It's May 11. 9:37 pm. We woke up and had to leave at 9:15 am. Normally we would go straight to the University of Santa Maria, but today we went on a company visit to lower  a company called Bosque, which is a manufacturer of mushrooms (possibly the only current manufacturer. A new company is supposed to enter the industry in 2 weeks, which would cause Bosque to lower their prices in order to try and be the low-cost suppliers. We walked through the entire factory and saw the routes that a mushroom would take to become a mushroom. We saw the manure that gets heated and cooled; we saw how the mushroom grows in the manure and sprouts up; we saw the pickers harvesting them; we saw how the mushrooms are stored in crates in different temperatures at different growth phases; how they are packaged, how they are canned, the whole nine yards. That was quite an adventure. Then our next company visit was to the number one tomato-producing company in Chile called Centauro. It is a family-owned company, and we met the great grandson who owns it now. I found it impressive that Centauro packaged their tomato sauce and their tomato paste and everything else they produced in both plastic cans and metallic cans. Cans make the food last longer but plastic is cheaper and doesnt give off a metallic taste once it is opened and eaten. Unfortunately for us, we came at the wrong time of year because for Chile, May is the beginning of the fall time and that is the time when crops don't grow as well. Chile is below the eqauator, and so their Spring is our Fall. As a result, we werent able to stay on the tour as long as we would've wanted to. But we learned much about the company regardless of how long we stayed.
dAfter that we all went to lunch and had empanadas. Quite delicious they were. Following that beautiful lunch we went back to the Unicersity and had lectures on the earthquakes that greatly impacted Chile and its music. The footage of the earthquakes were quite disturbing and intimidating and made me appreciate how fortunate I am to not have had to live through such catastrophic events. After the lecture, we went back to dancig classes. Today we practiced salsa agian, same as Monday. That was quite a fun experience. Following that, we went back to partying hard. The Chilean students don't have class tomorrow, so one of the girls decided to have an apartment party and that might have been the most fun yet. I'm off to bed now. I'll be back tomorrow.