Weekend exodus

It's been an enjoyable but busy week. I've spent many hours every day deep in messy coding with Mathematica working on a few different projects in parallel - this is parallel processing of the inefficient variety. Still, they seem to be getting there and I'll be running code on multiple machines over the weekend.

As I was walking home today I was struck, as I always am on a Friday, by the strange weekend exodus from Santiago. The city has a population of around 100,000, around 20 percent of whom are students. I would guess that at least 95% of the students here are from nearby towns and villages and still have strong connections to their homes. On a Thursday night and Friday throughout the day, lines of students can be seen, making their way to the train and bus stations to go home to their parent's houses in the country. I can't help but feel strange when I see this; the idea of university and independence are simply so far removed here from such ideas in England. At university in England the independence that university affords is one of the great benefits, and weekends that can be spent with newfound friends are a large part of this side of life. The idea of going home every weekend to spend time with your family so that your parents can cook and clean for you (frequently, so I hear, supplying several days' food for the students when they come back on Sunday night), is a strange one and I can't help but feel that such a continuous dependency on parents causes students to be less 'worldly' in a rather abstract sense, than their counterparts in other countries where home ties are loosened at a younger age. Note that this is not to equate the number of drunken weekends with maturity, but simply that such strong ties to home (as opposed to family) were rather alien to me at that age.

I write this simply because whenever I see the students heading home with their small suitcases, I can't help but feel a certain sadness. Students should be out, getting away from home, seeing the world and experiencing the highs and lows of life alone, making and breaking friendships and making the mistakes which we all make which turn us from children into adults.

Living in different cultures is not only about observing the differences in lifestyles and values, but trying to understand them so I'd be interested to know the opinion of anyone who takes part in this weekend exodus.