for now, the only thing we're growing on this farm is kids - not the goat variety

Category: Chile (Page 3 of 8)

Belated Photos

For the Chilean independence holiday, Dieciochera (September 18), you may remember that there was a weeklong festival in the park next door.  The festival is sponsored at least in part by the city of Providencia, and the city provides the park’s immediate neighbors with free entrance tickets to the festival.  This gesture is, I suspect, a sort of apology for all the disruption.  Our apartment complex is right next to the park.  During the festival traffic is heavy around our usually quiet block, and finding a parking spot is nearly impossible.  Noise is also an issue.  Concerts would start around noon, and music would blare from the park until midnight.  We could hear it inside our apartment, and we’re on the side opposite of the park!  I can’t image being in one of the units that faces the park.

The city sent us a few different types of tickets.  Basically, we were all able to go together two times.  But we also had two tickets that could be used repeatedly for the entire week.  So, at any given time, two of us could go enjoy ourselves.

So, one afternoon, Rosebud and I went together.  It was like a mother-daughter date.  Here she is all dressed up and ready to go.

You can see she had a spring in her step as we headed to the park. Continue reading

Winter Impressions

Our gas bill is generally accompanied by a small magazine similar to those hospital magazine/advertisements we used to get in the states.  You know the ones.  There would be an interview with a doctor; an exceptional success story; some recipes; photos from a fundraiser, etc.

The picture on this month’s cover of our gas company’s magazine cracked me up because it illustrates what winter is like here in Santiago.  There is rarely snow here in central Chile – so we don’t get a picture of some bundled-up, snow-sprinkled kids coming in the back door, tired but happy, greeted by their smiling mother who has hot chocolate waiting.  No pictures like that here in the Santiago area.

You should know that winters here are really not very cold at all.  Continue reading

What’d He Say?

In Spanish “rusio” means “Russian”.  “Rubio” means “blond”.  Carman, my most blond child (I know, I know, he’s not a child anymore! sniff.) is called both on the streets in Santiago.

Being blond is a bit unusual here.  And Chileans, especially the working class, are comfortable addressing people they don’t know.  They’ll mumble something about “rubio” under their breath as he rides past on his bike.  The guy at the bike store will ask, “¿Qué buscando, rubio?”  (What do you need, blondie?)  They call him blondie with a straight face.  It’s neither good, or bad, it’s just what he is – blond.

What surprised me is that folks on the street will also call him “Rusio” (Russian).  I feared this was a jab, an insult, an “Oh dear, you need to watch your back.”  But it’s not that way at all.  For whatever reason, here in Chile, the two words (rubio and rusio) can have the same meaning: blondie.

Now, if you’re a woman or a young child, you’ll also be called “mi amor” (whether on not you’re blond.)  I can go to La Vega, and be claimed as the “love” of 5 different men, usually at the completion of a vegetable transaction.  I say “thank you,” and they say, “Thanks to you, my love.”  It’s quite typical and nothing to be flattered or offended by.  Young children are addressed in this way too.

If you’re a woman, you’ll likely be called “reina” (queen) too.  No need to get a big head, because they’re going to call every 5th woman they see “reina.”  It’s like calling out “ma’am.”  This usually happens when someone is trying to get my attention: “Reina! Zapallo, repollo, cebolla…” (Queen! Pumpkin, cabbage, onion…)

It’s like being in a small, southern town and having the waitress call you “honey”, and the cashier at the diner call you “sugar”.  It seems though, that these “sweet” words are mostly spoken by women in the US.  Whereas in Chile, the men get in on the sweet talk.

Climbing for the Prize – the View and a Mote con Huesillo

We live fairly near Cerro San Cristobal, a small mountain/large hill that’s a noted landmark with a towering statue of the Virgin Mary on top.  She’s the tallest thing around, minus the nearby cell towers.  The Cerro is a verdant wonder in this dry city.  It is watered (and therefore green), landscaped, and sports Japanese gardens, a zoo, a chapel, some restaurants, and a huge swimming pool.  The Cerro is so big that each venue feels fairly tucked away and secluded from everything else.

On weekends, the winding roads going up the Cerro are busy, busy with pedestrians, runners, and cyclists.  It’s the closest experience to being in the woods for miles around, so it’s a very popular place.  Sudoku and I have taken to riding up the Cerro once a week or so.  From our apartment, it’s two hours round-trip for us pokey-paced girls.  (But we are getting faster!)

On our first climb up the Cerro, we got to the top, looked around, spotted our apartment and some other familiar locations, caught our breath, and then enjoyed the exhilarating ride down.  Zip!

The second time, we were with a local friend.  When we got to the top, we followed the crowd through a little passage underneath the funicular (incline railway) which opened onto a large patio.  Scores of runners and bikers were hanging out, enjoying the view, sipping mote con huesillo.  Since it was my birthday week, we treated ourselves to this unique, sweet Chilean beverage.  And when I say sweet, I mean really sweet.

We had seen lots of people drinking/eating mote con huesillo (especially around the Dieciochera holiday), and it really didn’t look appetizing at me.  The drink is typically served in a plastic cups with plastic spoons, is the color of beer, has barley in the bottom of the cup, and large wrinkly dried fruit floating in the juice.  I don’t know…maybe it’s the plastic spoons sticking out, maybe it’s the way you have to eat/drink it (more on that in a minute), but it just didn’t appeal to me.

BUT it’s a very Chilean drink, and we had just biked up a Chilean hill, were looking out over the largest Chilean city, surrounded by Chileans enjoying one of their signature Chilean drinks…  It was time to try this thing.  So we did.  The liquid is syrupy sweet.  My first thought was, “They opened a can of peaches and drained the syrup into my cup.”   But then it started to grow on me.  The drink was very cold, the mote (barley) was soft, and the huesillos (dried peaches) were so yummy, sweet, and soft!  Did I mention it was sweet?

So, here’s the gist of how it’s made.  Dried peaches are soaked over night, then cooked in the soaking water with chancaca, which is a raw, unrefined sugar with a high molasses content.  The peaches and juice are then completely chilled.  To serve, a couple of spoonfulls of cooked barley are put in the bottom of the cup, followed by 2-3 dried peaches (including the pits), followed by the juice.  The drink is sipped and eaten with a spoon.  As Gaby, my Chilean friend says, you have to forget about being proper or elegant.  You scoop out a big peach, balance it on your spoon, take a bite out of it, and then lower the remainder back into your cup while you chew on what’s in your mouth.  When in Rome…

The drink was super yummy.  But about 30-40 minutes later, after arriving back home, I felt just a bit dizzy and had a sugar-high headache for a couple of hours…  It’s that sweet.

Birthday Blues, Stomach Bugs and Lost Teeth

“Birthday week” is how we refer to the week when the boys have their birthdays. This year Carman turned sixteen and Doodle turned nine.

On Tuesday Marathon took them to Cajon del Maipo, and the next day he and Carman had a stomach bug:( The rest of us felt fine… till Saturday. On Saturday Marathon and Carman had fairly normal appetites but Milkmaid didn’t feel like eating lunch. She was in bed the rest of the day.

A few hours later Carman and Rosebud felt bad as well. So this left the birthday boy and I. Also, like I mentioned before, Marathon had already gotten it earlier in the week and he was feeling fine. The three of us ate dinner, and then we sung happy birthday to Doodle. About 5 bites into his large brownie, Doodle said that he didn’t feel well, and you can probably guess how that ended. Of course, I got the bug too, a few hours later. Continue reading

The Santiago Metro

Santiago has a great subway system. Very clean, modern, safe. It’s better than New York’s subway.

It costs around a dollar to get on unless you were just on a bus, in which case it’s around 10 cents.

When it’s really busy, they have green trains and red ones. Some stations are green, others red. Trains only stop at stations with their color. Stations that are heavily used or where lines cross are both colors. When it’s busy, the air in the train gets hot and stuffy, and when you get off, you breathe in the cool, smoggy air with great enjoyment.

I was on a train once where you could not get away with touching less than 8 people. Talk about personal space going to absolute zero. This creates problems when your stop comes along and there are 6 feet of people that are almost incapable of moving in between you and the doors. Trying to grab a handle or something as the train accelerates when it is this full is pointless… everybody is packed in so tight that you can’t move in the first place.

When It’s not busy, or when you are getting on at one of the terminal stations, you may have a chance of getting a seat. This is a rare privilege.

The lines are mixes of underground, elevated, and ground-level tracks. Visible metro parts are apparently considered an eyesore, because you don’t see any of that on the nicer side of town.

Here is a map of the 5 current functional lines. 2 more lines are under construction.

This is the uniquely styled bus terminal cover at the “Del Sol” station.

This is a typical elevated station.

This is the inside of an underground station.

This is the interior of an elevated station.

Fiestas Patrias – The petting zoo

The first place we went when the Dieciochera opened was the petting zoo area. There were horses, cows, goats, ducks, a peacock, pigs, bunnies and turkeys. Most of the animals were not pet-able because of the fences. The goats had an extra tall fence, and were not pet-able.  Well, a worker did carry around a little goat kid, and then we got to pet him.  So cute with those floppy ears!

Rosebud loved the little pigs! I don’t think she had ever seen any before 🙂

My parents said this calf looked almost exactly like the calf we had on our farm, and that the cow was a Milking Shorthorn just like our cow was. I don’t remember the cow or calf we had on the farm because we moved when I had just turned three, so it was very cool to see what our cows looked like.

Of course, my parents had to get their picture taken with them:)

Then we went over to pet the horse. We were standing there petting the horse and taking pictures of it, when a man came up and asked if Doodle and Rosebud wanted to have a ride! Doodle was really excited, because he had never ridden a horse before.  The man pulled a chamanto over his head and plopped a Chilean hat over his eyes.  All set!

Rosebud wasn’t so sure, because the horse looked big and kind of scary! Plus, she was wearing a skirt and her ballet flats. But after Doodle went, she decided to try it too – in the same traditional get-up.

She did great and was glad she had tried it 🙂

We took pictures of the rabbits and peacock, but we lost the pictures because one of our cameras was stolen out of one of the outside pockets of a backpack (it was visible). It was a good lesson for us, because we had kind of let our guard down because we haven’t had anything stolen from us here. We got lucky because the person who stole it took our ten year old camera, and not the new one.  Whew.

Cajon del Maipo

“Cajon del Maipo” is a string of little valleys in the Andes to the southeast of Santiago along the Maipo river. It is the only place of significant population in the Andes near Santiago, because of the usable land created by the unusually gentle decline of the river. Marathon decided to take Doodle and I on a “birthday trip” (our birthdays are 5 days apart) to this place that we had heard a lot about from various friends here.

Getting there was impressively cheap. There is a bus service that will take you from a subway station in La Florida to Any of the little towns in the valley for under 2 dollars a person, and Doodle was free.

Because the price of using this bus system is so close to the price of using the government bus system, some people use it to go from one place in Santiago to another, just because it covers a route that the government buses don’t. So, we did many little detours down side streets just to pick people up who weren’t going to Cajon del Maipo.

Our bus driver, G-force McLeadfoot, drove like he was several years behind schedule. He did stuff like not coming to a complete stop when letting a passenger off, going over speed bumps so fast that your butt came off the seat, and when in the mountain roads, driving at a pace most people associate only with Ferraris.

We got off in San Alfonso and did a three-hour hike at “Cascada de las Animas”, a huge, private nature reserve/camp with the highlight being a farm up on a plateau only accessible by a very steep trail. All the infrastructure of the farm houses, sheds, etc. was brought up the trail by mule. They had cows up on the plateau, and when we were hiking up, we passed some folks carrying a basket of cheese down the hill, to be used in the restaurant at the bottom.

After that, we took a “collectivo” (looks like a taxi but operates like a bus) to San Jose, the largest town in the valley. We hung out there for a little while, then took a bus back to Santiago.

Here’s Doodle with the valley in the background

This is the pasture atop the plateau. Not accessible by automobile of any type.

Naturally broken rocks. Pic doesn’t demonstrate how counter-top flat they are

Fiestas Patrias

“Fiestas Patrias” means “national holidays” or literally “homeland parties.” In Chile the independence day is on September 18. Unlike in the US, they have an entire week of celebrations. The celebration for the eighteenth is called the “Dieciochera” which means something like “eighteen-er”.

We live close to a well-known park in Santiago, Parque Ines de Suarez. It is a nice gated park with a large playground, concrete soccer and basketball courts, one large field, two fountains and a nice walking/running path around it. Every year the park closes at the beginning of September while they’re setting up tents and a petting zoo, constructing stages, inflatable bounce houses, a mini Ferris wheel, and other mechanical rides. Yesterday we went early (before it got super crowded) and I got some pictures.

You probably don’t realize how much work they did on these basketball courts. Here they are (the basketball courts) doubling as a food court.

This is a stage they set up in the middle of one of the big fields. Everything is red, white or blue! Well, almost everything, the chairs are black 🙁

Behind the stage along one side of the park is a large artesian fair. Lots of little booths with people selling their own special thing: Flowers, jewelry, origami, wooden kitchen utensils ect.

These are very realistic paper flowers.

This is a glass spiral with rocks inside of it, made into the glass. Also, if you’d like to buy it, it’s only 70 dollars!

There was also LOTS of food and drink booths, of which I didn’t take any pictures. Also, we can’t forget the inflatables and mechanical rides. This is the mini Ferris wheel that Doodle and Rosebud didn’t ride because of the huge line.

Throughout the days there are concerts, circus shows, story tellers and dance competitions of the national dance, cueca. This is what google.cl looked like on the 18th:

Sometime later this week we’ll probably go and watch the dances. I tried the dance the other day (one of my friends tried to teach me), but it’s the kind of dance that goes with a certain song, and you have to memorize what happens when.

There is a law here that all buildings/businesses must have a flag in front of them during Dieciochera (Sept 17-23): apartment buildings, grocery stores and even churches.

How many flags can you spot?

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