¡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.

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.