Company Visits

Today started very early, we met in the lobby at 7:30am for breakfast. We’ve been having complimentary breakfast every morning. It’s actually charming, there’s always pound cake, apple butter, a biscuit, Jell-O, yogurt, with cheese and meat. It’s actually really good! We left for our first company which was Hela Tools, which is the company I researched. It was very interesting to see how much actually goes into the process of making something as simple as a paint brush. The tour was done completely in Spanish, but luckily Paula and Francisco (two Chilean students) and Werner (the director of the Plus 3 program at Santa Maria) translated everything for us. They helped me ask all of my questions and I got a really good look inside the industry as a whole as well the individual company. This company mainly focuses in producing all sorts of brushes and exports them directly to retailers domestically.

After Hela, we had an hour bus ride to the second company. The whole bus ride Jillian and I were talking to Francisco and we were teaching each other customs from our cultures. It was pretty interesting and funny most of the time. The Chilean students are really nice and I love to hear about how their life is here compared to ours at home. The second company was Conservas Centauro, which is a canning company. The tour was also done in Spanish and it was difficult to hear the translations because the factory was so loud. We toured their vegetable canning plant so we saw tomatoes and a variety of vegetables and how they were produced. We had to wear hair nets and face masks so we didn’t contaminate the food.

We had lunch after that, we stopped at a little empanada place which was sort of like a hut. It sounds weird but it was actually really cute and had its own character to it. I had a chicken and cheese as well as shrimp and cheese empanada. After that, we went to a mushroom factory called Nature’s Farm. I expected it to be a lot smellier but it wasn’t that unbearable. It was actually not that bad, it was pretty interesting how the mushrooms were grown and sold. Tonight we’re all getting pizza and then exploring again. I’ll talk to you guys tomorrow!