Marcelo's Blocker Blog 2023

  It all started one day before the actual event. My American friends from IES told me there was a parade going on in town in the evening that day or the day after. I decided to miss the one on the evening and go on the next day. I didn't do any type of research about the so called "parade", all I knew was that it started at 2pm on Sunday, February 12th. I went to the gym that morning and since I didn't have any data left on my phone, I decided to go alone to the parade to arrive in time. On the tram, I saw some german students with customs and decided to ask them about the parade. Not even 5 minutes passed and friends from their group showed up from different parts of the same tram! I couldn't avoid seeing t he large amount of people gathered in the streets and as far as that point, these local students kept telling me about people with "masks" on the parade. Long story short,  I ended up staying with them for 2 hours watching the parade and enjoying t

  My anecdote takes first place one week before this trip, when I was visiting Zurich. I took a FlixBus with 2 friends from Freiburg and we noticed that the driver and his assistant were from Italy. When I was doing the passport check, the Italian assistant was surprised by my Chilean passport and since the Spanish and Italian languages are similar, I was able to understand when he told me was coming from a "killer country". At the beginning, I felt confused and was kind of happy he knew about Chile's existence, but then during the trip when I asked him to elaborate, he told me that both of his Italian grandparents escaped to Chile from WWII, settled in Chile, but were assassinated in the Pinochet Dictatorship. Even though it wasn't my fault, I couldn't avoid to feel a little bit ashamed about the situation. In addition, the day I came back to Freiburg I met a Chinese, half-German student who was rooming with one of my IES friends and he told me he knew about the