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Published: April 27th 2009
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mapuche lunch
eating delicious fresh food with some of my favorite girls (these are the 3 girls i went to BA with) Holaa! Familia, amigos, whoever else stumbles upon this documentation of my experiences.
I hope all of you are doing well, living life, happy. I heard its snowing back home. I hate to laugh at your expense but... Well, i´can´t help it.
The weather is getting a little chillier but with some amazing sunny days mixed it. Actually, yesterday, sunday, a few friends and I took the bus to Renaca, a beach ust north of Vina and actually only about 10 minutes from my house, and spent the day at the beach. It was a perfect beach day.
Anyways... where did I leave off..
Pucon! The whole CIEE program (all 37 of us) went to Pucon for a weekend. We left Viña at 9 pm and drove about 12 hours through the night. Most people slept but I was never so lucky so I got off the bus in Pucon drosy, a little cranky, defintely tired. CIEE didn´t really give us a chance to get situated or anything. We pretty much got off, at some breakfast, and then got back on the bus to meet the Mapuche.
We got to a Mapuche Cocina owned by the program director´s friend
at about lunch time and were treated to one of the most delicious lunches I have ever had. Everything was grown around the cocina or at their farm and everything was made fresh, just before we got there. Freshly squeezed juice, bread hot out of the oven, and soo many veggies. MMM. Really missing that bread.
So yea, we´re all tired, we get stuffed with this huge lunch and then we bus over to the neighborhood where alot of Mapuche live and go to a Mapuche museum that they have there. Bringing 37 tired, full kids to a museum was a bad idea. The two Mapuche women who were showing us the museum were talking to us about Mapuche culture and the Mapuche experience in Chile but it was difficult to sit there and be talked to. Especially for me after not sleeping the night before. We were all cursing CIEE, falling asleep walking, thinking "Is this seriously going to be our Mapuche experience???"
Luckily, we were treated to something much more personal. After the museum we got back on the bus and the bus took us about 20 minutes deeper into the hills to the sheep farm
where the director´s friends live and work.
The Mapuche family and friends had a big fire started where they were starting to roast piñones and boil water for mate. They also wanted to show us how they make clothes and yarn with natural dyes and how to play this hockey-ish game with wooden balls and sticks. The hockey game looked a little dangerous so i stuck with the fabric weaving. Which was very interesting.
After listening to the demonstration a few friends and I just hung out by the river right below their property and soaked in the incredible view.
We were called back up to enjoy piñones, talk a little more, listen to some music and do a litttle dancing.
Despite being exhausted it really was an amazing day that I can´t imagine forgetting.
(okay, so im actually writing the rest of this today april 27, after getting back from buenos aires and MUCH after getting back from Pucon..)
The day after our Mapuche adventure we had a bunch of options for outdoor excursions cuz Pucon is a natural wonderland with lots of rivers and lakes, a huge forest, and... a volcano. Lots of people
did the excursion where you hike up the volacano which is huge and takes like 8 hours. I´m sure none of you are surprised that I didn´t do that one.
Me and my friends decided to do white water rafting. It was an amazing time and some of the rapids were pretty intense. That lasted a few hours and then my two friends who i went rafting with (Quentin and Rachel) and I were thinking about doing zip-lining but we decided not to especially because (suspenssseeee) there was a big jacuzzi in our cabana. So instead we bought a bottle of wine and chilled in the jacuzzi for a few hours talking and feeling luxurious.
At night we had a big CIEE dinner where i was treated to a delicious steak. We hung out in the cabanas for a little while after dinner and then went into town and hung out at a bar with a firepit and live music outside. We stayed at the bar until after they were closed and made friends with the owners and their friends (who thought i was the bomb for some reason... don´t be surprised).
The next day everyone went
to the hot springs but me and my cabana ladies were a little too tired for that so we stayed in Pucon and walked around the town which although very turisty was super cute.
Then, basically everyone else went to Patagonia from Pucon so there were only like 10 of us on the busride home.
Only 3 of the CIEE people that I´m friends with stayed in Valpo instead of going to Patagonia but we ended up having an amazing week while everyone was gone. We hung out with Paul´s ( a CIEE kid) host brother Choko and his friends (As I am writing this a month after it happened i can tell you all that Choko has become a very good friend. What a nice dude. ) And i also spent a lot of time hanging out with Claudii.
Ummm, so yea other than that I´ve just been going to classes and hanging out. Classes are okay... They´re kind of boring since you just listen to the profe lecture. Actually, I´m really only upset about one of my classes, a hispanic american lit class. Its just SOOOO much reading and its really more history then lit
and the profe talks super fast and i might have failed a quiz a few hours ago.....
My other classes really aren´t that bad. I´m in a really sweet poetry class about La Artista en Modernidad. Its just a lecture class but the profe is super interesting and the poetry that we read is goood.
Then I´m in a class called Gramatica para Extranjeros. It´s all exchange students but the profe is really fun and cool and we´ve had some really interesting classes like a class about Chilean slang and a class about swear words. I would say its actually more of a linguistics class.
And... what else. A class called Historia y Cine: Guerra y Paz where we watch movies about war and peace. We´ve watched some really good ones like Lawrence of Arabia among others. So that´s pretty chill.
And then my class with CIEE is Cuentos Cortos (short stories) and we´ve been reading some really awesome latin american short stories.
Really, i just feel like I´m learning so much more outside of class than in class. So the whole class thing is kind of a bummer.
But, what you gunna do.
Still, everything is going
well. Vina and Valpo are really starting to feel like home and I´m getting pretty close to my host family espeically Claudii (the sister). Actually she´s probably my best friend in Chile and we hang out and watch tv and just chat. She actually recently broke up with her boyfriend so now she´s at home alot more and we´ve been going out together and all that. Good times.
UMMMMMMM, well yea. a post about B A to come shortly. Hopefully in the next few days before i forget what happened there...
Much love! Sorry for taking so long with this post. Hope all is well back home. It´s starting to get cooollllddd here and I´m sure all of you are just soaking in the springtime sun.
Loves and misses,
Jenny
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