Day two

Today, we got up very early to go to Santiago, which is about two hours from our hotel in Vina del Mar.  I slept the whole way there on the bus because I was already so exhausted.  Once we got to Santiago we went to the stock exchange.  We had a short presentation giving us the overview of the stock exchange, and then we went to the room where the exchanges occur.  Next we visited the cathedral, which was gorgeous inside.  It is a place where a lot of people go to pray and just think during the day.  I also saw a lot of students, which was weird since it was about 11 in the morning.  Afterwards we visited a museum of Chilean national history which was nice. Afterwards we went to lunch at a restaurant in the fish market.  I had scallops and calamari, both of which were very good.  At the market, there were a lot of different seafood restaurants all in the same area. A lot of the restaurants come up to you and try to convince you to come to their restaurant, which I have never experience before.  We also were serenaded at our table by a man playing the guitar and his son.  They most likely chose our table since we were obviously a large group of foreigners since once they finished playing they expected money.  Later, we explored the city more and once again took an incline to the top of a very large and steep hill.  There were more stores here and even an outdoor church.  The view of Santiago from the top was really pretty, however it became very evident how bad the smog is in the city. There was just a greyish white cloud all around the city.  You chould barely even see the outline of the Andes.  After we left Santiago, we went back to the University for our dance lessons.  Yesterday we had a salsa lesson, which was fun even though I am no good at salsa.  Today we had reggaeton lessons.   Im not sure how to describe reggaeton music-  Daddy Yankee who sings the song gasolina would fall into the category.  But the dancing is much different from salsa, and more like the way people dance in the United States.  I still was no good at this either, but it was really fun again.  After we got back from our dance lessons we went out to dinner again, and now I am here blogging again.  We have very little free time, and our days are packed.  I am very happy that we have so much to do because I would much rather be walking around and exploring the cities than be sitting in our hotel with not much to do.