I still have sand in my eyes!

And that is why I haven't blogged about the desert yet! No, that's a mentira (lie), but I have been really busy this week and will get around to it this weekend. For now, know that the desert in Chile is much like other deserts I have been in (okay, I've only been in one other one), in that it is hot, sunny, sandy, and dry.

10K race this weekend! Ahhh!

Crazy Coincidence

I forgot to mention something pretty unbelievable that happened while we were rock climbing yesterday. There was another group climbing at the same spot we were at and we started talking to them after a while. There were four college-age students and they all spoke enough English so that we could communicate in either that or Spanish. After a while the only girl of the group told us she had lived in the US in high school and we asked where and she goes, "Minnesota?" Lucy and Mathias and I unanimously went, "WHAT?!" Hahaha! How hilarious is that! She did her sophomore year at Wyzata because she has some family there. Incredible. It also turns out that she lives about three blocks away from me in Santiago. Sometimes I wonder if the world could get any smaller.

Also, close to the cerro we climbed there is a small airport (I guess that's what one would call it) for gliders. They're this really skinny airplanes with no engine that literally glide around without making any sound. It's a beautiful thing to see in real life. If you haven't seen them before, check some out on youtube (although videos don't really do them justice). Off to school!

10 years later...

You may call me the rip van winkle of blogging. Except I definitely haven't been sleeping the past two weeks...

Spring has hit Santiago, and it has been warm and sunny lately. The smog tries to block out the sun once in a while but thanks to the thin ozone layer around here, it doesn't do a very good job. Good weather during the day means that it doesn't get freezing cold inside of houses/apartments at night, which is a nice change of pace from when I first got here. My friend Lucy has a really charming back patio behind her house and we have eaten our there three times over the past two weeks (pictures!). We also had coffee out there one morning before school, sitting at the big wooden table dappled in sunlight. It would be perfect but they have this crazy dog who is always running around, jumping on laps, and trying to steal food. We love her but sometimes you just want to throw her on the grill with the burgers. Nooooo - she's a lover. Anyway, one night Lucy made caprese salad, our favorite, and last night another friend of ours made these delicious burgers and we had sauteed onions, mushrooms, and peppers to go on them, along with avocado and tomato. AND Heinz-brand ketchup and mustard. Loved it. Last weekend we had another go at pie-making (strawberry this time) and this one was much more successful.

On Friday night a bunch of us went out with Mariana and her friends to a club a bit south of downtown to dance some cueca, because Mariana's friend plays in a cueca band. It was soooooo much fun (more pictures!). What I have realized about dancing the cueca is that more important than knowing the actual steps is having the cueca attitude. It got packed in this club with people of all ages, and the pañuelos were flying. Really, if you haven't done it yet, look up a video of chilean cueca on youtube. We decided it must run in Chilean blood because even after the band stopped playing, people started banging the rhythm on tables and couples were just as happy dancing to that. Awesome.

Soccer has been so good to me lately. I'm becoming much better friends with some of the girls in my class, and the team I play with on weekends qualified for the gold bracket! We thought we were still in qualifying rounds, but we showed up for our game on Saturday and found out we had already made it! And we tied our first game 4-4, thinking we were going to lose. PLUS I think we're getting t-shirt uniforms, aka my favorite thing in the whole world. That will be a great souvenir. I might add another weekly soccer session to my week too - another girl in our class has a team in a different league, and our teams might get together to play pick-up on Wednesday nights. Which would bring the total to 5 days of soccer a week. Beautiful.

Today I went rock climbing for the first time. It is so much fun!! I had gone in gyms maybe twice in my entire life, and not since I was probably 10 or 12. This was on top of a cerro, real live rock climbing. (Pictures, obviously). I only went up once but I can tell my arms are going to be sore tomorrow. Not to mention the hike up is no easy task. A few of my friends have enough gear that we can go ourselves and be self-sufficient. I love climbing anything, and this was no exception. We also have two really good climbing trees outside of the apartment building. I might have to start being more of a monkey in those now that I've gotten a taste of the real thing.


Volunteering at the high school is going well. The boys whistle at me less outside of the classroom now, and the students are getting more comfortable asking me and the other volunteer questions when they're working. I'm going to show one of the classes a powerpoint about places in Madison. They're doing a unit on cities. (Speaking of Madison, what a season to be a Badger football fan, no? I don't even like football but I do like beating the gophers in their new monstrosity of a stadium :D)

Next weekend I'm going up to the Atacama Desert with some friends. It is purported to be the driest desert in the world and some people think it hasn't rained there for decades (for example, me and my Dad), but my geography professor told us just the other day that that is BS. It rains a little bit every winter, and also she said, "and what does 'dry' mean anyway?" Apparently some guy wrote an article about it a long time ago and called it that, and the reputation stuck. It should be a fun trip. Hopefully I'll get another chance to blog before I leave!

Here's a picture of the view from where we were rock climbing today. That's all for now! Missing home, loving Chile.

Independence

FANtastic weekend. After Friday's ear fiasco, I cleaned up the wound, took a shower, put my hair up, and took to the streets to celebrate sweet sweet independence. Well, not exactly to the streets but to a fonda (like a mini state fair) not far from my apartment with some friends. We drank chicha (like wine but doesn't ferment as long so it's sweeter), ate anticucho (like a shishkabob with hunks of steak and chorrizo), and walked around looking at all of the chilean crafts. Aprarently that fonda was the most high-class of them all... as high class as a state-fair-like event can be I guess.

Saturday during the day I visited the general cemetery. I had heard that it's beautiful, and it's in my Lonely Planet book as a place to visit. When I first walked in, I was in an older section that must have been where the wealthy families are buried. The graves were big and made of old stone. One thing Molly had told me about the cemetery was that it struck her how many of the graves had fresh flowers, and she was totally right. A lot of them not only have fresh bouquets of flowers, but the whole grave would be planted like a mini-garden. Then there were big buildings that were like the apartment-building version of graves (photo), but even those were covered in flowers and had really sweet engravings. I was almost reduced to tears several times.



The less-wealthy section was really cool^. Most of the plots had pinwheels, soccer team flags, flowers, and even tents over them. I thought it looked like more fun to be buried there than with the rich people, but both sections had their charms. I'm really glad I went. That night I went out with Mariana!!! I met her and another friend at Mariana's house and from there we went to the fonda at the National Soccer Stadium. The crowd was definitely different from the night before, but we got terremotos and chorripan so I was more than happy. THEN we went to Providencia to find somewhere to dance and found a Cuban night club that was playing salsa and merengue. It was a smallish joint and for part of the night they had a live band! Siempre lo paso demasiado bien con la Flaca.

Sunday the weather was gorgeous so I walked to the park to do some homework. It was really busy with families with little kids, and kite-flying is something that everybody seems to do. It was fun to be surrounded by cute chilean kids and their parents for a while. The weather was absolutely gorgeous all weekend. Funny, because today is the first day of spring and it has been cold and rainy all day.

To welcome spring, there was a ceremony in the center of the city today where they threw flower petals and ticker tape out the windows of building around this small plaza. I went with one of my friends from soccer class. It was great and made me think that there should be something similar in every city to welcome spring. I guess in MN in March it's usually too effing cold to get everybody outside for something like that, but it made me feel really happy.

I'm throwing in a picture of the pizza I got when we went out for dinner with our program coordinator the other night, mostly for my mama the unofficial (Italian) food critic. And one of a wicked cool sunset that I saw out my kitchen window the other night. Life is good!

SUCCESS!!!!!!!

RAN UP SAN CRISTOBAL TODAY!!!!!!!! Now I can go home happy. There was a minor set-back when an overhanging tree took a bite out of my ear and I started bleeding, but I controlled the wound with my shirt and continued on up. It is so beautiful out today so when I got to the top I sunbathed for about half an hour (it's still winter, in case you were wondering). AND I ran into Jenners from Camp Hand in Hand up there! How nuts is that? Just bumping into friends in a city of 7 million.

I ended up staying in Santiago for the holiday weekend. The news reported that 1 million people left. I believe it, the city feels really empty. Wednesday I took a nice long walk to see Pablo Neruda's Santiago house. It was the only one of his three houses in Chile I hadn't seen yet. I would be extraordinarily happy living in any of them. This one is in Bellavista, the hip night-life neighborhood, at the base of Cerro San Cristobal. It used to have a river running right outside its window, but now the river goes under the property. He had really cool, interesting taste.

There are some North Americans visiting Santiago from Buenos Aires this weekend. We took them to La Piojera last night. It was more packed than I've ever seen it. We sat with a group of super nice Chilenas and two Chilenos. There were fútbol chants being chanted and everyone sang the national anthem at one point. One guy I was talking to wanted me to sing the USA's anthem but I declined. Hahahaha. Life is good!

Fechas Importantes

¡Hola! I got back to the apartment a little while ago from an independence day celebration at Mariano Latorre, the high school I volunteer at. This coming Friday is Chile's 4th of July: "El Dieciocho," or "The Eighteenth." It's the 199th anniversary of Chile's declaration of independence from Spain. Class ends at 1 pm on Thursday and by all accounts, that's when the celebratory drinking commences. La Universidad de Chile - one of the other main universities in Santiago - doesn't have class all week. The week leading up to Fiestas Patrias (the name of the whole shabang) has been described to me as "the biggest party of the year." The one thing I don't really understand though is that a lot of people leave Santiago for it. Originally I was thinking it would be sweet to be in Santiago to see all of the celebration, but now it sounds like a lot of my friends are leaving town. Surely there will be a lot going on here, but I don't know what I'm going to do yet.

The celebration at the school was a lot of fun. It was cool to see all of the students come to school on a Saturday to celebrate, and most of them were there all day long helping with their own class' stand. Our stand, Miss Gladys' class, sold empanadas, chips, and candy. I loooooove deep fried cheese empanaditas (Chilean spanish is all about adding "ita" onto the ends of nouns for small things). Other classes sold fresh-squeezed juice, chorripan (chorrizo and pan, aka a Chilean bratwurst), sopapillas, etc. And the cooking students made all kinds of deserts that were sooo yummy. I took a picture of their booth, it was right next to ours. I bought the spiral one. I didn't catch the name, but it tasted fantástico. Those boys are going to make really good husbands. I also took a lot of pictures of the elementary schoolers doing the national dance, the Cueca. It's really pretty when it's done right. The man is supposed to be in pursuit of the woman, which makes it extra cute when there are 10-year olds doing it. Here's a pic of me with the teacher I work with and another volunteer. Miss Gladys is wearing a typical Cueca outfit:


The celebration started on campus last week. There was a fonda, which is kind of like a block party but they're held all over Santiago and anyone can attend, at school on Thursday. It was a lot of fun - they sold typical Chilean asado (BBQ) food and drinks. And when it got dark there was a good band and dancing. I ran into some girls from my soccer class and it was a lot of fun to hang out with them off the field.

The other significant day that passed this week was September 11th, which was a sad day in Chile long before it meant anything in the USA. It was the day Pinochet's government violently took power of the country, and there are still protests and demonstrations to mark the event. We were warned as extranjeros to stay away from big plazas and government buildings. Apparently two people died in incidents related to the date. There are still a lot of people in Chile who think Pinochet was a godsend, and they fly the Chilean flag on the 11th.

On a more light-hearted note (well, maybe not), Chile had another disappointing outing in fútbol this week in their world-cup qualifying match against Brazil. It was a weird one - Brazil was not playing with their first line and therefore were not as dominant as usual, which left Chile with un montón of chances to score, but they couldn't seem to capitalize. Laaaaame. They lost 4-2. But I did get to eat my FIRST chorripan out of the deal because Mathias' host brother had some friends over for an asado. You win some you lose some.

Lily's Cumpleaños!

¡Cumpleaños feliz,
Te deseamos a ti,
Cumpleaños Lily,
Que los cumplas feliz!

The birthday song is different here!

It was Lily's birthday today and she had a party in the evening with a bunch of friends and relatives. She got home around 6:30 and we started preparing food and drinks. At most Chilean parties I've been to, they just have a bunch of finger food. My (and my mom B. Jo's) favorite! Tonight we had a veggie platter, nuts, cheese and crackers, meat balls/hot dog bites, empanaditas, little hard-boiled eggs, and this dish that I don't remember the name of that is a bed of thinly sliced zucchini with lemon juice and capers on top that is meant to be eaten on crackers. And everything had it's own home-made dipping sauce prepared by Joanna (our nana). She's a rockstar. She came to help with the party and stayed all night - with a nasty little cold.

I was a little nervous about helping with the party because I didn't want to get in anyone's way, but really Lily just needed help setting up and then we (the young adults) were guests just like everybody else. All of her friends who I have met are super nice, and her niece and nephew feel like my cousins. We even had a kid table like the Jeanetta cousins always do at family get-togethers. Lily was in a great mood and I think she had a really good time. Did I luck out or what?