Today was another relatively relaxing day. We started it off on the wrong foot, however, by getting on the wrong bus to the university. We corrected our mistake after a few minutes but showed up to our cueca dance class a little bit late.
Cueca class was interesting. Yesterday we learned that it is the national dance of Chile and saw a few videos demonstrating how to do it. The man dances around the woman, trying to court her, and both the man and the woman wave a handkerchief. The secret to the dance is in the movement of the feet, which I could not seem to get down. It seemed very simple (stepping in time in circles), but I had much more trouble than I did with the salsa class. I spoke with one of the Chilean students and she said that high schoolers did indeed have to learn to dance the cueca in gym class, which made me grateful that all I ever had to do was play floor hockey and badminton.
After our lesson, we took a bus back to Santiago to visit the airline LAN. We got to see behind the scenes of the airport where the planes are serviced. We also toured one of the Boeing 787 aircraft, which looked quite luxurious (much more comfortable than our flight into the country, anyway!). The man who lectured us yesterday all about Chilean culture, Jose Luis, was there and told us all about his job as an industrial engineer at LAN. He must think of new ways to save the airline money by minimizing costs (namely labor and fuel) and maximizing profits (ticket sales). It was interesting to hear about some of the strategies that they have come up with to make the airplanes more fuel efficient, like towing the planes around the airport and using plastic instead of a lot of metal in the plane bodies to make them lighter.
After saying our goodbyes to the LAN staff, we all got back on the bus and fell asleep. By the time we arrived back in Valparaiso, we were very late for our reggaeton dance lesson and decided to just cancel it and call it a day.
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