More Classes

Yesterday at 10, I had the class I have been anticipating: Areas Silvestres en la V Region de Chile (or Wild Areas in the 5th Region of Chile). The class is a 'lab' that explores concepts of biology, such as biodiversity which is what we focused on yesterday, as well as the flora and fauna that can be found in a specific area of the 5th region. The profe told us that we would be focusing our outside lab work at the Laguna Verde, slightly south of Valparaiso.

We will be making various trips to the Laguna Verde, depending on weather and availability of buses, in order to observe the wildlife that we have chosen to do our final project on. I chose to focus on an animal in the area, which put in in a group with a Chilean named Ricardo and a gringo from Boston named Jeff. It was hard coming up with a plan for a project already, seeing as I have never been to the Laguna Verde, nor have any idea what kind of wildlife is there or even what type of habitat there is. But, we still made a general plan for what we would research, which is birds and their habitat, and can refine it as we learn more about the area.

Although each group is only getting to choose one animal, plant, or fungus to focus on, I hope that we learn in a general sense what flora and fauna exist at the Laguna Verde and in this region of Chile.

Right after this class, I had to hop on a micro and ride over to Vina for my art class: America Latin en Textos e Imagenes (Latin America in Texts and Images... these translations are so hard...). I got to class a little bit late and the profe was already talking about something I was completely unfamiliar with since I missed last week. We began watching a film about El Dorado, and Brittany had informed me that most of the class would be watching movies. However, upon getting the syllabus there are some texts that we have to read as well. I really need to read the syllabus for this class.

My final class for the day is called El Hombre y El Mar (Man and the Ocean), which is a general level oceanography class. Like universities in the United States that have general requirements so students will have a broader education, the general level classes in Chile are meant for non-majors to learn something basic about the subject. This means that none of the Chileans in the class are oceanography students (which means they know about as much as me! I think...) and that the class will not be as rigorous, because it is only worth two credits.

The class focused a lot on the basic overview of the characteristics of the ocean, etc. In general however, the class will be more about how 'man' interacts with the ocean and how they effect each other. For me, the interesting part will be to see how the Chileans observe the ocean and how they interact with it. Already in the first class, the profe talked a lot about ocean fishing, and which resources had been tapped and where other resources existed, which is clearly a big concern for Chile, since one of the biggest exports, along with copper, fruit, paper and pulp, chemicals, and wine, is fish and fish products.