Everything is in English!

 Well this English course (since I only had to take English IV it’s the only course I can talk about), speaking honestly, didn’t help me much in terms of vocabulary, since the material that what use is very old, a language it’s something that changes through time so it needs an update from time to time, and also it is for British English, so a lot of words and phrases that I didn’t know I knew how to say them in American, but it help me a lot to improve my redaction, I wrote in English only a few times for tests in high school, so having to write a blog every week was very helpful. So the only thing that I need to improve is my pronunciation and getting to speak smoothly, but I think that for me is not helpful exercise it in the classroom, I think that I can only get better by actually speaking more in English with other people in more everyday situations. For outside the English class, I practically only consume English media, movies, series, music, videogames, board games, videos, comics, articles, news, etc, outside from facebook, I only read in English. Around 2012 I started to watch only videos in English in youtube, and since then I search everything in English, specially movies and series, I hate with my soul dubbed media, I think that if it is dubbed it kills it completely, I once resold a game without even playing it because it was dubbed, so now if I don’t find it subtitled I watch it in English at the cost of missing a few words, but there is always the possibility that someone in it have a weird accent so despite you knowing a lot of English you are not going to understand it anyway.        

My study programme

 Well I choose to study chemistry because I liked the curriculum, it has a lot of math and physics, and it doesn’t have biology, I grew tired of biology in high school, that doesn’t mean that I was bad in biology, it just bored me. I like that it have until math 5, differential equations, and one thing that most interest me was quantum mechanics, which both courses are of 3th year. And of course I choose this career because it has a ton of chemistry of all the areas, in chemistry we have the four areas, organic, inorganic, analytic and physical chemistry, and the four have up to the third course. For me this year have had few workload, because in this two semesters I had only have 5 courses per semester, and of the five at least 1 course that was very light on subjects, but from the next year onwards I will have more courses and they are going to start getting difficult very fast. Luckily this faculty has a lot of laboratories, a ton of classrooms, 16 to be specifics but that’s enough for this faculty, you never see all the classrooms being used, it has a good library, and with this university library system, in which you can get books from all the faculties, you can always get your hands on the books you are looking for, and couple with the amount of computer that it has, it creates a good environment for you to study. For what I have seen so far, a lot of teachers use power points, but if that is good or not depends of the teacher, because some teacher needs to get classes of how to make good power points. Also one of the problems the classrooms have is the air conditioning, when it’s on you can barely hear the teacher if you are far away, that have happened to me a ton of times, and now with the high temperatures of the summer it gets worse, more teachers turn it on.  

  

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.

What I want to do in the future

 In the future I would like to dedicate myself to teaching, chemistry in particular. I love the idea of giving back to the community the knowledge that I gathered over the years in college and in the years of investigation that I want to do after I finished my chemistry studies. My plan is to finish college and get a ph. D, here in the college that I’m currently studying or outside Chile, since I have relatives in Canada and Sweden I plan on getting an scholarship to study in one of those countries, and with that teach in college; and the other option is to get the pedagogy in chemistry, I would love to teach in a high school, to show the youth how wonderful the chemistry can be and to motivate them to study chemistry and others science related careers. Since before I started studying in college, I decided that I wanted to teach, one of the reasons is that I have heard a lot of stories of bad teachers from friends from other school, and I want to change that because of that teachers the intellectual growth of the country and us as a civilization is getting hurt. That thought of mine has been getting stronger by the fact that speaking with other people here in college; one of the reasons that always appear is that their high school teachers motivate them to continue with their education. I really don’t care about the salary; I only want to do what I want with my life and be happy doing it.

My kind of music

 The kind of music that I like the most is rock and metal, I love the sound of guitars, basses and drums, but I also like the sound that produce air instruments, basically in ska, in particular two band that I like which are ska-p and streetlight manifesto, the saxophone and the trumpets of streetlight manifesto are awesome, and the other band that use air instruments that I listen a lot is In Extremo, In Extremo is a German folk metal band that use bagpipes in their songs, among others unusual instrument. Speaking of instruments, I love a song with a great bass, and the thing that comes to my mind when I think about a song with a great bass is Primus, Les Claypool is such a great bassist, Wynona´s big brown beaver is my favorite song of them, but Tommy the cat is also a great one. And of course my favorite band Rammstein, I love the drums and the keyboard, the keyboard specially in songs like Du Hast, Ich tu dir weh and Du riechst so gut, it sounds amazing! In terms of bands that I listened when I was young, I still listen to them till this day. They were ska-p, system of a down, metallica and linkin park, the last one I listen only occasionally out of nostalgia. One of the soundtracks that I remember and love the most is the soundtrack of Reservoir Dogs by Quentin Tarantino, which consist of a selection of themes of the 70, the songs work so well in the scenes. I love Little green bag which is played when the group comes out of the dinner.      

And today in human anatomy... the liver

 The liver is an amazing and very important organ of our body; it has very important functions like the synthesis of plasmic protein, detox function, vitamins and glycogen storage, bile secretion, among other equally important functions. The liver is located almost in its totality in the right hypochondrium and the epigastrium, while the rest of it is located in the left hypochondrium. The hypochondrium corresponds to the area under and above the false ribs, which are the 8^th, 9^th and 10^th pairs of ribs, and the epigastrium is the area between the two hypochondriums. The size of the liver in an adult it approximate 26cm with a weight of approximate 1.5kg. The more common illnesses that affect the liver are the hepatitis (A,B,C,D and E) and hepatic cirrhosis, and of course hepatic cancer. A ton of people also suffer of fatty liver, which is produced by the accumulation of fatty acids and triglycerides in the hepatic cells, its symptoms are: pain in the upper right part of the abdomen, general discomfort, fatigue, loss of weight and sensation of heaviness. Before, the fatty liver was attributed to the consumption of alcohol, but now is known that it is also caused by bad alimentation. It is important for the prevention of liver related illnesses to maintain a diet based in low consumption of fats and reduction of alcohol consumption.

     

The best concert i have gone to

 The best concert that I went to was the Rockout fest 2016, on the 3th of September of this year and it was held in the Santa Laura stadium, in Independencia. It was a music festival with 8 bands, 2 Chilean, 4 North American, 1 Swedish and 1 German band. The bands were Valium, All Tomorrow, Antiflag, Hellyeah, Dead Kennedys, Meshuggah, The Offsprings and Rammstein. The festival had two stages, the transistor stage that was the metal one, with All Tomorrow, Hellyeah, Meshuggah and Rammstein, and the other one was the monster stage, that was the punk one with Valium, Antiflag, Dead Kennedys and The Offsprings.

 Since before the concert started, it was clear that all the people were there for Rammstein, about 90% of the people were wearing clothes with Rammstein pictures and logos on them, and it was predictable, since Rammstein was the heavy hitter of the festival. I was also one of them because I went to the festival to see Rammstein, I always regretted not going to their concert on 2010, but I dind't listened to them in those years. The stadium opened the gates around 2pm and once we entered with my friend with whom I went with, we rushed directly to the transistor stage, since there Rammstein was going to play later in the day. The funny thing was that while one stage played, in the other the people where resting for the next band, since while one stage was playing the other was being prepared for the next band. We rested in Valium, Antiflag and Dead Kennedys, but we enjoyed the Offspring, at least three songs. Then it came Rammstein and it was amazing. Rammstein is known around the world because of the pyrotechnic they use in their concerts, it was mind blowing, you could feel the heat of the fire that was coming from the front and the back, it was awesome seeing all the people only staring and singing, and occasionally jumping to the rhythm of the music. The concert ended at 11pm and it were 9 straight hours of jumping and shouting.

     

A country I would like to visit

 Well, hello, I’m Agustin and I’m going to talk to you about a place I have always wanted to go to. You might be asking, where? Well, it´s Germany. One of the reasons is that in school I had German lessons, and so I learned a lot about German culture, and I’m very interested in German cuisine, particularly in German desserts because in Chile they´re already very well known, like kuchen and strudel, and I like them a lot.

The other reason is the Rock am Ring, which is a music festival that I have wanted to go to ever since I found it on the internet. The festival is held in Fugplatz Mendig´s airfield since 2015, around the first days in June, and it´s one of the biggest music festivals in Europe and Germany. Before 2015 it was held in the Nürburgring ring.

 I plan on taking lessons again since I already know a bit of german and go for exchange to Germany, that is if I get the certificate, because my plan A is to go to Canada since I got relatives there, so the year that I plan studying there will be easier. But I don´t want to live there after I finish my studies, because I don´t want to leave Chile. When I finish college I plan to travel to different places, but always returning to my country, I wouldn´t want to leave my family alone.