May 7, 2008

May 7, 2008

Today we had our first company visits to Centauro Cannery and Gerdau Aza Steel Recycling plant. We got up and had breakfast provided by the hotel, and then loaded up on our Mercedes Benz tour bus to go to Centauro Cannery. The factory deals mostly with tomato products, but also bags and cans other fruits and vegetables. It is number one in Chile in production of diced tomatoes and exports mostly to Japan and the United States. Because we arrived in the colder season of Chile (our summers and winters are reversed) they did not have many tomatoes actually there. The company gave us a can of "Porotos Granados," a sort of bean chili, as a thank you for visiting their company. We loaded up the bus again and continued on to eat lunch at Pura Carne. I ordered a dish called "Biffe a lo Pobre," which is translated to "beef to the poor." It was essentially a piece of steak with fries and fried eggs on top. It was delicious and satisfying, no other way to describe it. After lunch we had our second company visit to Gerdau Aza near Santiago. I was kind of disappointed with the visit because we didn’t actually see much of the plant. All we did was observe a presentation put together by one of the employees. The presentation itself was very well put together and informative, but I just expected more from the visit. They even gave us yellow Gerdau Aza shirts to wear making me think that we would get to see the processes. After the visit, we returned home to the hotel and ate some food and got ready for some quality Chilean night life. The students were going to take us to some different bars and clubs. The first place we went was called "Cafe Journal." I actually really liked the set up and had a lot of fun there. After a good 2 hours or so we decided to check out another place called the "Tutix Club" closer to our hotel. This was also a pretty fun place, but it turned out that we had to come home early because one of the girls was not feeling too well at the hotel. It was getting late though, and I needed some quality sleep to prepare for tomorrows events.