Palegoldenrod

Tomorrow morning I’ll be heading north for a while with Pachamama By Bus. This tour will take me up to San Pedro de Atacama via La Serena, Antofagasta and a few other places, and then back to Santiago through a few more places, including some that are a bit less accessible for someone without a car (national parks, small villages off the normal way etc).

This bus service has a really great reputation (both online and from people here in Santiago who have travelled with them). It offers “get-off-get-on” service, with unlimited time. You can jump off the bus anywhere and get back on the next time the bus comes through or whatever. It also goes to places other than the cities (parks, beaches, tours around each area), stops frequently for exploration, photos and other things, and is very flexible and welcoming. Groups are usually no bigger than 15 or so.

The tour I am taking goes for 10 days, usually 2 days driving / exploring / sight seeing, then 1 day staying in a place, 2 days driving again etc. Beatrice is going too, and thinks she may want to stay longer in San Pedro if there are enough things to do. I’m not sure - I’ll stay somewhere if it feels nice (warm and without rain = nice at the moment! haha).

So, I’m leaving my laptop and instruments here (travelling light this time) but will be back in Santiago in one or two weeks before I say goodbye to Santiago and head north for real. I’ll try to post a few bits and pieces here and there if I can

Sunday the 25th May was Chile’s National Day of Patrimony, where all (or most) of the national monuments are open to the public. There are so many national monuments here - in my first week in Santiago I recall a tourguide on a bus boredly repeating every 2 minutes “That is the blah building. Its a national monument.”

Beatrice and I decided we would take the opportunity to check out some of the more interesting buildings - like La Moneda. Now, those of you who have been reading will have thought “Oh, Carly, but you have been there already!”. Well the normal tour is to walk through the courtyards only. On la Dia del Patrimonia Nacional, the entire building is opened up. You can walk through almost every room and even look into the President’s office!

There were a lot of people interested in seeing the national monuments - families, but also young and old people and individuals, which was good to see. I remember people talking to me about loss of Chilean culture, both through Pinochet, the popularity of the west and I guess in some way sometimes a touch of cultural inferiority - it feels like a lot of Chileans don’t like Chile, they just want to get to the west. Well I think this National day of Patrimony is a great thing - a lot of people are obviously interested in knowing more about Chilean history, the day has a festive feel (street performers come out, art is being created in the streets, everything happens on one day). In La Moneda people were handing out stickers “I participated in the National Day of Patrimony” - to adults and children alike. What a great opportunity and technique for passing on (even reviving) the history of a nation, and thus pride in it.

The buildings aren’t just opened - the tour guides are very well informed, good humoured, and welcoming. In La Moneda (where my cousin informs me the guards are specially selected for both skill and a good appearance) the guards in each room were encouraging children to the front, asking if people had any questions, and in some cases patting the children on the heads as they moved them along. It was a very cosy feel - surprising to me for a few reasons. Firstly, I don’t recall any building tour in Australia being quite as welcoming as these, and secondly for the sheer number of people moving through each building (especially La Moneda) I was surprised that the guards weren’t more serious, more concerned about security. Maybe they were but we didn’t see it.

The La Moneda tour also included an opportunity to taste traditional Chilean cuisine, for free (what a great idea). I had a tiny serving of Pastel de Choclo which was very yummy. I think Pastel de Choclo may be my favourite Chilean dish, just above the El Completo

In the Plaza de Armas, people were dancing traditional northern dances, the usual sunday game of chess was being played, and there was an incredibly long path of sand/sawdust/floral art on the ground from the entrance of the catedral along two sides of the plaza and down a pedestrian street. I’m not sure how far it went or where it ended, but from the corner of the plaza it went down the pedestrian street as far as I could see. I think it must have signified a historical pilgramage to the catedral? All of the art we saw was Christian themed. Maybe a local can help me figure this one out.

After La Moneda we had a look at Casa Colorada, one of the first houses in Santiago and now a colonial museum. Here were a bunch of young people dressed in period costume and traditional music was being played in the courtyard.

We then had a look at the Santiago Town Hall which had some beautiful and intricate interior architecture… I don’t think the photos do it justice.

The National Day of Patrimony is once a year, and monuments across the nation are open for free all day.

As usual, more photos are available in my Flickr area

Pomaire is a village about an hour and a half bus ride from Santiago (more or less - it depends on whether you take a direct bus or one that wanders around a bit first). It is famous for its pottery - both the clay from which it is made as well as the skill of generations of potters that have lived there. It is also famous for its huge 1kg empanada, or as I like to call it “The Empanada of DOOM“.

Beatrice and I decided we wanted to go and have a look at Pomaire one Saturday (the 17th, sorry for the delay in posting) and had a really nice time. The village is pretty small and is outside the layer of smog that usually envelopes the city. It was also a nice day to be outside as the sun was out most of the day.

We went through all of the shops and markets and tried to decide what to buy and figure out how we might be able to get it home. The pottery is heavy and of course can break in transit so it was a conundrum. Beatrice will probably carry hers home but I need to post mine.

So the cool thing about Pomaire pottery is that the clay distributes the heat very well, and is easy to clean. Self-respecting Chileans serve pastel de choclo only in a clay bowl from Pomaire, and the tiny clay bowls for salsa used in restaurants and cafes are usually from Pomaire too.

They are so cheap. Four normal sized bowls for pastel de choclo (imagine a bowl a touch larger than the biggest circle you can make with your hands) can be bought for $1000CLP. So at 250 pesos each, that is (roughly) $0.50AUD. Very affordable, especially for a hand-made item which is also a souvenir of the trip.

I bought two mugs as a gift to my cousin, a jug, a cute little jug and salsa pot set and a set of different sized bowls. I think it came to a total of about $12AU or something. Beatrice bought a plate, an alpaca jumper and a few other bits and pieces too.

For some reason I found it difficult to get good information about how to get to Pomaire - both in guidebooks and on the internet. So here is some info that I hope will help.

What is there

There is a lot of pottery, and of different grades and styles. For example, most of the larger vendors probably make the pottery themselves and the quality is generally pretty good. Some of the smaller vendors my not make the goods themselves; they may be selling 2nds. Not all, but certainly from what we saw while we were there, it was obvious that even the Chileans avoided many of the smaller stores.

There are clay products ranging from traditional simple bowls for pastel de choclo through to trinkets and modern painted and glazed works; vases, masks, casserole dishes, cups, mugs, plates, jugs, clay jewelry and a piggy bank (money box) the size of a pony, I kid you not. There are also a few side streets with other markets - clothing, textiles, artwork, jewelry etc.

You can buy blocks of the clay itself, sweets, a bit of fresh fruit and vegetables (but not much from what we could see), fresh herbs… I think it will depend on who is selling what when you get there.

You can eat well enough there. There are at least 4 or 5 decent sized cafes serving cooked food including the giant empanada. I had a 1/2 kilo empanada for lunch, which had both chicken and mince in it. I was a little surprised when the chicken was still on its drumstick and the whole thing was inside the empanada, but hey. It still tasted nice.

You will also find friendly people - individuals in Santiago are friendly enough, but outside of the city people seem much more open and inviting, and willing to help.

Timings

It takes about an hour or an hour and a half to get from Estacion Central to Pomaire, depending on your bus.

I am told that Monday the village is closed. It will be quieter during the week anyway, and packed on weekends because even Chileans like to shop there.

For one week in May there is a bit more of a festive air in the town as it celebrates harvest of a certain crop from nearby farms… I never did find out what crop it was, but if you know please comment below

You could spend a half day there, depending on how you shop and if you are after something specific. Beatrice and I left Estacion Central at 11ish and arrived back in Santiago at about 4 or 5pm after looking in every shop and eating lunch there too. Your mileage may vary.

Getting to Pomaire from Santiago

The easiest way is by bus. Go to Estacion Central - you can easily find buses to Pomaire usually via Melipilla, which is a larger town closer to Pomaire. You have some choices - it is unlikely that you will find a bus directly to Pomaire unless you go on a tour, so you can either get a direct bus to Melipilla and then a collectivo or microbus from there, or you can take a microbus from the station - it will just stop at a bunch more places on the way and take a bit longer to get there.

For any bus that does go to Pomaire, Pomaire is the last stop. The buses do a loop through the village and then head back to Melipella.

When we went, we took a microbus to Pomaire (about $1200CLP) then caught a microbus back to Melipilla and from there took a direct bus back to Estacion Central (the direct bus cost about $1400CLP). Either way it is pretty cheap and easy

I’ve been here a month now, with my cousin in Santiago. I’ve made a few day trips or weekend trips around - to Valparaiso, Viña del Mar, Cajón del Maipo, Pomaire. I’ve covered a lot of ground on foot, mainly through the city and the areas of Recoleta, Patronato and Bellavista. I’ve been to a few fiestas and made a few friends (both travellers and locals).

When I arrived it was quite warm - walking around in thongs and a t-shirt and still working up a bit of a sweat. Now it is cold - tonight will get down to 2 or 3ºC, and it has been raining pretty constantly for the last few days.

Things I have learnt:

• “Un café expresso” doesn’t always actually get you an espresso. A lot of the time it will just be some instant Nescafe poop
• Time means little here - people frequently make plans at the last minute, or don’t keep plans they have made.
• As a foreigner you can be both liked and hated. Some people will “like” you because they desire a better life, in the west - like in the movies. Some people will hate you because of how rich the westerners usually are.
• I make friends slowly and warily. It turns out that by and large most people I have met are very friendly.
• Chileans (shop keepers etc) will laugh out loud at you when you try to speak Spanish and manage to say something stupid, but they laugh in good humour (not scornfully) and will then spend the next half hour grinning and trying to teach you more words.
• Australians are loved here. “Billabong” clothes are popular, and I see shoes and shirts with kangaroo logos in a lot of places. That was unexpected.
• The Santiago metro system (underground trains) are very clean, convenient (usually a train goes past every 10 minutes or so) and the stations also double as works of art and cultural icons.
• Speaking English with non-fluent non-native speakers screws with your ability to speak it, even if it is your native tongue. Lol.
• Spanish has too many tenses!
• I can procrastinate very well

Right now I’m waiting for my membership for the South American Explorer’s Club to come through, then I am thinking I will go on a short tour of the south (maybe for 2 or 3 weeks) with a tour called Pachamama by Bus. This tour allows me to get off and on as often as I want at any of the stops, and while it is a little more expensive than just booking a normal bus, these guys go to a few off-the-beaten track places, and have a tour guide and assistance with accommodation at each stop. It will take me to Pichilemu, Pucon, Valdivia and Puerto Montt among a few other places.

Hopefully this membership card will come through soon and the weather will be ok. If the weather is too bad then I’ll might instead go over to Mendoza (Argentina) for a few weeks and then come back to Santiago for a short while before heading north.

I’ll be getting some private lessons here and there soon, to improve my Spanish - I need the practice as I think I am getting too comfortable speaking English to friends and family here.

I’ve had a quiet-ish week or more - I’ve had a bit of a cough and cold (which prompted my first exploration of a chemist) and then some relaxing days at home, and I’ve been doing some tinkering in Java, Ruby and .NET here as well which has been good. I want to get out and around more frequently though - the time disappears so fast! I want to have a peek at some museums around the place, as the city has so many and they are usually very cheap to enter.

Anyway, I’m gonna go jam/sing with my cousin I’m well, even if the weather is ordinary. I’ll write again soon, about Beatrice and my trip to Pomaire last Saturday. The pics are already up on Flickr!

Hola chicos y chicas.

Well this week I am not taking Spanish classes, so I am left to my own devices and able to wander the streets of Santiago terrorising innocent people with my terrible Spanish. Muahahahah!

Last week my German friends from my first week of classes left - Burkhard went home, Beatrize started her internship and Simone took some private language lessons and spent the week making friends with Chileans and exploring.

We had our fiesta on Thursday night with our awesome teacher Luis DJing for the evening. It was a good night and I made some new friends, both foreigners and locals.

Everything caught up with me this week and I have been incredibly tired. I somehow managed to find energy to go to dinner with some of Simone’s Chilean friends. It was a homecooked meal of shellfish (pippis I think?), a traditional Chilean fish and an awesome homemade desert with fresh raspberries. Yorm - it was a great meal and good company - the girls were very friendly.

Saturday was Simone’s last day in Chile so we wandered around and had a bit of a quiet day, then went out for dinner and to a club. This time we ran into another German girl staying at the hostel with Simone, so we went with her and her friend Francisco to a rock club. They had a few live Chilean bands and then put on a video screen and some American/UK pop from the 80s and 90s. Retro, wot. Oh, and OMG - everyone here can dance salsa. It is so awesome to watch, but those of you who know me will already be laughing because you know how badly I dance. Oh well, luckily some of the people I know aren’t keen dancers either

On Sunday I went solo to Franklin Market, on the other side of the city. It is a huge market filling sidewalk and buildings on both sides of the street for five or so blocks, and starts right near a metro station. I bought my cousin a wireless router and had a look at a few other things. Some computer parts (e.g. hard drives, RAM) seem a bit more expensive than in Australian markets, even given the good exchange rate and the fact I was looking in markets. Maybe the computer markets we get at Newcastle have more direct access to Taiwanese and Chinese suppliers, and shorter transport distances to keep the cost down. Hmm.

In the afternoon Dane and I went up to Cerro San Cristobel (Saint Christopher Hill) which has a giant statue of Mary (not St Christopher) just like those photos you see of Rio with Jesus standing over the city. The only difference is that Santiago is too smoggy to have a nice view from on the hill, hehe.

Anyway, today I have slept in a bit, done some cleaning, some work on the internet and a little Spanish study. I feel much better after the sleep. Soon I’ll walk the dog and then I might go into town to catch up with some friends for the evening

Oh, and the volcano is nowhere near us here, though the volcano at Maipo has been getting a few tremors and might esplöd. I think my teacher Luis mentioned that the ash from Chaiten might be heading our way soon but hopefully it will be high in the atmosphere and not down here making the city smoggier than it already is.

So what’s going on with you guys? Anything awesome?

School

From 9.30am-1pm Monday to Friday of last week I’ve been going to a local Spanish school, about 20 minutes walk from here. My first day was probably the worst experience I’d had in a schoolroom. For reasons unknown I was put in a pre-intermediate class (with people who had, for example, learned spanish at school or had just completed a few weeks of classes). In addition, my three classmates were all german and already spoke both German and English (and in some cases other languages) so learning Spanish was easier for them.

The teachers here will speak in Spanish as much as they can - even if they can speak English or German or whatever. If you ask the teacher what “nube” means, they will say (in spanish) “the white things in the sky” and point and make motions with their hands to help you understand. Only if you are having real trouble will they use English.

My morning teacher, Luis, was great - he spoke reasonably slowly and clearly and the topics we were covering were new to me but I sort of understood what was going on. My afternoon teacher Dario spoke faster and with a heavy chilean accent, and I had no idea what was going on, what I was meant to do, what the exercises were about - nothing.

I even went to the school’s reception office to ask if it were best for me to be put in a lower class, only to be told that the lower class was full. So I went home and studied (covered the earlier parts of the text that I had skipped and looked ahead a little too).

The next day it got better. I could understand much of what my teachers said, even if I couldn’t put sentences together properly yet. And things are still improving. One more week of school to go, then I’ll see how things are!

Intercambio

I went to the school’s “intercambio” (interchange) night on Wednesday night, where chileans and foreigners get together at the school for some activities to encourage you to talk. The first 45 minutes is Spanish only, the second 45 mins is English only.

So I went there without any phrasebook or notepad and wasn’t sure what to expect (at the end of my 3rd day of classes) and found myself in a room only speaking spanish where I was unable to construct a sentence.

The spanish-speaking activity was for the group to construct a story where each person adds a sentence to progress the plot. The highlight of the night was when I was attempting to say “and a small dog” (y una perrita) and instead said “y una la perrita” which is a grammatically incorrect way to say a small dog which then got misunderstood by the spanish speakers as “y lamparita” (a small lamp/light). Which was funny given that the sentence now read “Santa Claus came into the room with a bag of gifts for the children and their friends, and a small lamp.”

The English activity was one-on-one free conversation where I was paired with a guy my age, Fernando, who could speak English reasonably well. We had a good old chat and he and his friend Juan decided to come to the fiesta afterward.

La Fiesta

The fiesta was organised my my teacher Luis, for students of the school and anyone else who wanted to come, at a local bar in the bohemian district. It was a little expensive (a German beer cost a whole AU$2, which is a touch pricey, especially outside of the richer suburbs like Providencia). The turnout was good - there were a lot of foreigners and a whole bunch of Chileans because it turned out to be someone’s birthday (not anyone we knew of course, so there were a bunch of strange people in the club).

I tasted the national drink, pisco, in the form of pisco sour and piscola. Pisco tasted sort of rum-y to me, so I wasn’t really a fan.

The Chilean guys tried to crack onto everything that moves, hahaha. Including the bar tender who was chatting to me and then suggested that he could teach me to dance and maybe by next week we would be boyfriend and girlfriend, at which I laughed, then so did he. And then I realised that there are no responsible service of alcohol rules in Chile. Even if there were, the bar tenders would be too drunk themselves to be able to assess if their customers were fit to consume more alcohol.

Anyway, I caved in early (at about 2.30am) and wandered home. It was a good night - I spoke to some pretty awesome foreigners and Chileans, and tried some drinks and listened to some horrible regaton (Chilean pop music, crossing reggae and hip hop a la the “Gasolina” song). I found out the next day that many of the others did the typical Chilean night out and were up until 6 or 7 am. I think I’ll have to have a siesta before the next one. They are every week :-D.

Next week though Luis will be controlling the music and there will be a cover charge to keep out any weirdos. If you are in Santiago on Thursday, drop me a line at carly[dot]lyddiard[at]gmail[dot]com.

Cajón del Maipo

On Saturday Dane and two of my classmates decided to go explore Cajón del Maipo (”Canyon of the Maipo”) which is a narrow valley south-east of Santiago (pretty close). We knew we had just missed the warm season where all the parks were open, and that the cold season for ski-ing was a way off yet. But we had heard it was still nice, and anyway, the school was going to do a bus trip on the same day but had to cancel due to lack of interest… surely that meant that something would be worth seeing up there.

So off we went on the city bus to Maipo. Maipo should be about an hour away at most. It took us 2.5 hours to get to the main village, San Jose de Maipo, because the city bus zig zags and stops pretty much everywhere and when it does speed up, its on those narrow winding roads on steep mountain sides, while a random passenger chooses that moment to stand up and (in Spanish) “Amigos, do I have an offer for you. Today only, some extra special CDs.. do you like regaton? Sexy music? Rock’n'Roll? I have them all”… for a half an hour. I wondered if the last thing I was going to hear as I plumeted to my death over a steep mountain gorge was a description of a bad regaton CD.

San Jose was a nice little village, though the tourist information office was closed. As my classmates were keen for a walk we decided to get a taxi to San Alfonso (a few villages up) which apparently had a walk or two we could do, but we didn’t know where it was (our guidebooks didn’t list anything too specifically).

We passed Pinochet’s old property on the way, the taxi driver pointed out that this was where he was placed under house arrest. The grounds appeard extensive and the snow-capped mountains towering over in winter would make it a beautiful place to live.

We jumped out at San Alfonso, had some lunch and then started walking to find this hiking trail. We found a private reserve where we would need to pay to walk, and decided to avoid that one - we managed to weasel out of the manager that there was another walk maybe 2km up the road, so off we went again.

Maybe 3 km along we finally got tired and went into some complex to find out if we were close. We got told that the only walks around were in El Volcan, about 15km away. We decided to wait for a bus and got told there would be one in 5 minutes or so.

About 45 minutes later we got on a bus and finally got headed home after a stop again in San Jose for a coffee and a peek at the local markets to buy some cheap and natural organic honey.

So I guess we got our walk, even if it wasn’t the one we were planning to take :-P.

A Walk in Santiago City

I went again for a walk into Santiago city on Sunday, when the weather was nice and the city was quiet, to take some photos and explore a little. This time I made it down to La Moneda, which is the current office of the President. According to a tour guide I had last week, La Moneda was the mint and is currently housing the President, the Ministry of the Interior and maybe one other ministry I can’t remember. All the other ministers are in different buildings.

You can walk through La Moneda (in one direction) for free, on most days. I think they close it when they have very special visitors or if there are demonstrations nearby. Anyway, it was a beautiful day to see it and a nice quiet day to walk through it. Yet another awesome building in Santiago!

Other stuff

I am still posting photos over at my Flickr area if anyone wants to have a look. e.g. My lunch today. Haha.