My overall experience in Chile was absolutely amazing. I loved my host family like my own, and I plan to visit them as soon as I can afford it. My classes were overall pretty good, except for missing a lot of classes due to the political unrest. The weather was completely different than Charleston – opposite seasons and no humidity or rain ever. The city we studied in is huge, which is also very different than Charleston. My favorite parts were all the traveling we were able to do. We went to 4 different cities in Peru and all of them were amazing in their own way. The most impactful part was all the political unrest. Seeing all the Chilean people united under one common cause was something I had never seen before. Seeing all the poverty and inequality really opened my eyes to the politics of South America, because we don’t learn much about their history in schools. My advice to anyone studying abroad would be to do a lot of research beforehand, because it was really hard for me to understand the politics behind all the protests. I also would advise to only bring clothes that you wear on a normal basis, because I definitely brought clothes that I later regretted. I also recommend doing more research about cell service, because there are laws about registering foreign phones that we did not know about until the last day we could register them, and some people were without service for 2 months because they missed the deadline. I wish I would have been able to connect with more locals, but we didn’t have classes with any Chilean students and personally I didn’t meet anyone outside of my host family and their friends. It has definitely made me more confident speaking Spanish to natives because that was the only way to communicate with my family and some of my teachers. I loved my time in Santiago so much, and it was very hard and emotional to have to leave my host family, but my real family made it worth it to come home.