Has it been this long!?!?!?!?!

Oh em geee! I didnt think it had been this long since I posted something haha. Well lets seeeee....last week, I had my interview with the SNA, the Sociedad nacional de agricultura en Chile, kind of like the USDA. It went pretty well, in spanish obviously haha, but I really liked my interviewer. His name is Francisco Gana, whos boss turns out to be my comercio exterior silvoagropecuario teacher (weird!), a nice guy who studied at Harvard some time ago, so if I ever needed to say something in english that I couldnt think of in spanish, he would try and help me. Basically the program I am most interested in is international food trade stuff, but the program also has other sectors to it. One of the sectors is about schools and classes specially designed for students who are planning to become farmers after they graduate and aim to teach them about the newest technology and how the markets outside of the their farms work. Another thing that I thought was cool that they do is here, after football, rodeo is the second most popular national sport. One job of the SNA is to test the horses for the rodeo to make sure they are Chilean horses, oooo, by a hair sample and some other tests. So hopefully they get back to me this week, I think that would be cool to work for a relatively large company like that. Then friday, as a required field trip, we went to Villa Grimaldi, which used to be a torture center during the Pinochet era, and El Cementerio General, which is well, a cemetery. Before our tour, we met at Casa Central, which is the main campus of my school, La Catolica, to have a lecture from someone we hadnt met before about the history of the era. Unfortunately, I couldnt hear much of the lecture because the students outside in the hallways were doing a mini-protest with pots, pans and drums, as is the usual protocol, but all is well. So we went out to Villa Grimaldi, which is a pretty small, well-fenced area in the outer parts of Santiago that supposedly was surrounded by nothing but fields 40 years ago, but is now is surrounded by houses and has bus lines running though it. The place itself is full of monuments and those little stone mosaic things on the ground because after it was used, Pinochet had it destroyed so as to symbolize that the torture didnt happen, but it has since been rebuilt so that the time period is not forgotten about. So we are going through this tour, sad and vivid of course, and I start thinking, wow, this guy sure does know a lot about the details of what happened to this prisoners. Well, turns out he was a student in the law school of the La Chile during the Pinochet era, and was in fact a prisoner who was tortured and then exiled to the United States, New York and California, for 13 years. I cant even believe that I was able to meet someone who went through what he did, let alone have him give me a tour of the place! Although sad and depressing, so interesting and worth the trip. Afterwards, we then went to el Cementerio General to look at the grave of Salvador Allende and also notice the stratified society of chile. The first part of the cementery is filled with huge statues and giant tombs of families and just everything covered with details. As we got further towards the back, you can just see the number of people grow and the quality of the tombs diminish, until one point they are just steel frames, rusted and broken, in a field. Some families cant even afford a plot of land and have to rent it out as long as they can until the bodies are removed and then placed somewhere else. Another thing that was interesting was for the family tombs, if there isnt an empty cell for a new body, the family will look at the oldest coffin, take the remains of the body, and put them in a smaller box with the new coffin in the same cell - called a reduccion. So overall an interesting field trip, ended by an old man singing "oh, linda linda linda linda linda" as I walked by with a friend. It was a nice change from whistling and car honking.
Ive also realized that once I return to school in english, I will be very happy. I took a quiz last week composed of 6 short answer questions, where 2 of the questions I didnt even understand, soooo well see how that goes haha. Thats about it for right now, Im gonna be thinking of anything I missed on my metro ride home, which oh god is going to be crowded. Oh! One time; I took the metro, and was reading Water for Elephants, and I got to this crazy stampede scene, and I started hearing all this commotion and women screaming and crying, and thought wow this is a vivid book, until I realized that the train had stopped and the screaming was because a boy had fallen under the train...sad.
Oh, and also went to mass for the first time in a long while. There is obviously a big church on campus...like really, right in the middle and they hold mass everyday from 1-1:30, so I decided to check it out. The place was full by the time 1:00 came around, people sitting in every pew, standing in the back, sitting on the side, everywhere. For the most part I could understand a lot of the sermons and what not, but couldnt really participate in the prayers, kind of just mumbled along haha. 2 of my classes dont start till 2:00pm, so if Im ever on campus earlier, like today, then Ill probably go to mass, sometimes just a nice place to think and take everything into perspective.