El Cerro Grande

The first week I got to La Serena I decided that I wanted to climb el Cerro Grande (big hill) that overlooks La Serena. You can tell that it would offer an excellent view - the ocean and city to the west, inland mountains to the east. Will and I tried to make plans to do it multiple times, but it never worked out for some reason.

I've also found it somewhat hard to come across Chileans who are interested in doing that sort of thing. Some of my friends expressed interest in going, but we never arranged it. So when another friend mentioned that he been up el cerro recently and I mentioned that I wanted to climb it before I left, we made plans to do so.

Imagine: Though the summit has a lot of electrical towers and antennae, you can just walk around them so they don't mar the view. You can see the entirety of La Serena - both the main part of the city and the neighborhoods that are on the outskirts. Everything looks so small; it feels odd to be standing on the top of the hill looking down when the opposite is usually true. Far in the distance you can make out Cruz del Tercer Milenio in Coquimbo, but it blends into the horizon. The haze that comes with such distance blurs the shoreline a bit, and the immensity of the ocean blends with the sky. When you walk around the electrical towers to look down upon the other side of the scenery, you see Valle del Elqui spreading out before you. Fields of crops are just blocks of greens and browns; they slowly give way to the surrounding hills and mountains that loom above the valley.

Beautiful, no?

Unfortunately, that imaginary scenario is just that for me: imaginary. Although the sky was perfectly clear on the walk to the foot of el cerro grande, halfway through the trek up, clouds started rolling in... and by the time we got to the top, we couldn't see anything. But I think that's what it would look like.


Anyway, here are the pictures I took:

beautiful day!

Then the clouds arrived. 

:(

I had mostly wanted to do the hike for the view, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Every week multiple people tell me that my Spanish is quite good. The problem with their comments is that people generally ask me the same standard questions: what are you studying? What classes are you taking? How do you like Chile? Why did you choose to study in Chile? I meet a lot of new people every week - friends of friends, friends of the family, classmates, etc. So although I don't have a script for these answers, I've navigated the territory many times before and I'm comfortable in what I say when I answer them. I don't need to hesitate to think something through or wonder if my grammar is right as I explain that although I study neuroscience and math in the US, I mostly just have random classes here.

I hiked with my friend Sebastian, from my Climatology class. Sebastian and I became friends because we live near each other and some days we'd find ourselves walking the 20 minutes home, so we'd walk and chat. Sometime in October we realized that we both headed home at the same time on Fridays, so we arranged to wait for each other at the university and walk home together. After weeks of those conversations, we had covered those basic grounds and were able to talk about more interesting things - whether music, writing, hiking, or something else.

The total time for the outing to el Cerro Grande was about 5 hours - ample time for many conversation themes. We ended up talking about existentialism, God, Chilean culture, US culture, school systems, and more.... my Spanish has clearly improved, though even still I often had trouble expressing what I wanted to say. But it was very nice to have an extended time to talk about more than just basic topics. It gave me a chance to learn new vocabulary and actually practice my conversational Spanish.