Pucon

Well, its been a while but here is an update on what I've been up to.  This past weekend, I went to Pucon, a town in the south of Chile with a few friends. We took an overnight bus on Thursday night and got there around 9.  The hostel that we stayed at, which was conveniently right next to the bus station, is run by a middle aged woman named Elizabeth, who lives there with her son Helmut.  She was very accommodating and welcoming, it almost felt like I had another host parent in Chile.  It rained the first two days we were there, but Pucon is an adventure town so we had no choice but to go outside and get wet.  On Friday, we went and visited some termas (what the Chileans call hot springs) and sat in them while the rain came down all around us.  The scenery in the south is so different from the middle or north of Chile, it is incredibly green and lush, with little streams and waterfalls all over the place.  The most active volcano in South America sits right outside of Pucon, and it was smoking steadily the whole time we were there. 

Volcan Villarica

On Saturday, we took a bus ride to a national park outside of Pucon and went for a hike on the muddiest trail I have been on.  When we went to pay the entry fee for the park, we got to pay the Chilean citizen price, because we all had our residency ID cards with us.  It seemed like a big deal to us at the time because when the ranger asked us where we were from and we answered, "Santiago", we were actually telling the truth.  It was raining steadily the whole time and we were slipping all over the place, because 3 out of the four of us had on running shoes.  As we got higher, we got into areas that were snow covered and started to get worried that we wouldn't make it out of the park to catch the last bus home because it was such slow going. 

Gettin' dirty

Snow!

We turned around and made it back in time to catch the bus.  

We woke up on Sunday and saw the sun for the first time in Pucon.  We took a bus to a place called the Ojos, which is a lagoon that has four or five waterfalls draining into it, plus random subterranean streams coming out of the rocks.  After we had lunch at the junction of two rivers, we took the bus back to our hostel, showered and ate dinner, and then got on the bus back to Santiago.          

Las Lagunas

  

A questionable bridge

El pais de Uruguay

This past weekend we had a ferriado (holiday) on Monday for Columbus Day, so I had a four day weekend. My friends Sarah and Kevin and I took advantage of the time and flew to Uruguay on Friday. On the drive to our hostel from the airport, we drove along a kind of mini lake shore drive, with the Rive Plata on our left and smallish apartment buildings on our right. Our hostel was beautiful and old, there was black and white tiling, curved staircases with wooden rails and stained glass windows.

El Hostal

We woke up Saturday morning and ate the breakfast that the hostel provided; there was a new spread to put on bread called dulce de leche, which was really good. That Saturday we spent the day walking around and exploring the city.

Plaza de Independencia

Along the Ocean

We went to the bus station to check out other destinations in Uruguay and after that continued exploring the city. We ran into the American embassy, which was the first time any of us had seen an American flag since we left the States in July.

"Amurica"

El Rio

We had watched the sunset into the Rio Plata and then returned to our hostel and had an asado with the other guests that were there. There were a lot of Argentineans at the hostel, as Montevideo is apparently a popular place for them to vacation. That night, we switched rooms in the hostel because of the high amount of people there and ended up in a four person room; it was Sarah, Kevin, me and a professional Uruguayan soccer player who had just signed his first pro contract and was looking for an apartment in Montevideo. The next day we went back to the bus station and bought tickets to Punta del Este, which is a vacation town a two hour bus ride up the northern coast of Uruguay.

The "Hand" of Punta del Este

Like Montevideo, the city wasn’t very crowded, and we spent the day walking around next to the ocean, trying to spot whales off the coast, which the lady at the tourist booth said was likely to happen. Unfortunately, we didn’t see any whales, but while walking along the docks in the harbor, we saw seals and sea lions swimming and putting their heads above water, probably looking for food from the fishermen who tied their boats up to unload the morning catch. After seeing the seals, we decided to find someplace to eat. We ended up at this small diner-ish place, where we were the owner/cook/waiter’s only customers. We went there because I wanted to try a chivito, which is a Uruguayan style sandwich. After forgetting to bring us menu’s, calling Sarah a “beautiful angel”, rubbing his hands through mine and Kevin’s hair, bringing us an amazing bottle of wine, and messing up Sarah and Kevin’s orders, the guy finally brought my chivito. The sandwich was made with a layer of steak, covered with ham, a fried egg, lettuce, tomato, and tons of mayo and mustard.

Chivito

It was delicious, although hard to eat without ruining it. After the restaurant, we made our way back to the bus, stopping to check for whales one more time. We got back to the hostel late that night and went to bed early. The next morning we caught our flight back to Chile, and our entry into the country was going smoothly until Kevin and Sarah decided that they weren’t going to declare the single orange they each had in their backpacks. Wow, you would have thought that they each had a backpack full of cocaine, the way the customs officials reacted. They were taken into a back room and questioned individually. Sarah was asked if she “wanted to see the destruction of her product”. It was all a little over the top, but we finally cleared customs and got on the bus to the center of the city.

Los Andes

Futbol!

Yesterday I went to my first soccer game here in Chile.  It was Universidad Catolica vs. Audax Italiano, played at the stadium of La Catolica.  (Even though La Catolica has the name of the University in its title, it is a professional sports team; there is also a team called Universidad de Chile.)  I went with my gringa friend Hattie and my Chileno friend Marco.  We drove to the stadium, which is in the outskirts of Santiago, in the foothills of the Andes, at around 5:30 in the evening.  The neighborhood that the stadium is in is upper-class, Marco said that it is one of the nicest neighborhoods in Santiago.  The stadium was almost full by the time we got there, (it could probably hold around 12,000) and there is no assigned seating, so we sat behind one of the goals because it was one of the few places left.

 As those of you who are soccer fans know, the seating behind the goals is where the most rowdy fans sit.  The opposing teams fans sat in a section of the stadium separated from the rest by a 15 foot high fence to prevent any violence. As the players took the field, all the fans around us started doing a combination of yelling, singing, whistling and chanting in semi-unison.  The opposing teams' goalkeeper had just recently killed somebody while driving drunk and had also previously played for the arch-rivals of La Catolica, Universidad de Chile.  Whenever he touched the ball, fans would whistle and yell "boracho" at him.  When I say whistle, I mean the loudest, strongest whistle you can imagine.  It is the kind of whistle you get when you stick two fingers in your mouth and deafen the person sitting next to you.  When the whole crowd is doing it at once, it can be pretty distracting.

"We aren't God, but we're everywhere"

Despite (or maybe because of) all of the whistling, the goalkeeper played out of his mind, making some spectacular saves.  La Catolica hit the crossbar 3 times, but lost the game 2-3.
Going to the game was a really cool experience, I thought that the soccer was similar to the MLS in the United States, with a little more emphasis on the technicality.  The fans in Chile definitely deserve the "Fanaticos" name that they have.    

Lighting up the flares

   

Bicentenario

This past week and weekend have been very busy. Over the weekend I traveled with 10 of my American friends to San Pedro de Atacama, a town of less than 2000 people that is in the Atacama Desert. We got up at 2 AM on Friday morning to catch our flight to Calama and then took an hour bus ride from Calama to San Pedro. The Atacama is the driest desert in the world; there are some spots that have never registered rainfall. San Pedro is at an altitude of 9000 feet, which means that the temperature during the day rises to about 80 and drops to about 35 at night.
After we arrived on Friday, we checked into our hostel and then decided to go sandboarding. Sandboarding is just like snowboarding, except you are descending a dune with a snowboard strapped to your feet. After every run, we would rub candle sticks on our boards to make them slippery and then hike back up the dune to go down again. (There are no ski lifts in the desert, unfortunately) After sandboarding, we drove to a cliff overlooking the valley of the moon and watched the sunset over the desert. We were on the far east side of Chile, so the sun cast its shadow over the desert and the Andes, which made some really interesting colors. The next morning, we slept in and in the afternoon, four friends and I went on a tour of the salt lagoons. San Pedro is located about 30km away from a huge salt flat, and snow melt from the Andes collects in some parts and makes a bit of a pool. The salt pools have 40%salt content, which is higher than the Dead Sea! We went swimming, and it was amazing how easily you could float on your back without moving at all. After that, we drove farther out into the desert on a very bumpy dirt road and arrived at a site called Ojos de Salar, which means the eyes of salt. These are two round pits randomly located in the middle of the desert and they are filled with water from the Andes. The water was about 3 meters below the lip of the pits, and we had fun jumping in to clean some of the salt off from our last swim. After the Ojos, we drove to another lagoon to watch the sunset and drink pisco (a popular Chilean liquor). The desert is an amazing place, especially when the sun is setting. The land surrounding you is desolate, there are no plants or animals, and the wind is very strong because there is nothing to stop it. After watching the sunset, we began our drive back to San Pedro in the dark, through the middle of the Atacama Desert on a little dirt track that was hard to pick out. To my right were the Andes, and just over the mountains was Bolivia; as it got dark, we watched cars that had just crossed the Bolivian border snake down a road into Chile, their headlights bobbing like fireflies. The driver was playing Andean music through the radio as we all relaxed and bumped our way back to the hostel.

The Andes in the Atacama.  Bolivia is on the other side.

Valley of the Moon

There was a debate among our group about what we should do Sunday. We all finally decided to go see the geysers in Tatio, which is located in the middle of the Andes. This trip involved waking up at 3:30 in the morning and then taking a 2 hour drive into the mountains. We arrived at 6, the coldest time of the day and the best time to catch the geysers. We got off the bus into -13degree Celsius wind and the thinnest air I have ever been in. Just walking around looking at the geysers was enough to make me light headed. No one had thought to bring winter gear with them to the desert, so we were all freezing inside of five minutes. This being a trip in Chile, our guide took us on a walk through the middle of the field of geysers, and we were able to put our heads over the holes in the ground and breathe in the sulfur-tinged steam that was coming to the surface from many miles below. Not all the geysers were the kind that erupted in huge bursts like Old Faithful in Yellowstone. The highest geyser in this field went off every 12 minutes and reached heights of 8 meters. We had breakfast up there, the guides had brought along ham and cheese sandwiches, tea, coffee, milk and eggs. The milk was heated by dipping it into one of the geysers and the eggs were cooked the same way. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to eat the eggs because the geyser decided to go off as they were cooking and they disappeared. After breakfast, we took a 10 minute drive to a natural pool that formed when hot water from the geysers mixed with cold water runoff water from the Andes. The two streams created a pool of water that was just right for swimming and I put on my swimsuit and got in. You could control the temperature of the water by swimming closer to the mouth of the hot stream or away from it. The stream wasn’t always steady, so sometimes you would hear a few shrieks from people who had gotten too close to the mouth when the stream picked up and brought more hot water into their area than they wanted.
The next day was Monday and the last day in San Pedro. We rented bikes and rode out into the desert, only turning around when we ran low on water.

I spent the rest of the week going to asados (barbecues) with my family and hanging out with some new Chilean friends that I made. After a few days of hanging out with Chileans, I was invited to go to Vina del Mar with them for a night and dance at the clubs there. I went, and we had a great time. I will have to tell you more about it when I get back.

I am planning on going to a professional soccer game on Saturday with my Chilean friend Marco, and I am really excited for that! These next few weeks should be more relaxing, I have a few projects/presentations to do for school.

Classes and Strikes

Well, I just ended the fourth week of classes here in Santiago and I am enjoying them as much as it is possible to enjoy a class. I am taking four classes; Español and Derechos Humanos (Human Rights) with my program, and Latin American politics and Chilean Culture at the Universidad de Chile (or, as it is called here, “la U”). There is definitely a different style of teaching here in Chile and a different atmosphere at the University. My classes at the IES center are with all other gringos and are very small, about 7-8 people in each class. These classes are pretty similar to classes at a University in the US, but there are more group project assignments than I am used to. The classes at U Chile are very different. The professors usually come in and start talking about the topic for the day without any powerpoint or notes written on the board. There is not a specific lesson plan that the students have so it is pretty much the teacher talking about his subject however he wants to. There is also the issue of strikes. Whenever the students don’t like a policy that the university or government is doing, they go on strike, which means that they don’t come to class. My first experience with a strike was last week, when I showed up to Latin American politics on Thursday and there were 4 other gringos waiting for class. We asked someone what was going on and learned that the students (Chilean students at least) were on strike and the professor wouldn’t be coming today. The professors here about the strikes from their students and then decide whether or not they want to show up. There was also a strike today, but this time we knew about it before hand and the professor came to class, which consisted totally of Gringos) and answered questions we had about the class. Classes are much more free form here, for our group projects, our topics can be anything that has to do with Latin American politics in the 20th century. Anything. There are no guidelines or rubrics.
I enjoy only having 4 assignments for the semester and a final exam because it cuts down on the busy work that I am often assigned in the U.S. It is a little worrying that my grade hinges on five presentations but I am sure I will be ok. It is also nice having class four days a week! I can’t imagine students in the U.S organizing a strike and the teachers being so supportive of it that they don’t show up for class. Así es Chile.

La Serena Day Dos

We woke up very early on day two in La Serena in order to get the Punto de Chorros, a nature reserve on the coast, to see penguins and whales. The drive took about an hour and a half and we got to Punto de Chorros in time to catch our boat. Unfortunately for our whale watching plans, there had been plans to build a hydroelectric power plant in the nature reserve and the day we were there was the day the official announcement came from the president that the plans had changed and they were not going to build the plant. The people in the town were understandably very happy, the plant and its emissions would have killed a great deal of the wildlife that lived there. Presidente Sebastian Piñera was coming to Punto de Chorros to make the official announcement, greet the townspeople and get some badly needed good publicity. Because of security reasons, our boat trip was canceled. However, we did get to see Piñera up close and personal. He arrived in a helicopter and then walked the short way to the beach to make a short speech before getting on a boat to the island where the penguins lived. On his walk, there was virtually no security, I could have walked up and shook his hand if I wanted. My friend Hattie walked up and did the Chilean kiss on the cheek greeting with him and introduced herself. The people of the town were very happy to see him and were shouting “gracias” and trying to shake his hand all at once. It is incredible to me that the president of Chile was so accessible, that would have never have been possible in the U.S.

El Presidente

The chief of the navy was also in Punto de Chorros for the announcement and he ate at the same restaurant as our group. While we were waiting for Piñera, some people in our group were climbing around on the big boulders that were in the water. My friend Jeff was trying to climb up the side of one and the rock broke in his hand and he fell into the ocean. His clothes were soaked and everyone had left their bag at the hotel. Maricarmen and he walked into town and stopped at a random house to see if they would dry Jeff’s clothes. They lent him some of their clothes while Jeff’s dried and after Piñera left we went to their house/store and all ate empanadas. The people in the town were so friendly to complete strangers.
After meeting Piñera, we lounged on the beach some more and then headed back to La Serena to get dinner. That night we went bar-hopping and then got to sleep in later the next morning.
The next day we had breakfast at the hotel and then left in the bus to go to the beach at Coquimbo, the next town over. We hung out at the beach and had lunch at a swanky hotel buffet before catching out plane back to Santiago.
It was an amazing weekend, even though I didn’t get to see any penguins.

llama

The Pacific

La Serena Day 1

This past weekend I traveled to La Serena, a town that is a 6 hour car ride north of Santiago. I got up early Friday morning and met my group at the IES center and then we all took a bus together to the airport. The flight was only 50 minutes, and we arrived in La Serena at around 10. The airport there is so small, there are no terminals to disembark on, you just walk out onto the tarmac. We were then picked up from the airport by a bus that took us to Valle del Elqui, a beautiful green valley where farmers grow grapes for wine and pisco. La Serena is on the coast and is also in one of the narrowest regions of Chile so it is also in the foothills of the Andes. It was a bright, sunny day and the drive through the valley was gorgeous. We stopped at a small hydroelectric dam that provides all of the electricity for the region that La Serena is in. We bought cactus ice cream and drank papaya nectar with aloe. (It’s supposed to cure anything) It was so nice to be outside of Santiago because the air in La Serena is amazingly pure, which gave our lungs a chance to breathe some clean air. After the dam, we got back on the bus and visited the town center of Paihuano, a tiny town of less than 1,000 is in a small valley to the south of La Serena. We stopped there to talk to the town planners and get a feeling of small town life in Chile. People tell me that in order to experience the “real” Chile, I need to leave Santiago and travel around the rural areas. They are right. It is a different Chile outside of Santiago. Life is very relaxed and people are very, very friendly, every local that I passed on the street said hello to me. Some people are also very poor, but they don’t seem to mind. After the town, we continued to drive into the valley and stopped at a restaurant that the program director, Maricarmen, knew and ate the most tender pork that I have ever eaten in my life. The restaurant overlooked a wine vineyard and from your seat you could gaze back up the valley. After the restaurant, we went and toured an organic pisqueria, which is a place where they make pisco, a grape liquor that is very popular here. It is one of the only organic pisquerias in the country; they only make pisco in March and April, harvest time for the grapes. At the end of the tour we got to drink different aged pisco, it was very strong. After the pisqueria, we drove back down the valley and stopped at Gabriela Mistral’s house, the female Nobel Prize winning poet from Chile. By now it was about 5:30 and we drove to Vicuna, another town near Valle del Elqui. We had dinner in a restaurant and I will always remember the waitresses because they were the nicest waitresses I have ever had. The called all the boys “mi amor” and would chat to us while we ate. Just another benefit of small town Chile. After dinner it was dark and we drove up to an observatory outside of town. There are quite a few observatories in this region of Chile because they have pure sunshine 320 days a year. At the observatory we listened to a presentation about the universe and the stars we were about to see. Did you know that the milky way galaxy has over 100 million stars in it and that there are at least 100 billion more galaxy’s in the universe? If you went to a beach and looked at all the grains of sand, and every grain of sand represented 10 suns, there wouldn’t be enough grains of sand to represent all the stars in the universe. After the presentation we went to look at stars through a two meter long telescope. We saw the Southern Cross, which is the equivalent of the North Star in the northern hemisphere. Our guide would focus the telescope on what we thought were two or three dim stars and when you looked through to telescope there would be 300 in that same spot. We then went up into the actual observatory and looked at Jupiter and other stars through the electric telescope. After realizing how small and insignificant we actually are, we got back on the bus and drove to our hotel in La Serena, arriving around midnight.

Pisco Sour

$4,000 bottles of wine

Ari and Hattie

La Luna

Valle del Elqui