Things to see and do on Santiago.

For a person that's currently livin' on Santiago, it's difficult to find interesting things to do. I mean, with the smog, the noise, the aparrently stressed living way that we constantly see in people I would definitely recommend a tourist tha leave Santiago right away and go travelling every other interesting place that Chile has. But if I must, I would start for telling them that they must go downtown and visit historical Santiago. There you can still find remnants of spanish period of conquest over Latinamerica. Then I would go for Bellavista neighborhood; almost every tourist that come's to chile want's to party and get to meet people. There's no better place to do such things as Bellavista.
Then, in Santiago you should go to metropolitan park and walk around it; you can get a beautiful view of polluted Santiago from it's heights. Moreover, you can go to the zoo and I don't know, get to see the animals they have there.
Another thing that I like a lot here in Santiago is to go to higher zones of the city such as La reina or Peñalolen during night time and find a nice place to see Santiago over night. In many ways, is like to be watching the ocean, only in this case it's a million lights ocean. Anyway it's feels very similar.
Last but not least, I would recommend a tourist to visit Colorado Sky park. I've never been there -not much of a snowsports guy- but I always hear about how great it is and how Chile it's known over the world for it's wonderful places to skiing and snowboarding, so it would be a mistake to not point Snowpark as a place to visit when you are a tourist and decided to come down to Santiago.

High School Experience

First of all I must say that I did high schools on two differents cities. Therefore I was able to experience two totally differents educational systems. The first one, on Chillan, was the classical school, very strict and severe. They made us to cut our hair very short and if we refuse then we were suspended for a week or so. In fact, it was a mason school, maybe that explains this behavior in teachers and autorithies. In the opposite side, here in Santiago I went to "francisco de miranda" school which it's known for it's "alternative" way of teaching and actually raising, that is in fact what a school should do. It's interesting how two completely different educational system can affect you. Here in Santiago I was always told that what's more important over every other thing is that you must be an "integral" beeing. It's not about just getting high grades and beeing best on your class. There's no point on beeing best in maths if you can't be the best person you can be. furthermore, here they teach me how to express my self freely, without feeling guilty or embarraced for my feelings and beliefs. In the other hand, this school always lacked of discipline. I mean, not that I was expecting a cop on my back to tell me what I should do or what I shouldn't do, but when you're -as I said before- raising childs or teenagers or whatever, it's necessary to show some discipline from time to time, because world often works in ways that we can't always deal with it if we're aren't properly prepared for it. Anyway, it's interesting how I was able to experience this two differents ways of teaching, I think it helped me a lot to grow and learn things that you don't usually learn in a class room.

Transantiago, now and then.

The new public transport system has brought a lot of trouble. Nevermind political ones, the main issue is the fact that making such an important modification should be gradual and not in the way that it was made; this is, with alot of "inside" planing, making sure of everything works in "paper" but not realizing that things in the "real life" are a lot more complicated than engineers think. This sort of things requieres that people who design the program go out and experience how is to travel in a public bus at pick hours and when you're late for work. Anyway, things have come a long way since the first day of transantiago. Slowly we're starting to see a modern public transportation system. City ways have been adapted and travel time is going down comparing it with what it was in the beggining. I think things will begin to get more organized as politics realize public money should be invested in public transport, so we can demand for better service, and also because it's very unlikely that only private investment would make this sort of things work.
An interesting thing about transantiago, is that we are starting to see busses all night long. This is very helpful to people who want's to go out and have fun and want's to go back home late at night. Things like this never happened with the old system, so that's a good thing that can be atributted to transantiago.