I've started this blog to document some of the experiences from the study abroad program I'm about to start in Santiago, Chile. In Santiago, I'll be studying at La Pontifícia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC de Chile), where I'll be taking classes in Latin American literature, history, political science, and maybe Portuguese as well. I'm hoping to improve my Spanish (it's already mostly fluent, but I'd like to get more comfortable in academic settings) and take the chance to meet and become friends with Chileans and other Latin Americans. I'm hoping also to do a fair amount of traveling during my stay in Santiago. I'll be taking classes at La Católica through the end of November 2014, and I hope to stay in Chile a bit past that to travel around.
Chilean schools run on a different academic calendar (as I understand it, the convention is for schools to start in March and go through December, with a summer break beginning around Christmastime. This made for a little bit of an awkward combination with UChicago's North American academic schedule: I'm leaving midway through my second year at UChicago and won't return till the winter of my third year. Since I wasn't going to be able to finish the winter quarter at UChicago, I spent the last two months interning at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington D.C., a multilateral development bank that lends to Latin American countries to try to reduce poverty. My aunt, uncle, and three cousins, who live in DC, were kind enough to let me stay with them AND feed me (no small undertaking, but the Maryland McDonoughs were up for the task).
These last two months have been great: I've read a lot more for pleasure, gotten to prepare for this trip using my expanded free time, spent a lot of time with my wonderful cousins, and binge watched House of Cards in the meantime. My internship forced me to practice my somewhat rusty Spanish and introduced me to wonderful people from all over the Americas, including Chileans who have been especially helpful in the planning of my trip (Otra vez, muchas gracias Carolina!). Now that I've finished watching/gorging on HoC, I'm mostly set to leave. My plane leaves tomorrow morning, and I get to Chile tomorrow night around 8:30 p.m. local time (due to daylight savings time, Chile is 3 hours ahead of CST right now, but will be just 1 hour ahead of CST by April I think). I have international student orientation on Tuesday, and classes should start soon after that.
I named this blog Same Flag because both Chile and my native Texas share very similar flag designs. I did a little bit of reading on this (using the always reliable Wikipedia), and found that Chile's flag predates Texas' flag by some 20 years; it's not clear if the Texans copied the Chilean flag deliberately, or just made use of then-popular flag design. Regardless of anyone's intentions, I like that the flag of my soon to be adopted country and native state are so similar.
Chile's flag--La Estrella Solitaria
Texas' flag--The Lone Star State
