Empanadas y Llamas

Last Wednesday I spent FIVE hours on the bus and on the metro. Not joking. It was all just so I could come home from campus for the homemade empanadas we were going to have for lunch. FIVE hours. SO WORTH IT.

There must have been about a hundred empanadas. This is the raw batch.

And this is the finished product. Which didn't last long. Because I ate them all.

Then, after stuffing myself on empanadas, I made sushi for the third time (I am now a master sushi chef--not exactly a skill I had anticipated picking up in Chile) at Andres's and Ernesto's apartment and we played Mexican card games and drank cheap wine and took the bus home at 2 AM (which is just as sketchy as it sounds but I have no choice).

I spent Thursday reading and reading and reading. Just for my one Vargas Llosa class I've already read about 900 pages. In Spanish. and it's not even easy Spanish. It's possibly the most difficult literature in Spanish that I've ever tried to read. Vargas Llosa loves being complicated. To give you an idea, his biggest influences are Sartre, Flaubert and Faulker. So imagine a novel written half in narration, half in interior monologue but never announcing which is which. And then you have about eight time periods going on all at once. And in one coversation, what you're actually reading is three conversations that all overlap and invade each other so you have one person in one time period and space seemingly responding to another but not really because the second person is actually having a completely separate conversation in a separate time and space with a third person. But there's nothing marking that change. So it's just a big ol' confusing mess. And everything is very ambiguous on top of that. And characters change names. And there's about a million of them. And it's all in Spanish. So I've been doing a lot of reading. I'm on to my third novel--100 pages in, 630 to go.

Friday afternoon I packed my backpack and headed to the airport to catch a flight up to San Pedro de Atacama, a desert area in the north. CIEE took us for an official program weekend. We arrived Friday night, went out for a stroll around town (which is so touristy it reminded me of Antigua, Guatemala) and split off for dinner. I got quinoa (mom, you will be excited about that. everyone else will probably have no idea what that is) and coca tea. that's right. coca. Oh Evo, you had it right all along haha. But really, it doesn't do much and it tastes a lot like spinach.

The next day we headed off to see the salt fields, stop for a million photo ops with flamingos and llamas, buy some alpaca gloves/hats/socks and climb a sand dune to watch the sunset over the Andes.

Helen and the salt fields. The flamingos live off of shellfish that live in the briny pools.

The two of us in the desert.

Valle de la Luna. So named because it looks like the surface of the moon. NASA even tests here.

Sunset on the dune.

Early to bed because we had to get up at 4 AM the next morning to make it up to see natural geysers at 4300 m above sea level. FREEZING. 14 degrees C below zero. but at around 7, the sun finally peeked over the mountains, illuminating the mist rising from the ground and warming our nearly frostbitten toes. Then we peeled off our newly-purchased llama gloves/hats/socks and jumped into a natural hot spring in the mountains. Fully refreshed, we bussed down the bumpy desert road, past the vicuñas grazing on dry grass, and made our way to a tiny village with a llama farm and anticuchos (the Chilean version of kebobs). So while traipsing through the llamas, I ate one of their friends. Llama, let me tell you, is delicious.

Me and a geyser. All bundled up in my new llama hat and gloves. It was so misty before the sun came up that you could barely see ten feet in front of you.

The sun hitting the geysers was spectacular. Especially for my poor toes.



The tiny llama farm in the desert.



Eating llama while wearing llama and seeing llama.



LLAMA!

A full day of traveling home and then back to the real world. Or sort of. Since I am still in Chile.

Yesterday I began my salsa class and the best compliment I received was that afterwards a kid from El Salvador came up to me, introduced himself and asked "Where are you from in Latin America?"

Santiago. Obvio, po.