Wrong and familiar: That is the feeling you inevitably get when, after a 16-hour flight, you sit down on the Plaza de Armas, Santiago de Chile’s main square, and look around.
First of all, the season is wrong because you are in the southern hemisphere. It is possible that you had left home in autumn drizzle and find yourself now in glorious spring. At noon, the sun stands in the north but is warming you up. The scenery seems familiar and European: Spanish-looking arcades here, spruced-up palaces there, at the corner a modern mirror-glazed tower next to a neo-classicist cathedral. The faces of the people are also familiar: typical Latinos? No, not at all!

On the Plaza, you are sitting in the eye of the hurricane: While crowds rush all around you, people here fall into a leisurely stroll, looking over the shoulders of chess-players, or listening to a string quartet. Also ‘wrong’ is the cliché of a chaotic Central American metropolis: everything here is calm and civilised; no taxi driver is hooting behind you, and at the most, a street seller will try to sell you some cheap jewellery.

No sign of an extrovert temperament like you find with Argentines. And yet, it is easy to have a conversation with your neighbour reading the newspaper on a bench, or with a shop assistant who turns out to be a student of German, and all of a sudden everything has changed.
The Chilean people are unobtrusive but curious and seriously interested in European visitors. ‘Where from?’, ‘Where to?’, ‘¿Te gusta Chile? (Do you like Chile?), these are their first questions. And then it turns out that the brother-in-law of an aunt had once lived in Europe, and from that moment on you are an ‘amigo’ (friend) and are invited for a barbecue on the following Sunday. While travelling in Chile, you will frequently enjoy the pleasure of warm Chilean hospitality.

The school lies at the foot of Santiago’s ‘green lung’, the Cerro San Cristóbal in the colourful Bohemian suburb Bellavista. Its numerous bars, restaurants, discos, and small theatres have turned this ‘barrio’ into a magnet for students, artists, artist-craftsmen and tourists. The school was established in 1992. Because of its manageable size, it offers students individual care and a casual atmosphere.