School

And time flies.

Classes have started. I'm taking 3 courses while I'm here, as well as volunteering for the American Corner, which is a club in the library to help the Chilean students practice their English. The courses are a survey of contemporary Latin American literature, a survey of Latin American cinema, and a political science class: Relaciones Internacionales entre Los Estados Unidos y América Latina. The rest of the students also have to take a composition class, but having already taken both the Intensive Grammar Review and Advanced Writing courses in the Spanish program at the U of O, I don't have to take it, which gives me a good amount of free time to explore the city and be out speaking instead of sitting in a classroom. I'm using this free time to help out a company in town that teaches English, which will be great experience when I make my way back down here after graduation to do just that while I continue to hone my Spanish skills.

Homework has been sparse so far. I've had one assignment, which was to watch The Motorcycle Diaries. Tough, I know. Especially since I've already seen it twice. The cinema class has been fun, we've watched a couple films our professor made, which ordinarily I would object to, but they were both shot quite beautifully, if they were a little boring. Last week our Relaciones Internacionales professor gave us a humongous stack of reading, which we have a couple months to get through before our mid-term in November. One of the readings is a declassified report on the USA's covert actions in Chile leading up to and during the 1973 coup d'etat. It's kind of humorous, many of the conservative people in Chile who are wealthy due to the policies and economic development during the dictatorship deny that there was US involvement, and here we are reading a 15 page report that was presented to the US senate in 1975. Our literature class thus far has been reading pre-colombian literature from the Americas, which is not contemporary, and I have already studied in depth. It's kind of frustrating, I've been looking forward to finally getting to read some works from the Latin American Boom. Whatever.