Chile - Part Two

Here are pictures from some of the other cool sites in Santiago...

La Vega

This is a huge, beautiful, amazing market in the center of Santiago.  It's filled with hundreds of stalls, most selling fruits and vegetables both familiar (like strawberries and apples) and unique to South America (like purple corn and chirimoya).  There were also tiny little restaurants, stalls filled with sacks of different grains, and fridges filled with meat (like the whole pig heads above!).  I got to go with one of my friends from study abroad, which was awesome - we got to catch up, and she was a great tour guide!  She's teaching English in Chile now, and was able to give me the names of all of the unusual fruits and vegetables that we saw.

This, for example, is me holding a pepino, my favorite Chilean fruit.  It tasted like a cross between a melon and a papaya - an amazing combination!

This is Kelsey eating a tuna (in Spanish; I guess they're called prickly pears in English).  It's a fruit that grows on cactuses, with spines on the outside and juicy, sweet flesh that tastes kind of like a sweet, mushy cucumber with lots of seeds.

This is physalis.  They are tiny little fruits that come in husks, like a tomatillo, and look like little gold tomatoes.  The taste is kind of weird - it's like eating cherry tomatoes, if they were actually fruits.  A little sour, a little sweet, a little bitter.  I couldn't quite decide whether I liked them or not.

This is lúcuma, probably my least favorite fruit of them all.  It is kind of like an avocado, if avocados were tasteless fruits.  After you peel it, you find a super dry, greenish, chalky edible part surrounding a big pit.  It's the only one of the bunch I wouldn't recommend.

Cerro Santa Lucia

Right in the middle of downtown Santiago, there is a hill with a recreation of an old Spanish fort, surrounded by paths and gardens and plants.  I'd heard of it, but had no real interesting in going - I'd already climbed the Cerro San Cristobal, which is a lot taller, and didn't think this would be that different.

Then, one day, I happened to walk by it...and was totally enchanted.  It looks like something out of a fairy tale - maybe like Sleeping Beauty's overgrown castle if it had roses instead of thorn bushes.  I started exploring the garden at the bottom, thinking I'd just check it out quickly, but ended up climbing all the way up and around it.  It was crowded, but also quiet, with none of the noise from the city, and you felt like you were getting lost in a castle garden.  It ended up being one of my favorite things in the city.  Here are some pictures:

The steep path up to the look out at the top.

The view from the look out to a garden below.

The view from the look out to the city.

All of the paths and sides of the hill were covered with neat-looking cactuses, trees, and flowers.

Some of the flowers were even growing up the side of the building.

This was closed, but there's also a tiny little chapel.

Chile - Part One

Hello, everyone, and greetings from Santiago de Chile!  In order to get a new, necessary visa for staying in Bolivia, I had to leave the country and apply for it somewhere else (fingers crossed that it is ready this afternoon!).  It's kind of a pain, but it also gave me a good excuse to visit some friends in Santiago, which has been awesome! Here are some pictures from the first half of the trip....

Cerro San Cristobal

These are pictures from a huge hill in Santiago, topped with a big statue of Mary, a little church, and lots of beautiful flowers.  It's a little like the Cristo in Cochabamba, but with a smaller statue and more of a garden...

...and a view of a much bigger city.  I remember being at the top of the Cristo in Cochabamba and thinking it seemed huge - but that was nothing compared to Santiago!  While I was walking up the path to the Virgen, I kept looking out at the view and being amazed how huge the city was - going on at least three times farther than Cochabamba.  Then I got to the top, where the path circled around, and realized I'd only been seeing one little sliver of Santiago.  The city goes on forever in 360 degrees, right up to the Andes mountains.

This is the inside of the little chapel near the Mary.  It was really pretty.  It was built in the 1930s but seems even older, with gray stone and pretty murals of scenes from Mary's life.

Outside, there was a wall filled with plaques, all saying things like "Thank you Mary, for the miracle that you gave me," or "Thank you, Mary, for saving the life of our daughter."

This is mote con huesilla, a traditional Chilean summer drink sold in all of the snack stands at the top and bottom of the hill.  It's like the sweetest sweet tea ever, poured over fresh, squishy wheat and peaches.  Not something I'd drink every day (I think I got a sugar coma from it), but worth trying and very refreshing after a long, hot hike!

Museo de Arte Precolombiano

The next day, I took a trip to the Museum of Pre-Columbian art.  It was small, but really cool - filled with sculptures, pottery, and clothes from all over Central and South America from thousands of years.  This is me trying to take a selfie with this guy quickly (the guard was giving me a weird look).

These are wooden sculptures from Easter Island, that used to go on top of people's graves.  The people who carved them believed that, when they died, warriors and chiefs would go to roam the volcanoes in the West; everyone else would go across the sea to "eat bitter potatoes for eternity."

 

This is the way the Incans kept records, with elaborate systems of knots in ropes.  No one has quite deciphered it, but it seems like they used them to keep track of things like censuses and taxes - knots in different places meant different numbers of different things. 

American Brands

Chile is a huge, international city, filled with banks, shops, and restaurants from all over the world.  I've been trying to mostly do and see the things that actually are unique to Santiago...but, it's also the first time in 2 months (and the last time for the next 7 months) that I have seen anything American besides the one Burger King in Cochabamba.  So, I may or may not have gone to Pizza Hut with John my second night...

...and I definitely got Taco Bell for lunch my first day!  My one true love, reunited after far too long apart!  Soooooo good!

Pool Party!

Me, Noelia, and Geraldine

Last week, the educadoras (the women who take care of the girls at the orphanage) invited the other volunteers and me to come with them on an outing.  To celebrate the girls who had birthdays in September and October, they were taking everyone to swim at a pool.  Because I got a lot of pictures - and because the day was filled with so many only-in-Bolivia moments - I thought I'd do a blog post about it.

We're ready for an adventure!

The woman in charge told us they were leaving at 8:00 on the dot.  Ina (my German roommate), Julia (my American roommate), and I got to Madre de Dios around 7:45 to find a whirlwind of activity.  The girls were all super excited, showing off their bathing suits and running around bringing food from the kitchen to the van.  Typical of Bolivian punctuality, we helped a little, then hung out and played hand clapping games until about 8:20, when a huge bus showed up.  The younger girls got in the van.  The educadoras got in their own cars.  The older girls, volunteers, two cooks, and the toddler and infant sons of one of the cooks got on a huge bus.  The van driver gave the bus driver some instructions, and we were off.

I'd asked the girls and the cooks where we were going, but they didn't know.  This didn't seem like a huge problem - the driver did have directions, after all, and I rarely totally understand what's going on here - but then we passed the city limits of Cochabamba and pulled over next to a soccer field attached to a high school.  The bus driver explained he was waiting for the van driver because he didn't know where to go next.  So we waited.  And waited.  And waited.

After about 15 minutes, the bus driver asked if anyone knew where we were going.  We also realized that none of us had any of the cell phone numbers of the educadoras.  Unless the van appeared - which was seeming less and less likely every minute, as I grew more convinced that the driver had gotten us completely lost - we were going to spend the entire day beside that school's soccer field.  We didn't even have the keys to get back into Madre de Dios.  Julia, Ina, and I seemed to be the only ones who were concerned, though.  The girls kept on singing along to the radio, the cooks kept on smiling out the window, and the bus driver texted.

Such a beautiful site

Miraculously, we did eventually see the other van appear on the road behind us and turn a few streets away.  We did a frightening U-turn on a narrow street, and eventually caught up with them bobbing along a dirt road.  We followed them to our destination: a fenced-in field with a grove of tall trees on one side, a beautiful view of the mountains on the other, a pool, and two little buildings - one that just housed bathrooms, and one that someone told me was a "country house" of a family with some sort of connection to the department for the protection of women and children and, through that, to us.

At first glance, it seemed beautiful - idylic, even.  The sun was warm, the view gorgeous, the pool huge.  The girls bounded out of the bus and we started unloading our food for lunch (huge pots filled with potatoes, rice, and chicken, as well as a big plastic bag of lettuce).  We brought it to a table by the pool, then looked in the pool...

Beautiful!  But wait for it...

Just...ewww

And saw nothing but a foot of green water.  Literally, green.  I am from the land of 10,000 lakes, and I have never in my life seen a body of water that looked less suitable for swimming in.  There was a little hot-tub like pool to the side that the family was filling with a hose, and that looked fine, but the main swimming pool was a disaster.  Ina, Julia, and I looked at each other in horror and said it was such a shame that the girls wouldn't be able to swim.

We were wrong.  Unfazed by the slimey, green, completely non-transparent water, the girls started climbing down the ladder and splashing around.  Julia, Ina, Andrea (the social work intern), and I were horrified by the water.  No one else seemed concerned in the slightest.  The girls swam, splashed, did headstands, played with floaties.  The director of the home hopped on in herself, and, when she got out, she came over to where we were sitting to splash me and laugh about it.

It's almost like showering off, right?

Soon, a water truck arrived.  (In all of Cochabamba, water is limited - for big things like filling pools or watering big gardens you have to buy water from a truck.  In the southern part of the city, there is no public water system, and everyone has to buy all their water that way.)  As Julia gasped in horror, asking why they didn't drain the pool and clean it first, the driver hooked up a hose to the truck and started adding clean, clear, normal water to the sludge at the bottom.  All day, he kept coming back and dumping more water in - but, somehow, instead of diluting the water and turning it a little clearer, every new delivery of water only seemed to make it more and more dirty and a grosser shade of green.  The girls loved, it though, and ran over under the hose to play in it like it was a waterfall every time.

Pots of chicken and potatoes, stored outside all day - yum!

At around 1:00, it was time for lunch, and we discovered another complication.  Apparently, each girl had been responsible for bringing her own bowl, but no one had told us to do the same.  (Maybe all pool parties are bring-your-own-dish here?)  After a lot of searching, we found a few extra bowls, but no silverware, so Julia invented the potato spoon (you take a bite out of your potato and use it to scoop up your rice).  It was fairly effective.

After lunch, the girls went back to swimming and playing volleyball and hanging out on the roof above the bathrooms.  (The bathrooms, by the way, were completely out of water all day.  There were fifty girls, ten adults, and two toliets we couldn't flush once.)  Ina, Julia, Andrea, and I spent the afternoon tanning on the grass, dancing with the girls, and trying to avoid being splashed.

¡Feliz cumpleaños!

Towards the end of the afternoon, we gathered around to sing happy birthday (the tune you all know with Spanish words) and eat a (delicious) chocolate, vanilla, and fruit cake.  By that time, the wind had picked up and the shade covered most of us, so a lot of the girls started to dry off.  Some of the girls started playing on the trampoline, some of them came over to ask me to tell them fairy tales, but a determined few kept splashing around in the swamp.

All in all, the girls declared it a great success.  I can't say I had quite as much fun as them, but no one got cholera - so I'd have to call that, at least, a great success as well.

Less-Than-Wonderful Things about Cochabamba

While most of Cochabamba is wonderful, to present a truly honest picture of it, I need to mention a few less awesome details.  Here are my least favorite things about the city:

1. Germs

There are so many germs here.  The tap water is full of bacteria and amebas, so everyone coming from other countries has to boil it before drinking it.  This is kind of a pain, but wouldn't be so bad, except that people here drink it and use it without problems.  This means foreigners have to be really careful about food here - I can't eat fresh fruits and vegetables, for example, because they're washed in tap water (I miss salads so much!).

Picture of giant cow tongues borrowed from
https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7082/6945822754_c7a254c515_z.jpg

There are also very questionable food safety practices throughout the city.  In the markets, for example, unrefrigerated, uncovered raw meat just sits on counters until someone buys it, and even bread comes in wheelbarrows with flies buzzing around them.  There are tons of street vendors selling roasted meat and empanadas and ice cream all over the city, but no one seems to have a reliable way to keep food at the right temperature (or to wash their hands).

It gets even worse, though, if you're working at an under-resourced orphanage, where none of the bathrooms have soap, fruits and vegetables are stored on the floor underneath the stairs, and all of the girls have lice.  I think, all things considered, I've been pretty healthy, but for a hypochondriac like me, it's been a little tough to adjust.  And I got lice for the first time in my life at age 24.  On the plus side, when I get back to the US, I should have an immune system of steal.

2. Terrible Internet

It is almost impossible to find good internet here.  Apparently, every company you can buy internet from in Cochabamba actually contracts it back to the same provider - and that provider is terrible.  Every once in awhile you'll luck out and get decent speeds for a few minutes, but no matter where you go, the internet is constantly going out or slowing way down.  It's not that big a deal most of the time, but it makes it super frustrating to Skype and FaceTime with people from home.  There are a million free ways to talk online, but the only way I can talk to anyone for longer than five minutes at a time is to pay to use an international call booth.

I didn't take a picture of the actual scorpion,
so this is borrowed from http://4.bp.
blogspot.com/-lAKrQJMoLHQ/
ToXWtJgUixI/AAAAAAAABlM/
puKOgOBUtfc/s1600/escorpion.jpg

3. Scorpions

I have never lived in a place with scorpions.  I had no idea there were scorpions in Bolivia.  Then one night, about two weeks after I arrived, I walked over to the sink to wash a dish - and there was a little scorpion crawling around inside it!  Everyone I have asked says that they are pretty rare, so I keep telling myself they are not a huge threat, but I still hate them.

4. Laundry

We do not have a clothes washer here.  We have a big pot and a sink.  So, once a week on laundry day, I fill up the pot with laundry detergent and boiling water, and do my best to scrub my clothes with a little brush before rinsing them out on the other side of the sink.  It's not that bad for things like shirts, but washing jeans or sweaters or sheets is a mess, and the whole process takes about two hours.  Maybe I'll get better at it as time goes on, but for now, it is my least favorite chore.

Two hours of this every week

5. No Chipotle

Not even a three hour's drive away in Tallahassee.  

And...that's all I can think of.  As I said, it's a wonderful city overall.  I just wish there was a little more soap.

Presidential Elections

Today is Election Day in Bolivia!  It's pretty exciting - way more involved than election days in the U.S.

For one thing, voting is mandatory here.  Every person over the age of 18 has to vote; otherwise, they aren't allowed to leave the country for the next year and lose the right to vote in the next election.  The headline of the paper today is "6.2 Million Bolivians Elect New Authorities" - they know how many people are going to vote even before it happens.

There are a lot of other rules that take place this weekend.  Alcohol sales have been banned since Friday - I guess the government wants everyone to be in their most sensible state of mind for today.  Also, for all of today, cars are completely banned.  The streets are deserted except for people walking on foot or biking, and most things are closed for the day.  Supposedly, this is to prevent corruption - you can't sneak extra votes into ballot boxes if you don't have a car to do so.

This is the infographic from the paper today, describing the actual voting process.  It seems pretty intense - it involves a "president of the voting table" signing your ballot, and you stamping it with your thumb and signing it.  Not the most anonymous, but maybe it helps cut down on fraud?

There is a bit of controversy surrounding this particular election.  In Bolivia, presidents are limited to 2 terms, and those terms can't be consecutive.  The current president, Evo Morales, has already had two terms.  During this past one, however, the government re-founded the country, writing a new constitution and renaming it (from "República de Bolivia" to "Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia").  Because of this, he's saying he's only been president of this country for one term, and he's running again.  As the first indigenous president in South America, and as someone who's helped the economy and done a lot of good for the poor and indigenous people in Bolivia, he's generally popular and is expected to win by a good margin - although plenty of people (especially the richer, whiter people who are concentrated in the eastern part of the country) have their reservations about him.

I'm not sure how long it takes for the authorities to collect and count all of the votes.  Everything is done on paper, and this is a country where only 20% of the roads are paved, so I imagine it takes awhile to collect and count everything.  I'll keep you guys posted, though!

Wonderful Things about Cochabamba

1. Great People

When I first arrived in Bolivia, I literally knew no one - I had sent some emails to the volunteer coordinator, but had never met or even talked on the phone to anyone in the entire country.  For the first two weeks, I was worried that this was a huge mistake.  I had no friends and was worried that this would be the loneliest year of my life.  It turns out, though, that Cochabamba is full of approachable, friendly, and interesting people.  Bolivians seemed a little quiet at first, but almost everyone I've met has turned out to be super welcoming and warm, and it hasn't been too hard to make friends.  I also started randomly chatting with a girl I heard talking on the phone in English before a concert, and through her have met a bunch of international volunteers from England, Australia, North America, and all over Europe - all nice and interesting people doing cool things with children, micro-financing, journalism, people with disabilities, and more.  Plus, over the past two weeks, I've gotten two awesome new roommates to explore, do errands, and play German pirate-themed dice games with!

2. Beautiful Parks

 

In addition to being surrounded on all sides by picturesque mountains, Cochabamba is full of amazing parks and gardens.  Every few blocks, there's a plaza or square filled with flowers, trees, pathways, fountains, and playgrounds for kids.  The parks are always filled with families, couples, and groups of teenagers, and the bigger ones have kiosks with food and plastic tables set up for people to have lunch at.  Wandering through the parks here reminds me a little of summer in Minneapolis, when everyone is outside walking around the lakes - only here, park season lasts all year long and is full of beautiful tropical trees and flowers.

3. Great for Spanish

Cochabamba is a wonderful place to study Spanish.  For one thing, Bolivian Spanish is pretty neutral - it doesn't have a strong accent or a lot of slang that's used only here - so it's fairly easy for foreigners to understand and useful for talking to people all over Latin America.  It's also a great place to go to be immersed in Spanish.  There aren't many foreigners, and not a lot of people speak English.  In the Dominican Republic, everyone spoke English and, especially when I would travel to touristy areas, tons of people would use that with me.  Here, that has never happened.  Besides talking to the other international volunteers (and sometimes to one Bolivian friend who wants to practice English), every conversation I have is en español - which is awesome!

4. Perfect Size

With almost a million people in and around Cochabamba, it has plenty to do - museums, restaurants, parks, concerts, open-air markets, hiking trails, soccer games, places to dance - as well as important practical things like good doctors and an airport.  But at the same time, it's not so big that it's overwhelming.  Almost everything important is downtown (only about a 20 min walk from my apartment), and even though I've only been here a month, I rarely have trouble finding my way around.  Except for one unfortunate bus trip that accidentally took me two cities over, I haven't been lost once - impressive, as that happened all the time when I first moved to Pensacola.

This sign says "We'll make of Cochabamba an eternal spring" -
a little ironic given how cloudy it was that day, but usually true!

5. Perfect Weather

Cochabamba is nicknamed "the City of Eternal Spring" - a name it totally deserves.  Every day here is like a perfect spring day in Minnesota: temperatures in the high 70s or low 80s during the day, and in the high 40s or low 50s at night.  You can leave your windows open all the time, and, while I've learned to take a sweater with me everywhere (it gets chilly in the shade even during the day!), you never need more than that.


6. Los Gatitos

Cariño

And, finally, the newest addition to my life in Cochabamba: Cariño and Amorcita, the two adorable kittens my roommates and I just adopted.  The boys' home that we live in has a courtyard filled with animals - five dogs, three chicks, a rabbit, and a few cats.  My super sweet and animal-loving roommate had noticed two kittens who were not being taken care of.  We don't know what happened to their mom, but she's not around, and without her, the kittens were looking malnourished and helpless.  (We even saw one of them trying to nurse from one of the dogs!)  So, this weekend, we brought them up to our apartment, gave them baths and milk, took them to the vet, and settled them in with a bed (a desk drawer filled with blankets).  They seem to be much more relaxed than they were downstairs, and have even started batting around pieces of string and climbing up into our laps.  They are the most adorable little animals I have ever seen.

Amorcita

So, overall, Cochabamba is wonderful, but stay tuned for the next post, when we explore its less-charming side.

More Food

Here are a few of the best, worst, and most interesting Bolivian foods I've tried so far:

Chuño

In both of these pictures, the dark brownish things that look like chunks of meat are actually pieces of chuño - freeze-dried potatoes.  Chuño has been made for hundreds of years in the mountains of Bolivia and Peru by letting potatoes sit outside in freezing temperatures at night and then putting them in the sun during the day.  It's a good way to preserve potatoes until you want to boil them in a soup or stew.  It doesn't taste at all like a potato - it's more like eating a slightly nutty sponge.  It's not terrible, but I don't think I'll be missing it.

Salteñas

These are pictures of a salteña - a popular mid-morning breakfast snack here, sold on probably every street corner in the city from about 8:00 AM to whenever they run out.  Salteñas are kind of like soupy empanadas - dough wrapped around a meat, onion, and vegetable stew.  The crust is just a little bit sweet, and the inside is probably the most flavorful thing I've had here.  This is the first meat dish I've really liked here - which means for regular meat-eaters, it's probably even more amazing.

Lagua...maybe?

We had this soup at the orphanage yesterday.  No one was quite sure what it was.  It was some kind of grain-based soup...Imagine a grayish, bitter, watery bowl of cream of wheat with some potatoes in it.  I'm pretty sure this is the gruel they give the orphans in Charles Dickens books.

Cuernos de Queso

I saw this for sale in the bakery section of the grocery store and had to try it - it's name means "cheese horns."  It turns out, it's a slightly sweet bread (in the shape of horns) filled with a little tangy cheese. It was like a starchy version of an empanada, and was pretty tasty.

Pastel de avena

This was by far the weirdest food we've had at the orphanage so far (even the Bolivians who work there thought it was odd).  It's not typical food at all - it was invented by our cook to use a bunch of oatmeal that we had.  It was basically oatmeal lasagna.  It had a thick bottom and top layer of oatmeal, with a filling of marinara sauce and vegetables.  The parts on their own were good, but it was very weird to be eating them together.