Chile

I've been in Santiago, Chile (South America) since Monday morning. I left Sunday afternoon (5pm) and arrived Monday morning, at 8:30am. It's neat, because we're in the same time zone, so there's no time difference between here and Pennsylvania. It's winter here, and they'll go forward an hour in the spring, when we go back an hour in the fall...there'll be a 2 hour difference between us in September.

I was asked to collaborate on a childhood obesity project here, with some colleagues of mine that I was in grad school with. It's a husband and wife research team...they are the sweetest couple you've ever met. Their daughters were in my study when they were still in State College (they left in 2000), and now their daughters are teenagers...it was crazy to see them all grown up.

I brought my student, Sharon, along with me, because she is interested in working with Latino populations, and she's fluent in Spanish. I speak enough Spanish to get by, but I've kinda been depending on her to help us navigate the system. When we haven't been working, we've been sight seeing...we went to the oldest winery in Chile, and yesterday we rode something similar to a ski lift up the mountain. The mountain separated the north and south sides of Santiago, and it was so beautiful.

This is one of the driest countries in South America, but it rained for the first time in months yesterday. Because they're surrounded by mountains, there is little ventilation, so there's a lot of smog...they only get relief when it rains, so yesterday was the first day we saw the Andes mountains, and they had snow on them! Tomorrow we'll take a tour of the coast/beach area, which is supposed to be beautiful even in the winter. By the way, winter here is like Fall in Pennsylvania...low to mid 60s. We'll be leaving on Sunday night and with all the stinking transfers, we won't be back in State College until late Monday afternoon. I love traveling, but it's the "getting there" that stinks.

Enjoy the pics.