Chile 3

Pickpockets. Everyone is admonishing us to beware of them, to wear our backpacks and purses in front—even when we went to the cathedral. The Christmas season here isn´t so commercial. There are folks shopping, but very limited decorating in stores. I am confused by the explanation of customs that includes Santa Claus. Most of America observes religious Christmas, with presents brought on Jan 6, the Feast of the Epiphany, or Three Kings´ Day. Not here. The practice is, according to a tour guide, to go out to dinner on Christmas Eve, return home to get your presents left by Santa Claus. I have to confirm this, because this guide spent quite some time in NY, so her presentation might be a little off. The obscenity I observed in front of the cathedral was a huge Christmas tree with monstrous red decorations, on each of which was the Coca-Cola logo.

There are a lot of promotional ads for universities on TV here, so I contacted many of them to see if they would be interested in establishing contacts with SPSU for their students to come to us. We already have lots of bites for the visit from Rich B. in March. These are private universities, whose students already pay tuition, and which would be more likely to come to us, I think. The public universities have students who pay little or no tuition, and would need financial assistance.

We visited the Santiago COINED facility today, a former residence in the suburbs. It gave us a proposal for 15 students, and for students who want to go individually. The completion of a level will require 3 weeks, not 2, as I had expected for this program in December. When I return, I will contact CACTUS, the agency that works for COINED and other schools of Spanish around America and Europe, to see if we can set something up for any SPSU student to go to school anywhere s/he wants for Spanish, so that there will be more options for our students. However, I will NOT be looking for contact hours, but rather completion of level before granting SPSU credit.

On the whole, there seems to be greater interest in SPSU’s coming to Chile to discuss agreements with other universities than to Argentina. This is the end of the AY here, and application period for March begins now. It appears that there is either a glut on the market in Chile, or a dearth of students. I still haven´t been able to get a hold of the UBA Office of International Programs, university-wide. We DO have, however, 3 appointments for Rich to keep in March in BsAs.

Santiago would be pleasant for our students because there is the sea and the mountains, but, for me, there is much more brain candy in BsAs. But that´s just me.

More later.