My summer holidays

 Well for this summer holidays I think January would be very boring for me, I don’t have any plans for it, so it’s going to consist in very entertaining days doing nothing in my computer with the very rare trip to the beach with my family, but for February we have a lot planned with my friends. We want to go to the south, passing through Concepcion, Valdivia and finally to Puerto Montt, a friend of ours has relatives in Concepcion so we plan of been there for a few days. In Valdivia we want to drink (a lot) of good beers of the zone and hopefully be there for the Valdiviana week, I really don’t know very much of it but I think been there with friends would be very entertaining. And finally Puerto Montt, I have family there and my dad want to go there this holidays so my plan is after my friends have returned to Santiago spend a few more days there with my dad. I had been a few time in Puerto Montt already, and I like it very much, the last time I went was in 2013 with my dad and we got to see a lot of places, by example we went to Castro and it was very beautiful, but for a long time I wanted to go there on summer since I always went there around winter, but don’t get me wrong, I love the rain, but I really want to see it in summer with sunny days, (I hope there is sunny days).

  

And this time, drugs...

Well, of course I´m very familiar with, you guess it right, alcohol. Who doesn’t like a good whiskey or wine? In my case I prefer rum and vodka. Apart for that I smoke marihuana from time to time and recently I started smoking cigarettes, but also from time to time. Since I only smoke marihuana when I am on a party, honestly I can’t separate the effects of it from the effect of the alcohol. Funnily enough I don’t drink coffee, but I consume caffeine anyway, I drink a lot of sodas (I love pepsi) and energy drinks, I admit that I am addicted to sugar, I try to consume less but I can’t.

Obviously the observable effects of a drug on a person varies on the drug, by example alcohol make the person dizzy and later the person can´t speak normally; marihuana make

the person appear calm and the eyes get red, etc. And of course we can speak of the benefits of some drugs, we don’t need to talk about medicines (that doesn´t mean that some medicines can´t produce addiction, a lot of people get addicted to them, morphine by example), some alcohols, like wine and beer have properties that benefits the body, like wine being an antioxidant, marihuana also gets a lot of medicinal uses, the most common is as an analgesic in treatments such as chemotherapy.

Drug addiction is a serious problem, aside from the obvious negatives effects on the health of a person, the social repercussion is large. Usually an addicted member can break the family, either because of money problems caused by the consumption or the behavior to the other family members. The withdrawal symptoms (or abstinence syndrome) vary upon the different drugs, but they are commonly, first of all desire to consume the drug again, and then: dehydration, sickness, shivers, headaches, irritability, insomnia, fever, etc.

Luckily I don’t have any close relative that suffer from drug addiction.     

In the future.. a ph.D?

 Well, of course I would like to have a post graduate degree, I already mentioned in the last post that I made. I would love to do research once I finish my studies and teach in college, and for that you need a ph.D or a Master’s degree. I plan on taking a ph.D in chemistry, and for the moment the ones that I’m interested the most are in the area of theoretical chemistry and physical chemistry. Fortunately, those post graduate programs are teach in this university, so that´s my plan A, finish my undergraduate studies and continue here my post graduate studies. Other options that I’m thinking about are studying in the University of Toronto, in Canada, or the University of Lund, in Sweden, and it’s great because both have the ph.D in theoretical chemistry and physical chemistry. Canada it’s my first option between both because I have relatives in Toronto, unlike Sweden, my relatives that live there live very far of Lund, so I will have to rent a place to live anyway, but in case of emergencies I will have somewhere to go at least. Also in Sweden I will have the opportunity to travel across Europe, I always wanted to do it. Because of the nature of a ph.D in science, you need to do a thesis and that needs a ton of lab hours experimenting, it has to be taught on a class room and on a lab, so sadly it can’t be taught online.