At the very end of my assignment I am struggling with my blog count and how well I did overall. I really don’t know if I am going to keep writing on this blog, or move back to the one I had before where I vented my frustration on finding a job as a professional immigrant. The one I should have named “in the middle of nowhere” due to my overqualified/underqualified profile rendering me no success at landing a career life in Canada.

Hey, on the other one I got paid… $10… but still 🙂

http://wallpapers.bassq.nl/Travel/South%20America/index.html#1

courtesy of wallpapers.bassq.nl

Anyways, as I was trying to come up with one post that would make it up, I remembered I had not written about Chile. And that is one country in South America that needs to be heavily publicized in terms of PR. Most of the people would remember Chile from the 2010 earthquake or the Chilean miners rescue.

Chile, as many other Latin American countries has a very diversified geography. They have a desert (Atacama), Andean mountains, the coastal range, the pacific ocean, the Patagonia, and, or course, Easter Island. This mysterious place is located at the southeastern most point of the Polynesian triangle and was declared a UNESCO World Heritage in 1995. Diversity has blessed the nation with a wide assortment of climates, landscapes and cultures… However, I love Chile for two things:

  • Chilean wine: Well, there  is no post or country mentioned on this blog that does not have a reference to an alcoholic beverage. Chile, with its fabulous wine, could not be an exception. They have a great industry and it is being sold with great market success in lots of countries. Chile is the ninth largest producer of wine in the world and the fifth largest exporter. They have a variety of grapes, mostly from the Spanish and French variety. The most common are Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Carmenere. The National Geographic has two short blogs about the country and its perks.
  • Their progress: Chile, like any other South American nation, has had its ups and downs and a good number of dictators. The progress they have made in the recent past amazes me because they have become one of the biggest economic powers of the South. Their pension plan was recommended as a model to be used in Canada by the Montreal Economic Institute. “Pension funds accumulated $111.4 billion by the end of 2007 – 70 percent of gross domestic product – and helped to drive growth in what became known as Chile’s ‘miracle’ economy.” could be read in a NYTimes article  published in 2008. Chile is, and should be, a role model for the rest of the South American countries that want to succeed and progress.

To conclude here, I must say love the fact that Chile is my last country, at least in terms of class assignments, because of two reasons:

  • It ends at the very extreme of the massive piece of land formed by America, North and South, opposite to the location of my writing. Chilean people might feel like they are located at the beginning of the piece of land formed by the Americas and, in their perception, I would be at the end … Everything is relative! The good, the bad, the ugly and the pretty. It is all good in the eyes of its creator. One of the things I tried to communicate when I decided to share only good things about these countries.
  • I found the video below about two guys snowboarding in the Andean mountains of Chile. One of my team members is the biggest snowboarding fan I have (and probably will) ever met. If you met my team, you would think none of our members had anything in common. We might have been the most diverse team ever formed in this program, and yet, we managed to work well as a work group thanks to the common things, but mostly, thanks to our differences. The Chilean snowboarding video feels to me like a visual representation of the common ground. South and North, young and not so young, snowboarding, the end, not really. Can you see the connection? I do. ♥ Crew PR!

[note: After publishing this blog I found out that in terms of economic risk, Chile got rated in the top 10 of least risky nations. This is the first time for South American country and it is a confirmationof what I said on this post  Chile top 10 world’s least economically risky nations http://bit.ly/hePufc ]