Wednesday, May 14

On the itinerary, we originally had "Multiplant" and "Activities at the University" listed for today. However, we will be going to Multiplant tomorrow instead of today and we unfortunately are still unable to return to the University. Instead, we had another free day with a soccer game in the afternoon with the Chilean students.

A group of us decided to spend the morning visiting some of the castles located around Vina Del Mar. Our first stop was a Castillo Wulf. I never got to know the significance of the castles we visited because all the information was in Spanish, but hopefully when I get home, I can find more information on what I saw today. Anyway, Castillo Wulf was a very picturesque building located on rocks looking out over the sea. We spent some time admiring the view and also some time walking around the museum inside the castle. While there, we also picked up a map of the other sights in Vina. We were supposed to meet the group at 2:00 to go to the soccer game but we asked if we could skip the game and instead do more sightseeing. She said it was okay and so we spent the entire day walked around Vina. We saw all the castles, old mansions, and various other sights such as the theater, the Vina Del Mar club, an Easter Island museum (my favorite part of this museum were the shrunken heads which were used as trophies of war during the time of the Machu Pichu), and some very old churches. It was interesting to me because a lot of the sights we saw today and what I have seen of Chile so far looks a lot like something you would find in the United States. I guess I expected a lot of the sights to be a lot older and to have a lot more history than they do. I shouldn't be surprised though, considering the fact that North and South America were founded and colonized by European settlers around the same time. The U.S and Chile are still both very young countries compared to a lot of the rest of the world.