Meat and meat and sandboarding

16/9/08
Tonight I went to an aunt’s house (but not really an aunt) for a welcoming back party for a girl who was born in Chile, moved to the U.S. when she waas kid, and now serves in the U.S. Navy. Apparently, according to my Chilean mother, the tradition here is to welcome them back with a “fish party.” She invited me along, and I didn’t want to decline, so off we went. I showed up, and it was literally a fish party. Everybody just gathered around and ate mussels and clams, in addition to a giant bowl of the most random assortment of meat I’ve witnessed (to name a few: chorizo, lamb chop, pork chop, assorted beef, etc.) I still don’t really understand why the custom is to do that when welcoming people back, but it was fun nevertheless. The only downside was the girl we were welcoming back. She was completely full of herself and liked to lord over the Chilean guests by talking about all the things she has in America (when asked if she has a car she replied “I have TWO”), and she liked to lord over me by speaking as fast as she possibly could in Spanish so I spent the entire meal saying ¿Qué? I got slightly annoyed with her, so then I started talking about how I have a friend at the Naval Academy. She didn’t have much to say to me after that. I think that this can be counted as the first person I have successfully made not like me solely while speaking in Spanish! Definitely a big step in Spanish speaking skills. Woo!

17/9/08
To start the independence day celebrations, we learned ceuca (the national dance of Chile) in class. The entire concept of the dance, as described by our instructors (a woman and her son), is to “conquer” the woman you are dancing with. The woman dresses up in a traditional skirt/dress, and the man dresses up in traditional cowboy style clothes (complete with spurs on his boots). The kid had a cool hat that I wanted to wear while I danced. I couldn’t wear it. He also had really cool spurs, but I felt a little bit more uncomfortable asking him to switch his boots for my New Balance. The dance starts nicely enough with the man escorting the woman around, they then position themselves across from each other and begin to clap. At some point (still don’t understand when), the dancers start to circle each other. The woman circles a handkerchief around her head while the guy grasps his with both hands over his head. Then a serious of moves is accomplished, some being quite surprisingly provocative using only a handkerchief, and the dance ends. They show us once then we have to do it ourselves. First we take turns pairing up with the woman and her son, getting the basics. Everybody is having a lot of fun, cause only one pair dances and the rest stand around in a circle clapping and laughing at the gringos who can’t dance. At one point, the son was dancing with one of the girls on the program (he is 16 btw), and tried to put his handkerchief over her head (a very forward move), and, all in good fun, she started using her handkerchief to whip him and hit him away. Then, we did what I was expecting we would do from the beginning. Since there are only two guys on the program, I then proceeded to dance cueca for the next hour, pairing up with all the girls in the room (who mostly just stood around waiting). Needless to say, by the end, the other guy on the program and I actually knew the entire series of moves of the dance and none of the other girls did.
After class, I went to my fourth birthday party since I have been here. This one held the same as the others. Yelling. Provocative dancing. The usual. This one had an added aspect, though. One of the sons of the aunts has a young daughter about 1-2 years old. She absolutely loves to dance. She’ll point at the radio if it isn’t on, or start hitting it if she doesn’t like the song that is playing. She jumps around and all the family members teach her dance moves, and, of course, the dance moves are highly inappropriate. The family also has a new chant. Whenever there is a lull in the conversation (which doesn’t happen that often with them), everybody bursts out in a good ol’ round of “Baila Jose baila!” or “Dance Jose(fina) dance!” She starts to dance.
After the birthday party, I went out to a bar in Viña. The collectivo driver that picked me up had to drop someone off on a road a bit from my house. We approach the road, and I look up, and it looks about as steep as a roller coaster track. This is fine when you are going up, but going down is a whole other issue. We start going up, and up, and up, until finally we are at the very top. At this point it dawns on me that this road is too narrow for him to turn around in, and there are no side streets or driveways, so we do the only logical thing that could’ve been done. He puts the car in neutral, and we begin to coast down this “road.” After about 10 seconds we have picked up a fair amount of speed, and even though he is braking the entire way down, we had to have been going at least 30mph…backwards. I cling to the dashboard waiting for us to veer off the road. My ears pop – keep in mind, while going backwards down the hill. We finally reach the bottom, do a three point turn, and are on our way. We met up at the bar with a few Chileans and stayed there for a bit. We then walked over to a “ramada” in the outskirts of Viña. The ramada was a cross between a fair (rides, games) and a shantytown of temporary bars/grills. There are a lot of customary foods for Chilean Independence Day, and they all involve grilling. There were literally hundreds of little grill stands/bars set up, so we walked around watching the games and absorbing the atmosphere until we picked one and ordered some delicious food. The night wore on and Catherine and I had to somehow find our way back from the outskirts of Viña back to the hills of Valpo. After a rather long hike, we finally made it back to where we could pick up a bus, and collapsed. Made it home at about 5am thoroughly exhausted from a long day.

18/9/08
Today I went up to the families complex of houses for a traditional asada (grill) for lunch. The festivities took place on their nice patio area that overlooks the entire city. There were two grills going side by side that had at least 12 different animals on them. The second I showed up (after the mandatory “Ehhhh Pepe!” greeting), I was handed choripan (chorizo in a roll). They had a game set up that involved throwing coins at a desk that had holes in the top for the coins to fall down into slots with marked values. There was also a metal frog sitting on top of the desk with its mouth open. I figured the point was to the get the most points possible, and that something special happened if you got a coin into the frogs mouth, but, alas, nobody ever did. Of course the radio was playing, and since it is independence day today, there was a special broadcast that only played cueca music and other traditional Chilean songs. There was lots of cueca dancing in addition to some attempted pole dancing. Finally, all 20 of us sat down and consumed tons and tons of meat. It was delicious and immobilizing. I was feeling good about my Spanish and stayed after my family left to go back to our house and chatted with some uncles and aunts. After the food, Catherine and I went out to the sand dunes on the other side of Viña (about 30 mins or so from where we live). There were a ton of families out running around with kites, dogs, and rented sleds/sandboards. We walked around a bit and enjoyed the view then rented a sandboard for $1. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I was pretty thoroughly exhausted from eating and walking and so was Catherine. We trudged up a small hill and sledded down a couple times, then I tried a little bit of sandboarding and actually liked it a lot/wasn’t awful.


One of many families at the dunes.

Looking at Valpo from the dunes.