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Published: August 9th 2007
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Gone, but not forgotten
Monument to the Disappeared, Santiago Back To School Hola chicos! And so to our fourth continent. And the first continent with a common language. We refuse to accept that Aussies speak the same way as Kiwis.
Since we're going to be here for a while (that's us rubbing it in folks) we figured it would make sense to learn some Spanish to help us along the way. And we're led to believe it's a little easier than Mandarin or Vietnamese.
And so we found ourselves in La Escuela Bellavista introducing ourselves to the other students in our best Spanglish. David was feeling so confident at this point that he accidentally introduced himself as a Spaniard.
They say that full immersion is the only way to really learn a language so we threw ourselves into it by staying with two of the teachers from the school who spoke to us solely in Spanish.
Especially hard at breakfast time which is never Carolyn's favourite time of day for conversation. But grunts and nods work the same in any language.
We soon learned that we weren't the only waifs and strays being adopted by Boris and Lidia. Besides ourselves there were 2 Chilean neices,
Class act
Carolyn with her classmates a Swiss student and a Brasilian student in the house. Not to mention the 5 dogs and 14 cats in the garden.
As well as helping with the language skills, being immersed in a household allows you to pick up a few extra skills that you probably wouldn't elsewhere. Like the making of such tasty delicacies as palta and pastel de choclo.
For the uninitiated, choclo is the Spanish word for corn. And you need a lot of corn to make a pastel de choclo, a sort of pie consisting of, well choclo obviously, and some meat (it is South America after all) and lots of other things that we couldn't ever quite pin anyone down on. It seems to be one of those dishes that contains everything you have left in the kitchen and is about to go out of date. Which, with that many cats roaming the grounds, is frankly a little worrying.
We didn't actually get to try the finished result, but we did get to make quite a mess of the kitchen in the process of stripping the corn from the cob. And having tasted a fine example in a restaurant, we can
Choclo chica
No corny puns necessary thoroughly recommend it. Although possibly not with sugar, as some Chilenos take it.
As we said, we weren't present for the consumption of the no doubt perfect pastel. We were instead topping up our culture levels with a visit to the central square, the Plaza de Armas, for a free concert featuring Placido Domingo and local favourite (apparently!) Veronica Villarroel. It wasn't really our sort of music, but it was impressive nonetheless. Once you got over the comedy faces being pulled, by Veronica in particular.
Having left the concert a little early, there was room for a little more seriousness amongst the frivolity of cooking and speaking spanglish. We paid a visit to one of the city's main cemeteries to see a monument to the Disappeared from Augusto Pinochet's regime.
What Spanish we had learnt was enough to tell us that the engraving at the top read "All that I love is here." Boris helpfully filled in the rest with a little translation later. "It's in the land, the sea, the mountains."
After a weekend break from school, it was back for a second week, complete with afternoon excursions to keep you practicing. One afternoon saw
Mi casa es tu casa
Our hosts Lidia and Boris us visit La Moneda, home to the Presidential offices and those of three of the major cabinet posts. Our group wasn't the most famous to visit the interior courtyards with heads of state from George W Bush to Hugo Chavez all attending an outdoor feast a few years back. Those two were perhaps understandably seated at opposite ends of the table.
There was no such diplomacy required for our multinational group. Just a little patience as tour guide and teacher Fernando attempted to negotiate his way through the dozen cameras handed to him to record the visit.
Sadly we had little time after the end of school to investigate the rest of Chile, with just one night before our flight to Argentina. It was an interesting night though as we accompanied Boris and Lidia to one of their favourite eating spots where we sampled sushi. In a Peruvian restaurant. In Chile.
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Kevin Back
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Oh, the mountains
They look fantastic. It's good to get an update from you guys - was just saying to Sue last night that I hadn't seen anything recently. Do you know how to say "The monkey is up the tree" in Spanish now?