¡Feliz Día de Dar Gracias!

Happy belated Thanksgiving, everyone!

This year, I was especially grateful for my time in Bolivia - and for the opportunity to celebrate Thanksgiving, despite being far from home.  Many Bolivians have heard of the holiday because of American TV and movies, but there were plenty of people (from the girls at the orphanage to one of my friends in college) who had no idea what it was.  However, because it is one of my favorite holidays, I was determined to find a way to celebrate it here.  It was definitely a challenge, but very much worth it!

Hunting down the food was the hardest part.  Although most Thanksgiving dishes are made of pretty basic staples (like potatoes) that are easy enough to track down here, a few things were really hard to find.  Some (like pumpkin) aren't common; others (like cranberries) just aren't in season, since it's getting into the hottest part of summer now.  (Especially coming from Minnesota, it felt so strange to be roasting a turkey while wearing a tank top.)

The most precious can of pumpkin ever

I think I went food shopping seven times in four days, in everywhere from open air markets to the biggest and fanciest grocery store in the city.  Eventually, I found everything except cranberries (although it turns out plums are a pretty close substitute).  My favorite moment was when my roommate Ina spotted the last remaining can of pumpkin pie mix high on a shelf, right in front of a group of people milling around looking for something - hopefully not the same thing as us.  Ina lept into action, jumped in front of the group, and snatched the can off the shelf as fast as I've ever seen anyone shop for anything.  Thank you, Ina!

My friend's mom took it out of the baking
pan to serve it - that's how tough it was.

Another challenge was the altitude.  Cochabamba is located about 8,000 feet higher than anywhere I've ever been before, which affects cooking and baking in weird and sometimes unpredicatable ways.  The turkey, for example, didn't take any longer than usual.  The pumpkin pie filling, on the other hand, took almost two hours to set, which meant the crust was in the oven so long that it had the texture of a piece of sheet rock.

Because the mini fridge and oven in my apartment are too small to hold a turkey - let alone a turkey and sides - I had to find somewhere else to cook.  Luckily, I have a friend whose family hosts American study abroad students and is used to foreigners wanting to do weird things like that, and they let me invade their kitchen for the day.  This had the added bonus of letting me get Bolivians' impressions of Thanksgiving food, which were...

1. They LOVED the gravy.  The turkey definitely turned out dry, but everyone loved the gravy so much, they didn't notice.  They kept commenting on how smooth and tasty the meat was when, secretly, it wasn't - it was just the sauce.

2. They thought stuffing made out of bread was the strangest thing.  Apparently, many Bolivians will stuff turkeys with fruits and vegetables for Christmas, but it's nothing like American stuffing.  They also did not understand why I was cooking it outside of the bird.  They liked it, though.

3. They definitely didn't like the "cranberry" plum sauce, though.  Bolivians generally like things either super bland (see: millions of boiled potatoes) or super sweet (the cakes are too sweet for me to eat, and that's hard to do).  Tart and sour are not popular flavors.

So much better than a saltless, pepperless
boiled potato - thanks, Mom!

4. They did, however, like the potatoes I made, despite the fact that they had flavor.  Every potato I've had here has been either boiled or fried with little to nothing in the way of seasonings.  For Thanksgiving, though, I made my mom's baked mashed potato recipe, which includes garlic, green onions, and sour cream - which everyone else seemed impressed by.  I'm hoping to start a flavoring potatoes trend.

5. Everyone was really impressed that I made cornbread (baking's not common here), but they were worried that eating it warm was unhealthy.  I tried to convince them that it's best right out of the oven, but I don't think they believed me.

6. They did not understand that the point of Thanksgiving is eating as much as you possibly can.  Everyone took dainty (healthy) portions of everything and then maybe chose to get seconds of one thing they especially liked.  Then they stopped eating.  It was probably for the best - not being bloated was nice - but it was strange.  I cooked the same amount of food I've made for similar amounts of people the past two years, but there were at least three times as many leftovers this time.

The final spread of everything.  Yay Thanksgiving!

Chile - Part Three

Some more highlights from Santiago...

Cementerio General

Santiago has one of the biggest cemetaries in Latin America, with about 2 million people burried in it.   It's still an active cemetary - at the entrance, in fact, there's a scrolling screen listing the times and locations of the dozen of burrials that happen there every day (a lot like the arrivals and depatures screen at an airport).  At the same time, though, people treat the cemetary like a combination of a park and a history museum.  Tours pass through and stop to comment on the presidents burried in it, vendors sell snacks inside, and families stroll along the pathways.  Here some of the things that I thought were the most interesting...

 

This looks like an apartment building, but is actually a multi-level structure housing hundreds of burial slots.  In this cemetary, like in much of Latin America, the most economical way for families to pay for funerals is to buy one of these spaces.  They're a little longer than a coffin, so when the first person dies, they get burried in a coffin and put inside the spot.  After a few years, when their body has decomposed, they pull the coffin out, put the bones in a smaller box, and put the box in the back of the slot - leaving room for the next coffin.

Here's another set of rows of this type of grave.

And here's a close-up of what the individual spaces look like.  They have the names of the people burried in there, and many also have carved stone vases or shelves to hold flowers or other things the people burried in there would like.  There are toys on children's graves, for example, and one widow visits her husband's grave every week with a can of beer to leave for him.

I took a picture of this grave in particular for my Croatian grandma - there are a surprising number of Croatians living (and burried) in Chile!

There are also a lot of Italians.  This is a 15-story mausoleam built just for the Italians living in Santiago.  It's designed to look like a shopping mall - complete with a functioning elevator - because the Italians were the ones who brought that type of building to Chile (and, apparently, that was the collective achievement that they are most proud of).

This is the grave of "Carmencita," who many believe to have been a young girl who was tragically killed but who was, according to cemetary records, actually a middle aged woman who died of natural illness.  She is one of Chile's many "animitas" - people who some consider saints, but who aren't recognized by the Catholic church.  There are similar graves and shrines all over the country of hundreds of different animitas, where people bring flowers and pray for different things.  If the animita grants their request, the people buy plaques that say "Gracias por el favor concibido" ("Thanks for the favor granted") and leave them on the grave or shrine.

There are a couple of other animitas in the cemetary.  High school and college students are particularly found of asking for help on their exams from a president who did a lot of educational reform.  They used to scratch their requests into the stone, until the family put up a sign asking them to stop; now, they slide their requests on paper under the entrance to his mausoleum.  There lots of other shrines of animitas throughout the country - there are so many along a main highway, in fact, that the government is having trouble moving forward with a project to expand it.  No Chilean workers are willing to move the shrines for the contruction for fear of being cursed.  

Rich Chilean families have a long history of trying to out-do each other with their elaborate, expensive mausoleums.  Here is a super modern one from a Middle Eastern family.

 

This is one designed to look like an Aztec temple.

Here we've got a vaguely Indian-inspired palace.

And this one is faux-Egyptian.

Saint George's 

While I was in Santiago, I got to visit and stay with my friends who are teaching English with ChACE (the Chilean off-shoot of the Notre Dame ACE program that I just graduated from).  Most of them teach at Saint George's College, a gigantic K-12 school with more students than my college.  While I was there, they had a huge fundrasier on campus, so I got the chance to get a tour and meet some of their students.  Here are a few pictures...

This is the entrance...

..and here's the map of the school right inside the entrance.  That's how big it is - it needs a map. 

The fundraiser was a big deal, as well.  There were thousands of people there, buying homemade jelwery donated by artsy families, eating hotdogs and sandwiches from vendors, listening to the live band, and going on rides like this little ferris wheel.  

Reunions!

As fun as it was seeing all of those amazing sites in Santiago, my favorite part of the trip was catching up with some amazing people.  

Here's a bunch of people from my ACE year getting pizza.

Here are representatives from three different Gulf Coast ACE communities posing in the ChACE apartment in front of the Chilean flag.  I had my first-ever Thanksgiving away from home in Pensacola with Johann (right) and visited John (middle) in Mobile, Alabama all the time during ACE.  It was so cool and fun (and random) to be able to see them again...in South America!

Even more randomly, I realized right before I left that two of the girls I studied abroad with in the Dominican Republic are currently in Santiago, Chile, teaching English with another program - and I got to see them for the first time in over three years!  We met up for ice cream and reminiscing about our crazy adventures in Santiago, Dominican Republic, and it was just wonderful.