Oh, The Weather Outside wasn´t Frightful

Two of my coworkers came over to my apartment for Christmas Eve dinner. They are both Americans and expat travelers, like me. We cheese and champagne with peach juice for appetizers.

Over dinner we told each other our stories. We have all lived in Spain for a time. Anna actually lived in Barcelona for two years. Vanessa has lived in England and Austrailia too.

We had chicken fajitas for dinner, which isn´t Chilean at all, nor it is like anything I normally eat for Christmas Eve.  This was the first time time in my life I didn´t go to my grandpa Shea´s house for Christmas Eve. I called before my friends came over and my family passed the phone around. It was good to hear everyone´s voices.

After dinner we watched Home Alone. It´s just so American. I love that movie. So classic.

On Christmas Day, I slept late and then taught an early afternoon yoga class. I was really happy to see my students on Christmas. Though here Christmas Eve is the bigger celebration, which involves a family dinner and kids opening their presents. It was strange to see people doing normal things on Christmas, like going skate-boarding and bringing kids to the park. To me, Christmas day has always been such a departure from the normal routine, the normal things.

One of my English students gave me a box of gourmet chocolates. There are some unique flavors mixed in, like papaya. It is too hard to choose, so I close my eyes to pick one to eat.

Merry Christmas

My friend Leti and I made Christmas cookies! It was a marathon, as always. We baked for hours and blared Christmas tunes.

Let is so creative so I stepped up my game with the decorating. Eventually we ran of Christmas-y ideas for decorations. And started using purple icing.

Leti made this Chilean flag cookie. Our first Chirstmas in Chile.



Last Class

I had my last class with one of groups of students. We played Taboo, which is always a good time. They were befuddled by words like ´´broom´´ and ´´penguin,´´ but ´´Micheal Jackson´´ they got right away. At the end of class, they gave me this box of chocolate and thanked me. I love teaching.

Animal Whisperer

Yesterday evening I taught a private English class at one of my student´s homes. He was late, so I sat out front on a patch of nice-looking grass and made friends with a black-and-white, slightly macho dog. When I say made friends, I talked to the dog (in English so I don´t know if he understood) and he sniffed me. I didn´t pet him because I couldn´t tell if he was a street dog or a neighbor´s. When my student arrived, he told me he hates that dog because it always barks at him.

After class I walked home and saw this . . .

This cutie was rolling back and forth, so happily, on the sidewalk.

I can resist petting street dogs but not cats, nuh-uh. She was just so content. And fluffy.

A few blocks away, I saw another long-haired cat. I said hello and it meowed a reply and trotted over. I knelt down and it circled me, rubbing on my legs.

Last night I dreamt about cats--our orange cat Clemintine and a big black cat we had when I was a kid, Purrs-a-lot. It was sweet to think of him again. I remember he would sleep with me, on my pillow actually, and slowly push my head off, purring the whole time. Pillow hogger.

I miss having cats.

Sunset

This is the sun setting over the park by my apartment. I go to this park almost every day to do yoga. I love the way children and dogs alike run free and eldery people gather on park benches to chat. yesterday there was a huge slackline. It must have been 40 feet long. I can´t imagine the balance it takes to walk across it.

The sun sets late here now. Around 9 o´clock. I can´t believe it was winter when I arrived it was dark by 6.

Friendsgiving

On Saturday my friend Magda and her boyfriend picked me up to go to a Friendsgiving. Our friends Matthew and Antone have a little house away from the city center. Magda´s boyfriend remarked a couple times that we were driving to the end of the world, but it really wasn´t that bad. The GPS told us we had ´´reached our destination´´ but we weren´t sure which in the row of little houses was our friends´. We weren´t sure, that is, until we saw this beautiful spread through the window.

We had an eclectic and international meal that lasted, literally the eating part, for hours. There were people from France, Poland, the UK, South Africa, the US, and Chile. I loved how people flowed freely from speaking English to Spanish. The food ranged from tabouleh to gazpacho to midwestern potato casserole with cornflakes on top. Antone, from France, made these open-face pies that were as delicious as they were beautiful. The crust was as close to my grandma Shea´s as I´ve had.

 

Happy Thanksgiving

I am thankful I took a risk and changed my life dramatically. I am thankful for greater happiness and confidence. I am thankful for my family, especially Mom and Dad, for supporting me. I am thankful for the good friends I have met here, and for those I miss back home.

I am thankful for my friend Leti, who insisted we have a mini-Thanksgiving dinner. I waivered a bit wanting to celebrate--well, not so much in wanting to celebrate but in thinking that I had time. It truly was a busy day. I taught at 8 a.m. After that, I had my Spanish class and then a work training. During the afternoon I went on a Spanish student excursion to Barrio Italia, which was chic and lovely. There were students from Brazil, Germany, and the U.S. The German guy treated us to gourmet chocolate ice cream, which was swoon-worthy. (The ice cream, not the treating us part.)

I taught English from 6:30 to 8, and then hustle-walked back to my place where Leti was waiting, her bike loaded with a roast chicken, wine, and banana bread. She had really wanted to make a pumpkin pie but couldn´t find canned pumpkin.



We moved around my little kitchen with the ease of old friends to assemble this pretty little meal. We even found half-burnt tea lights and pulled out the plates with the gold trim.

I am thankful for such a day.

It´s a Spring Thing

 It´s finally spring! The streets are filled with flowers and the leaves hang low over the sidewalk; I often have to duck. Now it stays light until 8:30 9 p.m. Sometimes I hold class on the terrace with my evening students.

These flowers are spraying over a fence on my Street. They stopped me in my tracks. This is what I live for--flowers and sunshine and warm, windy days.

Wirey

This amazes me. I have never seen powerlines so full. Why is it like this? When I was living in New York and D.C., I never noticed the absence of powerlines. Here I marvel at how laden down they are.

Stress

Whew. My students today were stressed out. We were reviewing for a test they were about to take. Though it was a taxing subject, (Prepositions. You try explaining the difference for when we use in, on, and at.) I could tell something was up. One student had his head in his hands and was rubbing his eyes. I actually said "time out" right in the middle of an exercise and asked if they were stressed. Rodrigo told me about his coworker getting fired and having to do her work in addition to his own. Dani works in finance and said there was a huge problem with closing the books for October, and Alejandra said she has personal problems, specifically financial. I told them it looked they all needed hugs. I don't think they really understood because they just stared at me glumly until I got up and hugged each of them, and then they smiled and laughed. We played games for the rest of class, and I gave them the test for homework.

Another group of my students is always stressed. They work for a pharmaceutical company. Every day before class I hear about the latest craziness at the factory and how Pablo's boss doesn't listen to what he tells him, only panders to the bigger bosses.

My private student Maria Ines is a doctor and works at an insurance company. She is a supervisor and said she and her team are crushed by the relentless amount of work they have to do.

I feel for my students, and at the same time it makes me thankful for and proud of how I changed my life so that I wouldn't live in a way that didn't make me happy.

The House that Neruda Built

I remember you as you were in the last autumn. 

You were the grey beret and the still heart.

In your eyes the flames of the twilight fought on.

And the leaves fell in the water of your soul.

-Pablo Neurda

I saw the hand-written verse of the poem "I Remember You as You Were" at Pablo Neruda's house here in Santiago. [sigh] What a Love Poet he was.

Neruda is Chile's Mr. Poet. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. Wait, that sounds too dry. Let me try it more poetically: From his soul a river of fanciful words did run / For this the highest honor he won

Neruda built a house at the bottom on Saint Cristobal Hill for himself and his lover-turned-wife. The inside of the house resembles a ship's hold, everything is thick, dark wood and low ceilings. There are wooden carvings from the south Pacific, modernist paintings, and a trio of big--I think freaky--dolls in one of the bathrooms. He purposely had small tables so that people would draw near one another and have good conversations.

I visited the house turned museum with my friend Magda. It was a lovely spring day, the type that gets you thinking, softly about summer. We both showed up in summer dresses and sunglasses.

After, I said, "It's the perfect day for sangria." and she finished with "Do you want to go to 100 Montaditos?" To which I replied gleefully, truly, "Yes!"

We drank sangria on the second floor terrace, people watching from above. We smiled conspiratorially as we both admitted to sometimes pausing and saying, "I can't believe I live in Chile."

As we left, I found myself thinking that is was also the perfect day for ice cream. Magda beat me to it, by asking if I wanted to stop at McDonald's for some. They have walk-up windows, and a cone is only 45 cents! I am tickled by this and get them often. We sat in the sun on the steps of a university building to eat.

Happy Halloween

My friend Leti is a trooper; she tracked down pumpkins. They are hard to find here in Santiago, especially since it is springtime. After following rumors and pumpkin myths all over town, she found bin tucked away in a corner of a big grocery store, aptly named Jumbo.

We finally felt in the Halloween spirit as we carved our jack-o-lanterns.

We roasted the seeds. There were fewer seeds than I'm used to seeing in pumpkins, but they were bigger and tasted more strongly of pumpkin.

I wanted to make traditional jack-o-latern, to give the Chileans a taste of the true spirit of the holiday. Well, sort of. ; ) I accidentally cut off my guy's top teeth so he only has a bottom snaggler. Leti is much more artistic and literally carved a minion!

A Horse, Of Course

This is Chile.

On my trip to wine country this weekend, I saw a lot of horses on the roadside. More than I expected. But then again, it was only my third time leaving Santiago.

This horse greeted us at the vineyard.

Tastes of Citrus with Hints of Chocolate

A friend and I took a day trip to a vineyard on Sunday. It made us smile to leave the city and see the countryside on the three-hour bus trip. The bus dropped us off on a country road, rather than taking us into the nearest city, Santa Cruz. We walked about a quarter mile to Viu Manent, a vineyard.

We turned onto the dirt lane that lead to the vineyard and reveled in the spring day and the breeze and the beauty.

We took a carriage-ride tour of the vineyard. They grow 26 varieties of grapes. We saw some vines that were 80 years old.

I love this picture of our driver.

We also saw the more scientific side of making wine. This is a wine laboratory. (In this case, I believe the more posh pronunciation of lah-BOR-a-tor-y is due.) On the right are different types of vats they use to ferment the wine. We tried some wine straight from the metal vat. It tasted raw.

We tasted six types of wine. The pencil was for jotting down notes, like "hints of lavender" and "pollinated by bees who also frequented clover." I stuck to check marks for the ones I like. The metal bucket is a spit bucket, which I did not use. High-brow or not, I don't look free wine in the face!

After the tasting we ate lunch on the patio of the vineyard's restaurant. This was our view. There happened to be an equestrian match going on. This is when we began to wonder if this was real life.

We began our meal with squash soup and a salmon and avocado salad. We continued with two bottles of wine. I had duck for my main, and we topped it off with a delightful little dessert that we ate so fast there wasn't a second for a photo.

I got on bus and couldn't physically hold my eyes open. I slept for two hours. A deep sleep.

Waking Up the Metro

I mean that literally.

This was the scene at Tobalaba metro station this morning at 7:55 a.m. I've never opened a metro station before. I find it incredible that a metro would even open as late as 8 a.m., even if it a Sunday.

Anyway, this was the start of my grand adventure of a day in wine country. More in my next post.

It's beginning to look . . .

a lot like Christmas?

I saw this in the Costanera Center, a big mall about a 20 minute walk from my apartment. On October 23rd. My roommate said it had probably been up since early October. I couldn't even look directly at it, and only did so for the sake of the photo. The tree is festooned with snowflake decorations. We're in the middle of spring.

But wait. There's more.

The tree is five stories high! SO much Christmas.

On the other side of the behemoth, trees of a different climate.

Quick as a . . .

Can you spot the critter?

This fox trotted by our bus while I was on an excursion in the Atacama Desert. He didn't seem afraid and hung out for a bit, until we drove off. Our guide said some people feed them.

The older a flamingo is, the darker it is. Flamingos only get their pink color naturally when they live in the wild. Our guide told us if we see pink flamingos in a zoo, the color is artificial.

This little guy is called a viscacha. It looks like a rabbit except that it has a long tail.

This dude made his burrow on the edge of a remote salt flat. Maybe we were the first humans he had ever seen.

This is a vicuña. It is a smaller, wild relative of the llama. Their wool is the most expensive in the world. A few kilos of it costs thousands of dollars. Now is it illegal to hunt them.

This is a llama family. Llamas are bigger than vicuñas. These ones are domesticated but they roam free.

And this is me eating a cousin of the llama family from above. The look on my face isn't one of dislike, but rather of savoring. The meat was very flavorful and soft, not tough at all.