A birthday and bye to Hostel Providencia

We're doing two blog posts this week as it's been fairly eventful and we've got plenty of pics...

As we said last post, we've moved out of the hostel into our new apartment. We had a great time in the hostel so we wanted to say goodbye to it with some pics:

Anna and Heather in the hostel breakfast room

Our room during the day, in a mess, sort of bleak in this light

Our room at night, packed up - a warmer more colourful and pleasant aspect

The room was small, and with the bunk beds felt really cramped - but there was plenty of communal space to sit and chillax. Heather, in the photo above, is an American teacher who has come to Chile via the same agency as us but to teach in another institution. A few others have been arriving, and our group is slowly all moving out into permanent accommodation so, as nice as all the new guys are, it was definitely the right time to leave. Felt like the new shift was arriving.

The living room in the hostel has this huge map on the wall - it's not easy to make out but we now live just to the south-west of the sort of pink-shaded area:

The staff in the hostel were brilliant, so to end that period on a high, here's the lovely Noelia and Susana:

Noelia y Susana Chilenas extraordinaire

We mentioned before that it's really cold here at the moment. There are loads of stray dogs in Santiago and someone has been going around giving them all coats, usually made from a modified piece of human attire. Check out this chap:

Today I am wearing my grey jumper

This critter was on the move so a little blurred, but he's sporting a sort of tartan effect

More of those soon, though they're difficult to catch because these dogs tend to scarper if you point something at them. On animal pics, we saw our first llama on saturday, in Santiago... this pic was taken outside Museo Bellas Artes (the Museum of Fine Art), which is the building which gives our barrio its name:

Man with his llama, a Chilean's best friend

More pics of our 'hood soon, but here's one of Providencia, the area just east of where we live, and where the hostel is located. We included this because it shows a different side of Santiago, much older and more colourful - these kinds of streets are hidden away all over the city:

un calle muy bonito

We discussed coffee in our last post. It can be a little difficult to get exactly what you want even when you've avoided getting instant - you know where you are with a cortado chico/ grande though - basically what we'd probably call a latte in the UK. Here's a good example:

See the stratification

While posting random food photos, we've fully bought into the avocado diet here. Here's breakfast, tostado con palta:

Oh yeah, green delight!

It was Struan's birthday on Saturday, and our friend Jessica's on sunday. What with the moving and starting school on monday it wasn't ideal timing, but we decided to have a go anyway.

Birthday breakfast in Cafe Soho, Bellas Artes

 In Chile lunch is generally the main meal of the day, but this isn't a rigid cultural thing, people do whatever. An oddity is that in Chile they have onces, which translates as "elevenses", but actually refers to a kind of afternoon tea taken at about 5pm. So if you eat like Chileans you have breakfast (bread), big lunch between 1-3pm, onces around 5pm (cake, sandwiches, coffee/ tea), then a light meal around 9pm or later. We had a late breakfast on saturday so moved straight onto onces before meeting the team in the evening:

Coffee and cake for onces at Cafe Flores Mesquita, Bellas Artes - awesome dulce de leche and meringue goodness!

Deciding that birthday night was not the time to experiment, we planned to go back to La Piojera for some more terremotos (see first post) - and the rest of the team apart from Alison hadn't felt the earthquake yet. When we got there they wouldn't let us in as a huge brawl had apparently kicked off inside. We hung around for a bit watching various bruised chilenos lurch out - one guy, with his equally sh*tfaced girlfriend, almost crawled out of the bar straight into his car and slowly trundled off. We have no immediate plans to get wheels.

La Piojera is not located in the best part of Santiago - it's near the fish market Mercado Central which we mentioned before. These market areas are fine during the day but feel really dodgy at night. We decided to stay brave and wait in another bar nearby to see if things calmed down in La Piojera. So we went into a bar - we should have been worried when the staff shifted the entire place around to fit us all in. The picture below gives no real idea of the scene - basically cat calling, constant staring, old drunks staggering up and blowing kisses at Anna... one old boy shuffled over and tried to sell us rosary beads and tins of incense. We would say that it was okay in the end once the initial excitement had blown over (which it was, and the truth is parties of 6 gringa women and 2 gringo men don't drink here that often) - but we got stung badly for our pisco sours. It's the first time it's happened since we've been here but basically the bill was much bigger than it should have been and arguing was not an option. Also WW3 had apparently erupted in La Piojera because they shut for the night! 

They saw us coming

Anyway things improved back in Bellavista where we headed again to introduce the rest of the team to Galindo.  Beers and cazuela all round - woop!

Cazuela heaven!

We hadn't noticed last time we went to Galindo that next to the loo there is the most strikingly literal, yet wholly inaccurate, condom machine ever:

The gist, at least, is obvious

Anyway, after that excitement Sunday has been spent mainly trying to prep our first classes for our first day of teaching tomorrow. It's good fun, lots of room for creativity, but we have to try hard at it for now. Looking forward to meeting our students though! Here's Anna making something:

A teacher at work

Orientation and a new apartment

Here's our second post!  

This week has been "orientation" week. Nevertheless we remain disorientated. Monday morning we went to get our RUT numbers - these are identification numbers for Chilean citizens and foreign residents. The registration process was funny, we had to visit various buildings to have our names copied onto forms, then typed onto other forms, have our fingerprints taken, visa type logged etc. Each time the official would spell something wrong and we'd have to start again. 

Chile loves a bit of bureaucracy, which is probably a legacy of elements of its history. We mentioned before that we planned to get some photos of significant places we visited on the tour we took last week. The one below is of La Moneda, the presidential palace where the Chilean president works though he (unusually for south america, not so long ago it was she - we mean Michelle Bachelet, rather than suggesting a very high profile gender realignment) lives elsewhere. La Moneda is where Salvador Allende died during the Pinochet coup in 1973.

Augusto Pinochet is one of the high profile connections between Chile and Britain as he was arrested in London in 1998 accused of human rights violations. He is apparently a very divisive figure today - the situation is very complex because it is widely felt that Chile's progress towards developed status is at least partly due to economic reforms enacted under Pinochet. The country is however deeply scarred by the historical violence and assault on culture and human rights with which this era is associated.

La Moneda

Later on monday we headed up to La Vega, a huge market area known primarily for food:

Verduras at La Vega

Almost the first thing we saw and heard was a line of people queuing up for bowls of broth - basically an outdoor soup kitchen. As our friend Warren said, this was intense. It was the first time we had seen concentrated poverty. The reason we heard it was because a preacher in a suit with a microphone was standing next to it loudly saving souls - his contribution didn't seem to altogether improve the situation, but the food was probably church aid. We got this photo below, which doesn't really capture the scene as it's not really cool to photograph this:

Outdoor soup kitchen at La Vega

A stall at La Vega selling stuff

See los Andes above La Vega in the photo below, we've now managed to take a few photos showing how the mountains decorate so many city views:

La Vega sells all sorts of food - check out the pig's head! All the butchers' stalls sell these, apparently you dice them and roast or casserole...

Pig head on a bed of meat - also intense

carrots - tame

Look at the little dog, he's not for eating

Here's another photo showing the city and los Andes, taken from one of the bridges over the Rio Mapocho. This is a sad river, apparently heavily polluted, which has the appearance of a large drain, though it may acquire some more majesty in the next few months as the snow melts in the mountains. 

A drain masquerading as a river

This one was taken from the top of Cerro Santa Lucia, another urban park with a castle (we think fake, as in decorative and relatively recently built, but further research is required - the mound itself is certainly man made so it may have been the site of an earlier fortification) on top.

An awesome view - similar to the one from our new apartment

See the trees reflected from Cerro Santa Lucia

South America is obviously well known for coffee growing, but this is actually confined largely to Colombia, Peru and Brasil - Chile doesn't have the climate for it. Prior to probably a very few years ago all coffee drunk in Santiago was Nescafe instant - gross. Even now you still have to be careful to ask for cafe de grano if you just order an ordinary coffee, otherwise you may get instant.

To make up for this coffee plight, before cafe de grano was imported an enterprising Santaguino invented the cafe con piernas, coffee with legs. These are basically coffee shops staffed by attractive Chilenas wearing short skirts. There is another type with blacked out windows and banging music, which is staffed by Chilenas in bikinis - a few times a day the manager signals "happy minute" during which the staff remove their bikinis and dance on the tables. Hilarious. We've been to the first type which has great coffee, and Anna will investigate the second type with Jessica as there is one near their school!  

Photos on those another time...

There are now plenty of european style coffee shops in Santiago, here's some photos from one we've been to a couple of times:

un gato de casa keeping warm at cafe constitucion

Anna, Jessica, Warren (and hiding Alison) at cafe constitucion

Back to food. Chile has a real dirty burger culture. There are loads of fast food joints selling fried stuff all over Santiago - called Fuente de Sodas. The only good thing about this is that these places have out-dirtied American fast food, which means the likes of McDonalds and KFC don't have a huge presence here - they're here but the chain el Fuente de Soda DonPepe seems to have the market cornered. There are also lots of small diner type places which serve main meals and snacks, they don't look like much but the food is good (if still not exactly healthy):

A diner near our Hostel - note the Chile flags

Warren, Anna, Alison and Struan tucking in

Churrillana - shredded pan fried beef, chips, sauteed onions topped with a couple of fried eggs - muy bien, what's not to like?

This week has included two major stresses: getting our work schedules and being "orientated" by our schools; and finding accommodation outside of the hostel. Here's Anna's school, Sede Alonso de Ovalle:

Sede Alonso de Ovalle - un edificio colonial classico

DuocUC

Here's Struan's school:

DuocUC Sede Alameda

DuocUC Sede Alameda - all of the campus buildings except Anna's campus are clad in glass

Our schools are part of DuocUC - a college founded and funded by the Universidad Catolica. Duoc is probably best described as a technical college as all of the programmes (2 or 4 years) are vocational, including construction related courses (design, engineering etc), IT, tourism and so on. The academic universities like Universidad Catolica tend to be dominated by the very wealthy who have been to fee-paying schools as there is a huge divide in quality of state education and private here. As such we'll be teaching some of the poorest students in Chile, some of whom have never met a gringo, which will be very humbling.

There'll be plenty of our posts in the future relating to teaching and students so for now we'll just mention that all 5 of us (Warren has now gone to his Duoc school outside of Santiago) have been inducted at our different schools, and all of us have come away with completely different info. We have our first classes on monday which we have all reacted to with varying levels of terror, but we're defo looking forward to getting into it. 

The wednesday barbeque at the hostel came round again, so here's some photos:

Andrea Rodriguez - the legendary TeachingChile coordinadora who has already got us out of some scrapes!

Alan, a Chilean who looks American and sounds Kiwi - manning his barbie

Alan up close, with a board of carne

A minor correction - last week we said the little kebabs were lomitos. They're not, they're anticucho. Details. 

The second big deal of the week was getting our apartment, yay! We'll do some future posting on this, but for now it's a super-modern block (the apartment is almost brand new), in a great central neighbourhood called Bellas Artes, with a guard, laundrette, gym, and roof terrace with outdoor pool! It's the tallest block around so the view from the roof is amazing. 

The other thing to say is that we had a problem with withdrawing money when it came to deposit and initial rent day. The agent and building administrator spoke very little english, and we can't hold this kind of nightmare conversation in spanish - we almost lost the apartment (we think, there was certainly a lot of excitement and arm waving). Anyway, we called in Scott, one of the Americans in our group who has fluent spanish, and got there in the end. He's become a great friend, and in recognition of his assistance we'll end this week's post with him - here he is, declaring his allegiance, or serenading or something:

Scott, living legend - play it again Maestro

The first week

So here is our Chile blog! We'll try to update this at least weekly, and particular events or trips etc may mean we add things more or less frequently...

We've been a little hopeless with photos so far but we'll try to include a good selection on this, and will also add a link to our picasa site which we'll update with all of the photos we want to keep.

We arrived in Santiago later than expected,  after an eventful journey as all our flights were delayed - our final flight from Madrid didn't leave until 3.30 am... we need to have a word with the travel agent though as we wouldn't have made the Madrid-Santiago leg if it hadn't been delayed. We had to go to a different terminal to check in and get our boarding passes, but only had an hour and a half wait for the connection and getting the passes took 2 hours in all! The LAN Chile check in line was hilarious, various Chicas sitting around pouting while (we think) being trained. The chica who checked us in spent ages tapping buttons, printing things off and ripping them up, then starting again. Eventually we asked if there was a problem, at which point she smiled sweetly and immediately completed the check in...

The flight was good, they still do glamour with flying in South America, and we descended into Santiago with an amazing view of los Andes in the morning sunshine.  

After losing each other for a short while at the airport in Santiago, and the inevitable mistake with our prepaid taxi booking, we arrived at Hostel Providencia. It's a fantastic place, very welcoming staff, and we have our own room (with bunk bed!). It was very cold when we arrived here though, and the hostel is a big old building with no heating and windows vaguely made to fit their frames... we've also now tried pretty much all of the showers in the place and realised that the one that we've been using since we arrived is defo the worst! A combination of boiling geyser and a piercing ice stream.

Our first night was a Wednesday, and they have an Asado (bbq) at the hostel every wednesday, which then moves onto a Chilean style night out on the town i.e. starts at midnight. After 30 hours travelling we decided instead to sneak into bed, but only after we had eaten a load of churripan (cooked chorizo sausage in small buns), lomito (pork on kebab sticks), and carne (basically beefsteak cooked medium rare and thick sliced) - all together with a bowl of diced tomato. Yum! We chatted with other people staying in the hostel, including an American archaeology student - yay!

Next day we went on a free walking tour of Santiago for about 5 hours with a great guide called Franco, a local musician who tour guides by day and plays in bars by night. Hopefully we'll find him again on stage sometime. It would have been a good opportunity to take photos but we've had a slow start on that - it was an excellent overview of the city though, and we got some great local and historic info. We'll redo the tour ourselves, or pick up various parts of it at some point and get some photos to post then. We'll also talk more about Santiago, but for now it's fair to say that the centre, and the older barrios to the west, and immediately east of the centre, have a very European feel to them (compounded by the spanish look of the locals). There is a mix of old and new buildings, particularly in the centre, and it seems that all of the newer eastern comunas out towards los Andes are very modern - these are the wealthier parts of Santiago and look and feel like North America.

The best thing is that the whole city has a backdrop of the snow capped mountains - we hope to get some great photos showing those views which just appear as you turn a corner.  

On our second night we went out with two American girls we met in the hostel, Tiffany and Joy, and an Australian, Alison, who is another member of our teaching programme who arrived the night before us. We went to a classic chilean bar called La Piojera and drank Terremotos (literally "earthquake" - a potent pint of half cheap white wine, half pisco sour (more later), topped with a blob of pineapple ice cream. No idea how this came about as yet). Strong, weird, but tasty and definitely a new experience!

Terremotos!

We also ordered some food to share and got this:

Lomo y papas - scary looking, good tasting

Basically, pork wrapped in fat, boiled, with boiled potatos, pickled vegetables, and a brava (hot/ spicy) sauce. It was amazing.

Jolly guitarist at La Piojera

On the subject of food, one of the big things to eat here are completos - basically hotdogs with various toppings. The classic seems to be el completo italiano, topped with diced tomatos, avocado, and a thick stripe of mayo. Yum, says Anna:   

Anna with a completo van

"Yum"

The photos above were taken in Bellavista, part of the old town now focussed on coffee shops, bars, restaurants etc. More on that later. That was friday, when we also took a funicular up Cerro San Cristobal, one of the urban parks in Santiago. It has great views of the whole city as it's the tallest thing in it, and a huge Madonna. We will explore this more as there is a Japanese garden and various other things up here (including morning yoga classes). We got some pictures but not with the new camera so we'll work on that another time.

See the Santiago smog!

On Cerro San Cristobal

Food is going to be a major feature here as it's v good! On Friday night we went to a Chilean restaurant called Galindo and ate paila marina, a broth with huge mussels, clams (ordinary and razor) and big pieces of fish in it, along with carrots, onions and other as yet unidentified mariscos.  It was delicious! It's defo on the list of places to go when anyone visits. On food, this dish is one that doesn't involve avocado - the Chileans have avocado with almost everything, even their Burger King whoppers...

Anna and a paila marina

A paila marina up close

On Saturday we met the other three TeachingChile teachers starting with us - all Americans. It's a good friendly gringo group: 3 chicos/ varones, and 3 chicas/mujeres - 3 Norte Americanos, 2 Brits and 1 Aussie. Speaking to them has been as interesting as Chile itself so far. On this kind of topic, many Chileans learn their English in New Zealand, which we didn't expect.

We visited the fish market, Mercado Central, together - piles of fish and mariscos - and had seafood empanadas (these are a kind of pasty, a real cheap staple which comes with various fillings - more on those another time). Later on we headed back to Bellavista with the rest of the team and toasted our new Chilean life over pisco sours at a bar frequented by Pablo Neruda (who had a house round the corner- more on that another time). A pisco sour is Chile's answer to the margarita- very strong sweet/sour cocktails made from fortified grape wine, sugar, lemons and a bit of egg white to give it some froth...

Struan with the World Cup in Pablo Neruda's bar!

Los gringos TeachingChile - Alison, Scott, Jessica, Warren, Struan, Anna

Finally for this post, a few pictures from wanders:

The "Mobile Phone" - built by Telefonica, designed as a (out of date) mobile phone, the possibility of design progress evidently not considered.

A mad street procession to celebrate Bolivian Independence Day - no idea

A group of actors who did skits on a pedestrian crossing timed to last exactly for the red light - complete with costume changes for every red light!

Chao y hasta luego!