This was another amazing week. Classes are starting to reach a close which is just another reminder that I have to leave soon. Despite this, I still had a great week. On Wednesday, we went to the National Congress building in Valparaíso. There are actually two National Congress buildings; there is one in Valpo and one in Santiago. It was interesting to learn about basic parliamentary procedure and see how similar it was to that of the USA. We also got to see their Congress discussing a bill. Fortunately, we were allowed to take photographs inside.
Yesterday, we went to a Mapuche tribe. The Mapuche are indiginous to Chile and some parts of Argentina and speak Spanish and Mapudungun (the Mapuche language). They were very nice, showed us where they live, played some of their tribal instruments for us, and taught us one of their games called palín. Palín is a Mapuche game which is very similar to field hockey, but there are no goals made of nets. The goals are areas, kind of like end zones in football. They also made us some of their traditional dishes (which are very delicious by the way). I end with a slideshow of pictures I took at their pueblo.
