Viña Del Mar y Futboooooooollll

I forgot to tell you about last weekend! I went with about nine other students from the CIEE program to Viña del Mar. We were able to take the metro to the bus station and then a bus to Viña. Viña is a little coast town a few hours from Santiago. Everyone goes there for vacations on the beach. We arrived and then walked quite a few blocks to the beach, but it was worth it! The beach was pakced with Chileans and fun little tents and kiosks selling different wares. I only went into the water up to my calves because it was really cold, but some of the Chileans were swimming all the way. We spent the day enjoying ourselves and relaxing and then we went home in time for dinner.
After dinner Jennifer and her host family invited me to go to a soccer game. They had fancy VIP parking and seating for the Colo-Colo V Audax Italiano game. The Colo-Colo team is the "team of teh people" so its fans are known for being wild and violent. Our seats were seperate from the dangerous seating. We were actually sitting in front of the entire family of the best player from Audax Italiano (which is the team for the Italian people living in Santiago). His son was playing cars right behind me. I decided that I liked the Audax Italiano team better because they seemed nicer and more civil. The Colo-Colo team and fans were really crazy, which made the game exciting and fun. They only sold about half of the tickets for the game and had policemen everywhere becuase Colo-Colo and Audax Italiano are such big rivals that they were afraid of too much violence. It was a really exciting and good game, and Audax Italiano ended up winning by one in the end.

We walked out of the stadium and noticed that all the players were walking out the same way! We got to meet and take a picture with the best player on the Colo-Colo team, Lucas Barrio. It was so much fun and Jennifer and I were very excited to meet a star futbol player!!