Wednesday

Wednesday was a good day.  This was the first day I felt settled in and "good."  We started out the morning by taking the bus to Villa Grimaldi.  Villa Grimaldi was a torture camp during the 70s at the time of Augusto Pinochet.  The camp was very secret and everyone who was taken to it was tortured.  The space is now a peace park to honor the people who were tortured, killed, and disappeared there.  It was a very heavy tour and a lot to deal with.  A girl who came on the trip a few years ago who happened to be in Chile at the time of our visit came to Villa Grimaldi with her mom with us.  There was a room with some artifacts recovered from a few people that had been there.  Turns out a relative of the girl was one of those people.  Definitely an emotional moment.

After Villa Grimaldi we went to the house of Pia Barros.  Pia Barros is a very famous Chilean author.  She is our trip leader's mentor and is most of the reason why our professor is so successful today.  Pia made us delicious food.  We had humitas which is like smooshed up corn wrapped inside a corn husk.  We also had picante and strawberry juice.  I think it was the first meal that a lot of us legitimately enjoyed.

After eating we got to sit with Pia and she talked a little bit about her life and writing.  We also learned a lot about our professor.  It was really just a cool moment.  Pia was so kind for opening her house to so many people and making us food and then talking with us about everything.  She even gave us all a little present.  During the dictatorship Pia was famous for her "objects."  Pia's books definitely would not have been published at the time (and would have sent her straight to the torture camps, in fact I don't know how she wasn't sent to one anyway) so she went around it by creating these objects that had literature on them.  Things like writing stories on the inside of shopping bags or inside boxes were her way of getting around the strict laws.  The one she gave us was a map of the damage of the earthquake that happened last year, with little stories attached to each city.

After all this we walked to the metro.  Chile's metro is fantastic.  It's clean, easy, air conditioned, there are tvs and radios, it's a single fair (so you pay the same amount no matter where you go).  Socialism!