A lot of people have been asking my lately why I chose Chile for my time abroad. The answer to the question has a few layers, so I'll begin with the most prominent.
I was going to originally try to study abroad in Italy. I went to Italy my senior year of high school and fell madly in love with it. The people, the food, the architecture, everything. As soon as I got to UCSB I enrolled in Italian 1, in order to prepare myself for living in another country. But, after Italian 1-3, I found myself in my second to last quarter of my sophomore year, ready to do something else with my life for a while. I dropped the Italian, took a quarter of Spanish, and then moved to San Francisco.
In San Francisco, I was surrounded by a whole new, giant set of cultures, languages and races of people. I got a seasonal job passing out hot chocolate at Williams Sonoma on Union square. One night, a family from Spain came in, seeking some help with their holiday shopping. They didn't speak a word of English, and my Spanish was rudimentary at best, so I radioed to the manager that I needed someone who spoke Spanish to help down front. They obliged, and sent someone down. He started conversing with them with so much ease and confidence, I was so jealous! I've lived in California for most of my life, and as such am constantly running into situations where speaking Spanish would be infinitely helpful, so right around that time I made the decision to switch my focus to Spanish, and it follows that the country I should send myself to should be a Spanish-speaking one.
The next obvious question became, "which one?" Once I decided to return to UCSB (for many complicated reasons) I had a very wide selection to choose from. After some thought, I narrowed my choices to Spain, Costa Rica or Chile. And at the time, Chile was by far the country I knew the least about. Spain had always interested me, because as I knew from my brief time in Europe and the trips my friends had taken there that it was incredibly easy to visit any of the other countries and that was something that sounded very appealing to me. I had also had lots of friends spend time in Costa Rica, and each one of them said it was an incredibly amazing and beautiful country. Chile was on the list mostly out of intrigue.
Spain got crossed off the list fairly early, not only because it is vastly more expensive to live there than the other too, but because I figured out of the three countries, Spain I was most likely to visit in my free time.
Costa Rica stuck around for a while, but once I started to look into Chile's landscape, culture and history, I became more and more infatuated with the country and its severe and dynamic beauty.
They call Chile "the land of fire and ice" because within its enormous and lengthy expanse you can find nearly every kind of weather or landscape imaginable. There are dry deserts, high mountains, miles and miles of coastline, lakes, jungle and more. It is home to the famous souther land, Patagonia, as well as one of the most curious and sought after sights in the world: Easter Island, not to mention being only a bus ride (albeit a long one) away from the famous and incredible Incan temple: Macchu Picchu. The markets are constantly full of beautiful fresh fruit and fish and the people are friendly and family-oriented.
Chile also has a tragic and violent history of dictatorship that only ended about forty years ago. There are still relatives of those who were tortured and killed under the fascist regime. This is something I can neither comprehend nor fully understand, but I am thrilled about the possibility of learning more about this culture.
Chile has a huge range of reliable and affordable public transportation with which I can easily travel throughout the country and continent. There are even places where it is both legal and safe to hitchhike.
The city of Santiago (where I'll be living and going to school) is home to seven million people! The school I'm going to be attending is the Universidad de Chile, also known as La Chile. It is recognized as one of, if not perhaps the best university in South America. It has five campuses throughout the city. Chile's most famous poet, Pablo Neruda studied there, as well as many other distinguished Chileans. I'll be taking classes with Chilean students given by Chilean professors.
Anyway, I've listed the main reasons that Chile seemed to be the right fit for me. 40 days until take-off!
