San Pedro y San Pablo

“Now you’ve hooked up with a Chilean TOO!”

My internet keeps konking out and causing us to have to call the tech people. Not a fan. As result, I don’t have internet until Tuesday night, hopefully, when the tech guy comes to try to fix it.

I had a lovely day though! Today was some holiday, I’m not really sure which. Someone told me once that Chileans have a lot of holidays. This morning madre and Johanna took me out to Los Dominicos, which is a stop off the metro right by a Spanish-style church and a little Mapuche marketplace. It had great hand-crafted trinkets and souvenirs, and it was really pretty, I really enjoyed it! I’ve determined that Johanna is a little spoiled. She’s a really funny, sweet girl, don’t get me wrong, but madre kept letting her buy all these snacks even though we hadn’t even had almuerzo yet!

We got back and had this classic Chilean dish (again. there seems to be a lot of them.) called pastel de choklo (corn pie), which was this corn puree baked in individual dishes with hunks of chicken and egg in it - it was actually pretty good! Johanna had French fries and chicken instead since she didn’t like pastel de choklo (again with the spoiled) and I tried a few of the fries and they were realllly delicious, so now I’ve been craving fries ever since.

Then I went out and met up with some friends to climb up Cerro Santa Lucia. The chance to speak English again was really nice; I spent a lot of time with my host family this weekend. There’s this old structure kind of covering the hill, so there were stairs all the way up, but it was really pretty. We think it was an old Mapuche fortress from the inhabitation of the Spanish. 

After we made our way back down, we started wandering in search of ice cream to celebrate Alex’s birthday, but instead we ended up stopping for churros and chocolate. Hot chocolate here is basically gourmet warm chocolate pudding. It looked delicious, but I opted for a chocolate cappuccino (mokkacino) the second I saw a real espresso machine. ALL THEY DRINK HERE IS INSTANT ESPRESSO. Ew. My coffee was fabulous and much needed. Then we continued on to Plaza de Armas. We were worried there wouldn’t be much going on after 5 PM, especially on a holiday, but we were wrong. We found music and dancing on one end of the plaza, an entertaining little comedy show on another, little booths of paintings on another corner, an awful 74-year-old magician, and a creepy angel statue man. The comedy show was particularly enjoyable. We walked up just as the two comedians looked like they were searching for some new materials and they could just see the gringa in our eyes (or by the giant camera I was carrying). They asked us where we were from and the second we said “los Estados Unidos,” we were in trouble. One guy pulled Kathryn in first, and tried to explain the Chilean custom of kissing to her. The truth: every time you meet or greet someone here, you press your cheeks together and make a kissy sound, kind of like kissing each others cheeks. He tried to tell her however, that there were three kisses, and explained by doing, one on the right cheek, one on the left, and… one on the mouth, to which she responded by wrestling herself away from him and quickly retreating. After a few more attempts to kiss her (and possible success?) he pulled Alex out since it was his birthday, and then me because I had a camera. They played with us a little more and then let us go. Afterwards we climbed back into the metro and went back to Providencia to get that ice cream we’d been searching for all along. I gotta say, this country has great ice cream. Then we declared it a good day and parted to meet our families for dinner.

OH AND I ate and enjoyed SPINACH for dinner! It was chicken and pasta and spinach mixed with onions. First I saw it all on my plate and I was worried, but then I ripped the chicken up and mixed all the parts together and it was DELICIOUS and I’m really excited about the fact that I have it for lunch tomorrow again. This little study abroad experience is really good for the expansion of my food palette. Happened to me when I spent a month in Germany too. Lesson: if you want your kid to be less picky, send them to live with another family for some time.