It’s Wednesday May 18^th 9:53 pm. Today was quite a long day to say the least. Out the hotel at 8 am and back at 7 pm. We went on our final company visit to Bolsa Comercio. Basically what it is is the Santiago Stock Exchange. It consists of buyers and sellers of stocks with third-party brokers who also are investors of stocks themselves. It was unfortunate that the floor where the transactions take place was closed due to construction. So we were only there for about 30-45 minutes. We then went ahead and decided to tour Santiago until lunch. We had a number of groups of students who wanted to take pictures with us. So we took Hollywood pictures for about 15 minutes straight and then left. We went into a museum afterwards and saw other student groups who were learning the same things we were learning. They took a similar route on their tours that we took and saw the same exhibits. My favorite part was the panorama of the old city of Santiago. But after that, we went to lunch and I had some combination of food that I probably won’t order together again. Not to say that the food was bad, it just didn’t work well together.

Anyway, closely following lunch, we went to the top of the nearest mountain, and we saw some beautiful views. The city of Santiago is quite big in fact. It is closed in on the eastern boarder by the Andes Mountains. I also found out, that Santiago is home to about 7 million people which is roughly 1/3 of Chile’s entire population. I even learned about which classes of people live in which regions of the city. We hiked the mountain to its highest point, and got as good a view that we could get. I got a chance to purchase a new type of ice cream that supposedly is new to the US. I heard it came out about a month ago, but also heard it has been popular in Chile for about 15 years now. But I thought it was pretty good. We soon left there, and got back on the bus for another hour bus ride to the hotel. We got back and decided that it was time for dinner. So we ordered two XL pizzas and called it a day. Then somehow when we got back to the hotel, my two roommates and I were locked out of our room for about an hour and then some. The key sat right on the table and we tried every which way to try and get in without busting the door down. Finally we were able to get the window open enough for someone to reach in with a pair of tongs and pull the key out. It was beautiful teamwork. From this day forward, we will make a conscious effort to make sure that the key is in our possession before the door gets closed b/c this is certainly not the first time this has happened. After having successful breaking into our own room, we decided that tonight was a good night to celebrate, although I’m sure we would have celebrated anyway, with or without the key.