Going to places so Chilean that I had to ask the site administrators to add their names as location options. (Really.)

I woke up early - okay, not that early, but certainly before 9am - on the 19th to tag along with another group of (very physically active) Chileans on their trip to the cordillera. Specifically, we went to a volcano called Lonquimay and stayed in a town called Malalcahuello, and perhaps most notably, I can now pronounce both of those names. They all went snowboarding, while I enjoyed a wonderfully lazy weekend. It seemed a lot like the Vail/Beaver Creek of Chile, as there were a ton of cuicos (rich people with snooty accents) from Santiago. Day One I rode the ski lift up to the top and took a ton of photos - it was incredibly gorgeous and almost surreal, between the almost eerie view and the near-silence. The skiers (sp?) looked like a postcard from a distance. Day Two I read (a Chilean novel translated into English - certainly ironic, if only in the Alanis Morissette sense) and drank a ton of terrible and terribly overpriced coffee. Sooo much better than the nightmare that was my half-day of snowboarding several years ago.

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