May 12, 2008

Today is Monday which means it’s no longer our weekend off and also the start of more company visits. Today the group visited a company called "Codelco Ventanas," a copper ore refinery. This was not originally a company that we were supposed to visit, but the workers of the mine we were supposed to visit were on strike disabling us from visiting. Much like Gerdau Aza we were not permitted to take a real tour of the plant because of safety regulations, so we attended a lecture instead. This was the first time that the person giving the presentation spoke no English at all. The whole thing had to be translated on the spot by our helpful student guides and Jo. As you might imagine this made it extremely difficult to stay involved in what the man was saying, especially with a technical topic like copper refinement. This also goes to show you how valuable a business person or engineer with foreign language skills can be to a workforce. Unlike Gerdau Aza however, we did get a small bus tour of the plant and got to see a decent amount of the finished product and what the workers were doing. For lunch, we went out near Codelco to a small empanada shop in the town we were in. You really can never go wrong with empanadas (especially not financially). We then returned to the hotel and proceeded to try to catch up on some sleep for a while. The rest of the afternoon was ours to do what we wished with so some of us decided to go down to Valparaiso to take a boat tour of the port as recommended by Monica Kunstmann. This was the first time any of us went out in the city on our own without a Chilean student or Jo or Krysta and I wasn't optimistic about finding where we needed to go. Surprisingly though, the ride went very smoothly and we got there successfully. It was also nice that when we stepped on the port we were immediately offered the boat tour that we were seeking without having to ask anyone. I thought to myself that this was all going too smoothly and that something was bound to go wrong on the way back. The tour was actually better than I anticipated and was very informative. I'm glad we came and did it rather than stay in the hotel. Again, the trip back was flawless and quick. For dinner we ventured out into Viña and found a really good, cheap pizza place. In the evening none of the Chilean students could take us out so if we wanted, we had to do it on our own. Well, of course everyone wanted to go out so we decided to go to Rufino, a karaoke bar that we went to our first night in Chile. Turns out that the crowd was older than what we anticipated. We took it in stride and stayed for a little anyway. I ended up going back a little early to sleep for tomorrow.