a bus again!

And, even better, with the new routes now I have three differents ways to go to my house, and all of them are very fast!

One thing that should change is the frequencie of some services. There's people that have to wait even half an hour for a bus. Also, the schedule of the subway should be longer, the "Bip's points" should be more and should be installed in places that are far from downtown and the old buses should be replaced by new ones. They pollute a lot.