Chile in photos

When I arrived in Santiago, we went pretty quickly back to Viña for the weekend.  Alvaro's friend El Bruja (literally translated, The (male) Witch because of his kind of longish nose) had an inauguration party to celebrate the fact that his group finally bought some land. I've mentioned El Bruja before when I first met him while he was living on his toma, occupied land, in Chile. The group's land is about 1.6 hectares, and will be shared by 12 families. Their land is in a city called Limache that's further inland than Viña and it's called Bello Barrio- beautiful neighborhood- and they're just in the construction phase. Mostly we had a BBQ, drank wine and beer, and ate lots of sopaipillas and pebre- Chile's pico de gallo cousin.

Photo taken the next morning- we slept on a soft bed of grass in the tent!

Isn't Limache beautiful? This is actually their bathroom, a baño seco- eco-toilet

Alvaro's friend Bubu (real name: Francisco) eating breakfast in the morning, and only a tiny fraction of the beer that was consumed by everyone the night before

In Santiago, the Apart-Hotel where we stayed had a pool!  Alvaro played around in the (freeeeeezing) pool with his cousins, Noam and Emilie and with Maia. Emilie promptly got cold (she's so small!) and she and I took photos.

View from our room. Sometimes I forget that Santiago really is surrounded by the beautiful Andes. Mostly it's too smoggy to see them

Adorbs. Emilie is licking Alvi!

We headed back to Viña for the Dieciocho- September 18th National Holiday- festivities.  The lines to take buses were incredibly long- at 4:30 when we went to buy tickets, the first not-full bus was leaving at 7:50pm. You can usually hop on a bus within 10 minutes. So we went to a restaurant to eat french fries and enjoy a beer. Alvi drank a Fantshop- a distinctly Chilean creation that mixes orange Fanta soda with a Schop beer. I stuck with just the beer.

My obligatory "I'm drinking a cerveza because it's national holiday time" photo

We went for a dieciocho hike with Bubu (pictured previously) and his girlfriend Anja. It was a pretty unique location, with lots of Chilean palm trees.

lovely

palmas chilenas

lizard! I think this is a male, brightly colored to attract a mate

Our final destination- right below these limestone rocks is the water hole

Alvaro and his dad (also named Alvaro...) in the absolutely frigid water hole

Later on that weekend, we took a nice stroll by the beach.

feliz 18!!

 Back in Santiago, I attended a march in protest of the current education system in Chile.  This wikipedia article does a pretty good job explaining the protests and their current goals. The education protests had gained a lot of support previously, and then an airplane tragically crashed on Chile's Juan Fernandez island that was carrying people there to help with earthquake reconstruction projects, including the Minister of Defense's brother-in-law and a popular television figure. Lots of people were rightly very upset about this, and lots of the protesters commented that this was a really good distraction for President Piñera who has had really low ratings lately. Basically, the march that Alvi and I went to was the first one since the crash and since the holiday festivities, so it was important to show support and to show that the cause wasn't dead.

my first education protest in Chile

 The signs are usually pretty creative.  I didn't catch a lot of them, but if you look at the left in this photo it says Los abuelos apoyamos a nuestros nietos- We grandparents support our grandkids.

No somos minoria ni consumidores, somos chilenos unidos por la eduación- We're neither the minority nor consumers- we're Chileans united for education

Ironically, these marches are a great place for consumers and even better for those who are selling things! I saw everything being sold from soy hamburgers to Chilean flags and buttons to lemons to help with the tear gas burning- more on that soon.

Tiny paper pieces popular for throwing around at marches for sale. Alvaro made fun of me for taking this picture, saying that I'd put it up on my blog explaining the Chilean word for it, but now I can't even remember the word.

Alvaro, like any good Chilean, partook in the consumerism and bought us sopaipillas from this lady

buttons for sale

Chilean flags for sale

Churros rellenos for sale! This guy even has a megaphone announcing the sales.

Might as well take advantage of hundreds of thousands of people marching to sell them a cold beverage on a hot day!

 As the wikipedia article mentions, the protests have become increasingly violent. A lot of the violence (as Alvaro explained to me) comes from an anarchist group that's broken off that takes advantage of the protests, and incites violence at the end of the marches. AlviAlvi and I watched while police officers directing traffic observed protesters blocking off the streets, yet didn't do anything to keep cars from turning and adding to the congestion and confusion of the protest areas, essentially encouraging the area to get crazy until they called in their police mega-bus and started spraying water and tear gas indiscriminately.

A weird, blue camera setting but you can see the water spraying and the cloud of tear gas. About five seconds after we took this picture, there was a huge stampede as people ran to get away when they realized that the truck was coming towards us

Yeah, police brutality is pretty awful, but why miss up an opportunity to make some money? -It's such a certainty that the police will use tear gas and water cannons that this vendor has his cart set up just outside the protest area with lemons (used to soak scarves and shirts) and water to help tear gas victims. We obviously weren't front and center in the police violence, but I could feel when we had to go through an area that had been recently tear gassed by a stinging and burning in my eyes/mouth and an urge to sneeze.

 In completely non-violent news, I made my first homemade challah for Shabbat!  I made one sweet one and a savory one- the savory one is the twisted circle, and it has sauteed onions and garlic on the inside of the ropes- it sounds like a weird challah, but it really was delicious!

 If you made it to the end of this photo-laden post, congrats!! Thanks for paying attention. I'll try to make a more focused post next time! sending hugs home...