Pucón: Day 3

On Sunday, four of us plus an Irish guy that climbed the volcano with us and was also staying at our hostel went on a walk throughout Pucón. There is a lake in amongst all of the mountains that has a beach with black pebbly sand from previous volcanic activity. It was nice to just roam around after the extreme hiking the day before and it was also fun to talk to Richard, the Irish guy, who goes to med school in Scotland. He’s traveling in South America by himself for 5 weeks. I asked him how he could afford to globetrot during med school and he said something like “Oh, med school isn’t any more expensive than my undergraduate was.” And how much is that? About $1500 a year. $1500!? I’m moving to Scotland.

Jon, John, Richard, Lisa and I.

Richard and Lisa walking along the black beach.

Although it has maintained a small town feel, Pucón is a little touristy so restaurants were fairly expensive. Instead of dining out, we made frequent trips to the supermercado and stocked up on groceries. I had a lot of yogurt, asparagus soup, bread, ice cream, cheese, juice, and, of course, crossaints. I was happy.

Our bas back to Santiago left at 8:45 p.m. and we got back Monday morning at 9:30 a.m., so some of us had to miss our 8:30 literature class. I went home for an hour and had to leave again for my 11:45 grammar class. It was a long, fun weekend!

Pucón: Day 2

On Saturday, we woke up at 6 a.m. to go on an all day excursion to hike Volcan Villarrica (a huge snowy, icy volcano). This was the real deal. We were given a neon yellow outfit to wear, 2 pairs of gloves, huge boots, ice spikes for the boots, a trekking backpack, and an ice pick. I felt like I was straight out of a Discovery Channel show. After being decked out in the cool outfits, we started the estimated 7 hr hike up the volcano. Intense is the only word that appropriately describes the ascent. I know I’m probably not in the best shape right now (walking 120 steps up to my apartment building multiple times a day is my main workout) but this was seriously the most I have ever pushed myself physically. It was so physically draining. Not only did you have to tread through snow with boots and spikes, but the incline was so steep and the elevation made it hard to breath. Two people from my group turned around after getting 1/5 of the way. Two other girls and I lasted until the ¼ point. Yea, it sounds really lame that we only got a quarter of the way, but when it got to the point that we couldn’t breathe, we decided it was probably best to go back. Only one guy that was with me actually made it all the way up to the summit.

Us in our neon outfits.

Armed with my ice pick.

Adrienne, me and Laurel - the three that got 1/4 of the way.

Saturday night, everyone was pretty much exhausted from conquering volcanoes, so we rented “El Orfanato,” a Spanish horror film from the same producer as Pan’s Labyrinth, and watched it at our hostel. It was in Spanish with Spanish subtitles and surprisingly easy to understand. I loved it! It wasn’t too scary but there were a few creepy parts and a graphic scene of an old lady getting hit by a bus that scarred me for life.

Pucón: Day 1

People had told us that when we arrived in Pucón there would be people at the bus station asking us to stay at their hostels so we didn’t make any reservations beforehand. There was only one guy that approached us who owned a hostel right next to the bus station so we stayed there for $10 a night. Again, I was disillusioned by my hostel experience. It was more like we were living in a normal house - a bed and breakfast without the breakfast. We shared rooms with one or two other people from our group and had access to the kitchen, living room area, internet, etc.

Some of the girls in front of the hostel with the volcano in the background.

We didn’t want to waste any time in Pucón so the same morning we headed to a tourist agency that someone from our university had recommended. I was starving (as always) so Amanda and I took a little detour to a restaurant/bakery by the tourist agency. They were just pulling out a huge tray of freshly made crossaints from the oven, so we each got one. I can’t even begin to explain how good these crossaints were. They were the best crossaints ever. Let’s just say Amanda and I returned to the bakery frequently during our weekend in Pucón – I don’t even want to think about how much buttery goodness I consumed.

After discovering the crossaints, we rejoined our group at the tourist agency. Five of us decided to go whitewater rafting and the other three decided to go on a mountain hike. I was with the rafting crew. If I didn’t have an insane love of rafting, I probably wouldn’t have gone because the water temperature was not exactly ideal. Luckily they gave us wetsuits that were semi-insulative. When we got to the river by van, they gave of us our wetsuits and we were all looking around for the bathrooms to change in. There weren’t any. They expected us to change in the van, so we were all half naked in a van in the middle of nowhere attempting to slide into sticky wetsuits. It was funny at the time.

Sporting the cool wetsuits.

The rapids were really good that day and the guide said some were nearly class IV. It was a little unpleasant when we crashed into huge waves and subzero water splashed down our wetsuits, but it was worth it. The scenery was stunning and I found myself staring off at mountains or cows grazing during when I should have been actually paddling. It was the first rafting experience for three of the people in my group. They were really hesitant to go initially but I finally convinced them after listing my positive rafting experiences during which, I assured them, no one died or was fatally injured. Afterwards, they wanted to go back and do it again. We all had a great time!

Pre-Pucón

Last weekend was our last free weekend together, so a bunch of us decided to plan another adventure. Earlier in the week, Adrienne and I went to the bus terminal to buy tickets to Pucón, a smaller city in the south, and were disappointed to find out they cost about twice as much as we had anticipated. A guy working there told us it would be cheaper to buy a ticket to Santiago and take a bus to Pucón from there since the Santiago terminal is a lot bigger and there are more buses. We decided to take a chance on that and bought 8 tickets to Santiago leaving at 6 pm on Thursday.

Before leaving on Thursday, I skipped out of Grammar class to get a yellow fever shot in preparation for my Argentina trip after my program is done. The nurse’s office that my university directed me to was a little sketchy – the lady didn’t use gloves and brought the injection needle in a little Rubbermaid cooler. I figured whatever diseases I would contract from the sketchy conditions would be better than getting yellow fever. I planned on paying with my credit card but it turned out they only accepted cash. The people were trusting enough to let me go find an ATM to withdraw cash from. I walked a few blocks to one, but it didn’t work and said my card had problems. So I walked to another ATM – it did the same thing. Great... I have a $50 shot in my arm and I have no way to pay for it. I went back to the nurse’s office and attempted to explain this in Spanish. The lady seemed to understand my dilemma and said I could come back and pay next week when I have my credit card straightened out. Seriously? I’m pretty sure they would have never just let me walk out without paying in the U.S., but I wasn’t about to argue. It would have been so easy for me to just never come back but, yes, I eventually did go back and pay for it.

After that crisis, I ran home to pack and met up with everyone at the bus terminal. We got to Santiago around 7:30 pm and luckily found some decent priced bus tickets to Pucón that left at 9:45 pm. We ate supper at the bus terminal and I had Barros Luco, basically a Chilean Philly cheesesteak. So good. Te overnight bus long was even longer than the last one we went on – 11 hours. Before sleeping, we watched “Men of Honor” dubbed in Spanish with Spanish subtitles. The bus was incredibly uncomfortable and, due to the lack of space, I ended up sleeping crunched over with my head in my lap. It wasn't a fun bus ride.

Mmmm...

My food addiction...

Breakfast
Breakfast usually consists of two of the following:

• Yogurt: strawberry, peach, vanilla, or chirimoya flavored. They have the best yogurt here – so creamy and smooth with rich fruit flavors. Mmm.
• Cereal. I’ve only had one kind of cereal here - Quaker “Quadritos de avena” (oat squares). It is so good and filling. I think it's even good for you.
• Round, flat bread rolls with thin slices of cheese, turkey, or salami inside.
• Clementines

Snack
Usually I grab a snack at school between classes since they eat lunch so late here. They have a small store in the university building and I normally have Pan con queso (a roll with cheese slices inside), yogurt, or I try a random candy bar or cookie. Otherwise, I walk outside to the corner where a guy fries and sells sopapillas and empanadas con queso from his cart. Sopapillas are yellow fried dough circles with absolutely no nutritional value. I don’t care, though – they’re good. And cheap (100 pesos=20 cents).

Lunch
Three days out of the week, I eat lunch at Mackay with all the teachers before working with the kids. It’s the best school food I’ve ever had. It’s more like a restaurant than a cafeteria. There’s usually fish, turkey or chicken with rice or potatoes. There’s also a salad buffet of beets, ensalada chilena (tomatoes and onions), and celery. Those three vegetables are the main components of salad here, which is drizzled with olive oil - this is one thing that I haven’t fully embraced. I miss lettuce and unhealthy salad dressing!

Supper
For supper, I eat a lot of chicken, potatoes, rice, and soup. My favorite meal has been a noodle dish that reminds me of chicken alfredo. I also really like this tuna/noodle concoction – I probably would have gagged at the thought of this a month ago. I have a roll, clementines or a banana, and juice with every meal. We never eat supper at the table. I always get it delivered to me in my room on a tray. Lunch is the only meal that we eat at the table for.

Drinks
Since I don’t drink coffee, tea, or soda, I basically live off of juice. I have tried apple, pineapple, peach, strawberry, orange and raspberry juice so far. My favorite juice is strawberry, but everything is so rich and pulpy and good. I don’t know how I’m going to go back to drinking U.S. juice – it’s fake! I have noticed the biggest difference between U.S. and Chilean apple juice. As you know, U.S. apple juice is yellowish and clear. Chilean (real) apple juice is opaque, pulpy and almost like pineapple juice in color. It looks like it actually came from, you know, an apple. I don’t drink a lot of milk here - usually only with cereal. I have tried milk in cartons at school. The chocolate was really good but the strawberry was too sweet for me.

Desserts
Desserts are nonexistent at home. My family is uber healthy and the closest thing I’ve had to a treat here is a small piece of pound cake for breakfast once. So I sneak in cookies or grab a pastry on my way home from school. I can’t live without sweets! Today I went to a chocolate store and tried a few different kinds of bars of chocolate. One was white chocolate with small pieces of cherries in it. It was indescribably perfect, but my favorite dessert here is still ice cream. I go to Bravissimo and try a new flavor every time I’m at the mall – as of today, my new favorite is Nutella.

Classes

Classes have been going well. The only homework I ever really have is reading stories and poetry for literature and, on very rare occasions, a painless worksheet for grammar. Last week, instead of writing another essay in literature, we did group presentations about a short story we read. I got a 6.7/7, which was pretty good considering I didn’t exactly understand the story and I wrote my portion of the presentation the night before. We turned in our second essay today. I wrote a comparison between two poems, both of which were entitled “Autorretrato” (Self-portrait), by the Chilean poets Pablo Neruda and Nicanor Parra. The last portion of my grade in literature is an essay due next Thursday that is supposed to focus on one theme and how it develops in all of the Chilean literary movements we’ve studied. I haven’t decided on a theme to examine yet, but I’m looking forward to writing this essay. Although I usually end up devoting an entire day to these essays, I really like writing them.

In grammar, we had our first of three quizzes last Tuesday (4 weeks into the program). It was really easy and more of a review of things I’ve done in previous Spanish classes. I got a 7/7. Our professor wasn’t coy about announcing to the class that I got the highest score and called me “mi mejor estudiante” (my best student). No, that’s not embarrassing at all. We had our second quiz today, so we’ll see if I can uphold my title. I can only hope…

21st in Chile!

Adrienne, one of the girls in my program, celebrated her 21st birthday last Thursday. She didn’t have any plans for the occasion, so John, Vaish and I decided to arrange a surprise birthday party for her. Last Monday, we went shopping in the center in Viña for supplies. Our first stop was a children’s party store where we bought streamers, balloons, and pretty hip Kung Fu Panda masks . Our next task was to find the essential part of any birthday party: a cake. We realized pretty quickly that it was not smart for 3 extremely indecisive people to be in charge of picking out the cake. So many choices: pineapple, strawberry, apple, chocolate, chocolate with caramel (I could go on forever). We bought a few cake slices to taste test the different flavors and finally settled on a chocolate cake with dulce de leche (caramel) between the layers. Planning birthday parties in Chile is fun... and delicious!

A few of us waiting for Adrienne to arrive with Rose's little sister.

Rose offered her house up for the party location since my apartment wouldn’t really accommodate many people. She has 3 adorable young host siblings that were equally eager to partake in the party! We told Adrienne that a few people had to work on a class project at Rose’s house and that she should meet us there to go out to eat afterwards. She was clueless and extremely surprised when she walked in and was pummeled with balloons thrown by people in animal masks. It was priceless. We had a lot of fun just talking, listening to music, and watching Rose’s little host sister toss around her pet hamster.

The birthday girl!

Sailing!

At PUCV, there is a weekly schedule of different sports and activities you can participate in with Chilean students: weight lifting, Arabic dance, yoga, volleyball, etc. One of the guys in my program was interested in learning to sail, so he organized a 7-class sailing course through a yacht club in Concon. I was tired of merely enjoying the ocean from the shore, so I decided to go out on a limb and try it. Besides me, six other students in my program are participating and none of us have any sailing experience. Last Monday was our first class. There was literally 10 minutes of introduction before we were in the boats. Valeria, the lady that is teaching us, explained some sailing terminology, told us that it was likely we would get wet, and shoved us on board. We realized very quickly that she means business. One of the guys got yelled at within the first hour after not tacking properly. Lisa, my sailing partner, and I were terrified of screwing up just because we’d have to face Valeria. The language discrepancy also complicates things. She mostly uses Spanish and we aren’t familiar with sailing terminology, so the first time nobody really knew what was going on.

Not to worry, though… Valeria emailed us a 33-page sailing manual that we were supposed to review for our second class. 33 pages. In Spanish. Yea right. We had our second lesson last Wednesday. I was relieved to find out that Valeria’s husband, who is not an intimidating drill sergeant, was teaching us that day. The waves were bigger and there was a lot more wind, which made it even more fun. The only downfall to sailing right now is that it’s winter here and the water temperature is chilly to say the least. We had another class last Friday but I skipped out because I’ve been battling a cold the past week and didn’t think being barefoot in freezing water would help. I missed out on a good time. The waves were especially violent and two of my sailing mates capsized their boat and fell in the ocean.

The Yacht Club in Concon where we go sailing.

Even with the tense instructor, I have fallen in love with sailing. It’s so much more fun than other water recreation because it actually requires some skill and you have all of the control. It’s great when you finally catch the wind and take off. The pelicans that randomly swoop down next to you are entertaining, too. We had a lesson yesterday and I noticed this huge splash directly in front of my boat. My first thought was shark. Before I started freaking out, Valeria yelled out, “¡Las focas!” Seals! There were two seals swimming around us and following the water movement from our boats’ rudders. It was really neat.

The sailing crew.

I can’t wait to go sailing when I get back to Wisconsin. I won’t be able to enjoy sailing with seals, but the water will actually be warm enough that capsizing won’t be such a distressing prospect. The only problem is that now I don’t know any of the terminology in English.

Cajon del Maipo

We did lots of outdoorsy things on Sunday. First, we went on a zipline across a river, from one side of the mountain to the other. I’ve done longer, higher ziplines in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, so this wasn’t quite as scary for me as it was for some people, but it was definitely fun nonetheless. Afterwards, we went trekking in the Andes for a few hours - our destination was a waterfall tucked away in the mountains. It was a fun, scenic hike and also a good workout. I had so many layers of clothing on that it was a challenge to ascend the 90 degree inclines. Every once in awhile, someone I was walking with would remind everyone, “Guys, we’re hiking in the Andes. THE Andes.”

Pretty waterfall.

Courtney and I on the zipline.

After the hike, we had lunch at the same restaurant on the campgrounds – the best part was the ultra fresh raspberry juice. Mmm. We had a 3 hour bus ride back to Viña – I slept most of the way. We got back around 7:30 p.m. and I just had some reading to get done for lit. class. After sleeping in the cabin, I appreciated my apartment a whole lot more, even though it doesn't have any heating, either.

There was a lot more vegetation in this area of the Andes compared to the mountains in La Serena. This was picturesque.

Santiago

This past weekend, everyone in my program had a planned trip to Santiago and Cajon del Maipo. We left Saturday morning at 8:30 a.m., so I had to get up early yet another day of the week. The bus ride to Santiago was an hour and a half. While in Santiago, we went to visit the Palacio de La Moneda (Chilean White House) and the Catedral Metropolitana de Santiago (a big church). To be honest, this was extremely boring. I haven’t done many “touristy” things here (perhaps on purpose) and this seemed like a definite digression. Lunch made up for it, though! We went to a seafood restaurant, which was my first opportunity to eat seafood here (which is kind of ironic because I live in a coast city and Santiago is farther inland). It was so good! We had big platters for the whole table with fried scallops, salmon and another unidentifiable fish. I don’t eat a lot of fish at home, but I’d inhale this stuff any day. After lunch, we went to Las Chascona, one of three houses of the Nobel Prize winning Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda. This was pretty interesting because the house was constructed similar to a ship and gardens connect most of the rooms.

In the Palacio de La Moneda. Apparently you're not supposed to touch the fountain. I was barely brushing up against it and 3 gaurds started to approach me.

From Santiago, we drove another one and half hours southeast to Cajon del Maipo, situated in the Andes mountains. We arrived at our home for the night, a campgrounds called “Cascada de Las Animas” (“Waterfall of the Spirits”), around 7 p.m. Adrienne, Laurel and I shared a quaint little cabin that had a kitchen, bathroom, living room, one bedroom, and another bed by the fire. I selfishly claimed the bed by the fire before anyone else could. Honestly, it wasn’t cold… it was FREEZING. I slept with four layers of clothing, one of which was my winter jacket, under 5 blankets. The air was so dry and frigid – think Wisconsin winters without the snow and without the luxury of heating. The only place I have felt warm during the entire time I've been here is on the Metro, which has replaced the bus as my transportation to class everyday. The bus got old quickly - the Metro is the same distance from my house as the bus stop, it's less crowded, it takes less time, and it's just more peaceful.

Our cabin in the mountains.

Back to the weekend... we ate supper at the restaurant on the campgrounds – a big chunk of chicken and a big slice of steak with rice. This was one of the first times I’ve had beef here, partly because I haven’t been fed it at home and partly because I’m picky about how well done the meat is. But it was really, really good. Dessert included a lemony mousse that nobody cared for. There was a cat in the restaurant that kept jumping up on my lap and its tail went in my mousse, which was a convenient excuse for me not to eat it.

The week in review

Things have been staying quite busy here. It seems like every day there is something new to do, which is good! After classes on Wednesday, we had one of the planned activities for our program – a trip to a vitrofusion artisan workshop. Vitrofusion is a type of glass craft where you paint on glass and then heat it at extreme temperatures. We made ash trays, necklaces, earrings, etc. We’ll get our projects back this week – the lady warned us that they might not turn out like her examples, so I’m preparing myself for something ugly…

Hard at work at the vitrofusion workshop.

On Wednesday night, Vaish, John and I went to Adrienne’s apartment to play “Ve a pescar” (Go Fish). Yes, I am even playing card games in Spanish. Thursday night, Amanda and I went to the mall to see the Sex in the City movie. Amanda is a devoted fan of the t.v. show (she has a Sex in the City t-shirt waiting for her at home…) and she was shocked/horrified to learn that I have never seen an episode. The movie was, again, in English with Spanish subtitles, so it was entertaining to compare what is verbally said and what is actually translated in the subtitles. After the movie, Amanda “convinced” me to get ice cream with her at Bravissimo. Vanilla Brownie… add that to my list of favorites.

On Friday, we got our graded literature essays back – I got a 7/7! We were all pretty nervous beforehand because our professor didn’t seem that thrilled about our essays when we asked if they were good or not. I used my perfect score as an excuse to go shopping Friday night and then went home to rest up for the weekend trip. The Fourth of July was just another day in Chile.