Tourists No More

What a change we've seen since last I wrote.  Having decided to stay in Valparaìso for two extra days Andrew and I didn't find ourselves traveling southward toward Chiloe until last Sunday.  Fifteen hours of bus travel--imagine economy class airplane seats that recline a few inches farther--and we had arrived at our first WWOOFing destination.

And here we are at "La Granja," a fifty-acre farm located on the northern end of the island of Chiloe, owned and operated by Germany-born Jaike and her Chilean husband Manuel.  While we've already spent a week here, it's difficult to accurately capture this place.  We've used the words, "zoo," "circus," and "petting farm" with great frequency, and if one includes Jaike and Manuel's daughters, Sofí and Lena, it can be downright craziness around here.  When we first arrived, their one-story five-room house contained one dog, two puppies, three cats, and two parakeets.  One of the puppies has since been sold, but it can still feel crowded in here when the remaining puppy engages in play with the rambuctious Siamese, Tuki, running from room to room and generally causing a ruckus.  Just outside the window, however, are three enormous German Shephards, a puppy of the same breed, three barn cats, a handful of sheep and their babies, five alpacas, a pair of ducks, a henhouse of chickens and roosters, four rabbits, two foals, three "regular" horses, two Chilotan horses, five wild boars, one enormous "domestic" piggy, and two wild goats.  As it just so happens, Manuel and Jaike happen to be veterinarians, thus albeit a busy zoo, it's certainly a happy and healthy one.

Given that we've been here a week already, there's a great deal to tell.  Andrew and I reside in a little cabaña on the property complete with two beds, a sofa, a tiny nonfunctional kitchen, a bathroom, and nothing more than a woodstove for heating.  After only two or three "stupid Gringo" moments, we've become adept at stoking our heater to produce enthusiastic flames within a matter of minutes as opposed to hours, and the extremely dense Chilotan wood requires that we only get up once during the night to keep it going.  In addition to the comfort of wood heating, there are three working lightbulbs, but foul weather the last few days has rendered them useless on a near-regular basis.

Electricity, however, is something we've found to be a luxury, and it serves no purpose other than pumping water and illuminating storm darkened living rooms for reading and inside farmwork.  Inside farmwork here at "La Granja" is the tedious and infuriating task of rolling large bundles of alpaca and sheep wool into balls of yarn requiring expert communication and patience not only with the material but with each other.  Telling stories in front of a fire while wrestling with wool is both beautifully pastoral and cause for petty argument.  We're not living in our tent yet, but quarters are close and we've only made a dozen balls of yarn.  To give a sense of the level of frustration; the first ball we made was already half completed when we started, and it took us nearly four more hours to finish.  Half a ball in four hours?  Luckily practice does in fact make perfect, and we're cranking out balls in under an hour now.  I enjoy the meditative aspect of the work as well as the conversation it produces, but I'm relieved to know that we only have three more to go.  Until it's time to sheer again.

As for the outside farmwork, today was the first day with fine enough weather to venture out of doors without several layers and a raincoat.  If I had more time and patience, I'd delve into the details of the day, but for now I'll have to summarize.  The day began with pig castration.  Until today, I had never seen a pig testacle, nor had I ever stopped to imagine just exactly what their removal would entail, but the process was both enlightening as to their size as well as to the required strength of stomach to participate in animal husbandry.  A single testacle of a year-old wild boar is roughly the size of Andrew's fist, or one and a half of my own, a size we estimated to be roughly that of the human heart.  Perhaps larger.  The slit for their extraction, made deftly by Manuel and his pen knife, needs to be between two and three inches in length, and the amount of rope required to sequire the beast in order to make that slit is two lengths of fifteen feet each.  After roping the enthusiasticly unwilling piggy and securing him to two fence posts by both snout and feet, it's cut, squeeze, cut, squeeze, suture, cut, apply antibacterial spray, and you're done.  It's bloody and the squeals turned my stomach, but after eating one of the little guy's uncles for dinner I felt much better.

After dinner--that is, the main meal of the day--it was time for sheep manicures.  Another dirty task, but sheep are far more willing to cooperate than wild pigs and we needed no rope to sit a bleating wooly on her rear end.  Sheep need regular hoof-trims to prevent the growth of anaerobic bacteria, and after wintering over the toes of the sheep at "La Granja" were covered in a hard black nail curling under the foot.  Using the same knife that had just undone two gentleman swine, Andrew and I tried our hands at scraping away the filthiest parts of the sheep's nail.  Manuel was gracious enough to give instruction in both Spanish and German, and soon we had the whole flock trimmed and back in the pasture.  Andrew seemed to have a knack for cutting too deeply, and while I had retreated to our cabaña to wash my hands post testacle removal, Andrew was reaching for a hose after nicking too deeply on a few ewes.  Manuel informed us that this was better than not getting the nail open and breathing, but Andrew said he was feeling more queasy after that experience than that of the morning. 

Tomorrow it may be back to the cabaña to finish our yarn rolls, but in the event that I get an opportunity to use Manuel's laptop again (and the power holds), I'll spend the next update illuminating Chilean cuisine.  Until then, we're loving our host-family, enjoying Chiloe's fairytale-like beauty, and eating, washing, and sleeping in volumes most likely approved by any mother.  Besos a todos y hasta pronto.

Five Days of City Life

We have arrived in Chile!  From Seattle to Vancouver by car, Vancouver to Toronto by plane, and from there airborn again all the way to Santiago, it was a long trek southward.  The trip itself was a simple one without a single delay, and even the journey to our hostel was relatively easy and direct.  Arguing with Chilean taxi drivers over how much one plans on paying them for their services is a good way to jump right in and flex one's Spanish language skills, and apparently I flexed those command forms of each verb as effectively as could be.  We paid fairly and correctly, and he drove quickly and directly--dumping us with a performative 'Bienvenidos a Chile!' directly in front of our hostel.

And thus, here we are.  Bienvenidos a Chile.  Feeling welcome in a foreign country isn't always a sensation readily available, especially when the language is either just outside our entirely removed from one's mental grasp.  Since arriving here, however, I haven't so much noticed the feeling of being entirely welcome, but I have certainly noticed a lack of feeling like a complete outsider.  If that makes any sense at all.

In other words, Andrew and I are, in every sense of the word, Gringos, but I do not feel the same social distance as I did when visiting, for example, West Africa.  The color of my hair and skin;  the accent in my words; both denote the distance between Chile and my place of birth, but there is a warmth behind every interaction we've had so far that indicates an even playing field.  A friend currently studying abroad here  informed me last night that some Chileans loathe Gringos with such strength that violence is occasionally the result.  That may be the case, but thus far, Andrew and I have had the incredible luck of encountering everyday people willing to give directions, recommendations, or even a story to two eager but lingually-awkward tourists.  Given that this is my first experience traveling without the infrastructure of an exchange program or educational institution planning my every move, I feel as though I have had an incredible amount of success.  And for this I am very grateful.


To recap in detail all of our adventures thus far would probably take pages, so since I'm treating this post as a little introductory 'hello' from Chile, I'll leave it to later posts to delve into specific instances or thoughts.  As a general overview, however, I will divulge the following highlights.  After arriving in Santiago we immediately hiked a small off-shoot of the Andes through orange poppies, yellow mustard blooms, and scores of succulents I'd never seen before.  Since Monday was a holiday, all of Santiago trekked up the hill too, and the summit provided not only amazing views of Santiago, the Andes, and beyond, but opportunities to people watch and consume some local festival fare.  

Hostel life in Santiago offered little stimulation as it was completely full of Aussies, Brits, and USA'ers like ourselves, so naturally we holed up in our room to read and play Scrabble whenever we were not out exploring.  Explorations took us to Plaza de las Armas at the city's center where we witnessed artists, young folk, and even a local political protest occupying and animating the square.  Then on to the Museum of Precolumbian Artifacts (El Museo Precolumbino) before venturing onward to the National Public Library.  A stop in a park brought the opportunity to speak Spanglish with two enthusiastic Chilean poets, the result of which was a lunch of Conger per their recommendation.  Delicious.  As a side note, I'm loving the availability of cheap and fresh seafood here.  Surprisingly, sushi is one of the cheapest meals to be had.


Currently, we're staying in the neighborhood of Concepción--Valparaíso's main and safest district.  My schoolfriend Theora is studying abroad here, so naturally we've been taking advantage of here connections to the city, to Chileans our own age, and to the general ins and outs of navigating Chilean Spanish.  Last night was spent in the company of both Chileans and students from Lewis and Clark, complete with boisterous triumph as we watched Chile beat Ecuador in a football match, as well as more American club music than I've heard since graduating college.  Like nearly everywhere else in the world outside the United States, nightlife starts late and siestas are a must.  We've been eating late and napping daily.


Tomorrow will begin with a trip back to Santiago in order to board a bus bound south toward Ancud.  The trip will take 15 hours from Santiago in total, so Andrew and I are considering purchasing beds instead of reclining seats.  Regardless, I'm more than ready for the journey.  City life has been exhausting, and although we've been pretty thrifty with our dollars, it's hard to live cheaply.  I'm also looking forward to the opportunity to live with a family so as to get more language practicum than simple menu navigation and requests for directions.  Andrew's only used his German on a couple of occasions, so I think we're both ready to plunge in and actually practice our language skills on a more varied and daily basis.



I'm unsure as to what our internet access will be like once we're on the island, but I'll do my best to update again soon with a more interesting post than this general overview.


Hasta pronto--






 

Northwest Living

Here are a few photos of what we've been up to since Andrew arrived on Bainbridge at the end of July:

Celebrating summer on Indian Island, WA with Sophie's parents

A view of the San Juans captured while hiking Oyster Dome near Bellingham, WA before a trip to Lopez Island

Housesitting in September brought an abundance of plum-processing opportunities

So we made tarts, cakes, jellies, sauces, and dressings; and we're still cleaning up plum juice

We stopped at the Peter Iredale shipwreck at Fort Stevens State Park.  The park is hugged by both the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean and sits just southwest of Astoria on the Oregon coast

Whalen Island, just south of Tillamook, brought more opportunities for island exploration

Before heading east toward Eugene, OR, we stopped in Newport to watch sea lions compete for napping real estate on the small town's waterfront

Back on Bainbridge—Mt. Rainier over Puget Sound

Outflowing Tide

We met one year ago on an island in the Aegean Sea.  Now we're out of college and out of momentum to live any longer on the island in the Puget Sound where Sophie grew up. We didn't know what to do next, where to go. But the island of Chiloé in the Los Lagos region of southern Chile has drawn us in, and we're about to flip-flop hemispheres.  The climate should be comparable to the Northwest, but its heading into summertime on that side of the world and we're looking forward to rewinding the seasons a bit to enjoy renewed sunshine.

Finished with summer employment; having purchased one-way get-me-outta-dodge flight reservations; in e-mail contact with a German-Chilean family eager to employ us for room and board on their organic farm; and through with life in the Northwest for awhile, we're currently in the throes of amassing months' worth of stuff that'll enable this next island hop.  We have a backpack apiece and several scary piles lumped into their own little islands of chaos on Sophie's floor.  Socks are co-mingling, wool hats have suspiciously vanished, and furniture is taking on new shapes. Important because it's got to be carried, Andrew has a superbly light tent to house our slumbering, which will be that much sweeter with Sophie's new sleeping bag—a Cat's Meow 20-degree bag of greater compactability and warmth than the seventies-era handmade down-filled behemoth she toted through college.  We anticipate camping at and around our work opportunities, especially through the higher altitudes and more southerly latitudes of Patagonia, so comfort is high on the priority list. 

Most of the other major expenses have been in batteries—around $35 total!—although we're hoping to purchase a new fuel bottle that won't be confiscated by the TSA, as well as a cutting board.  Otherwise, we've made piles of first aid and repair kit necessities, kitchen tools, and the few odds and ends of clothing that are neither too nice nor too shabby for farm work, city traveling, and not getting stolen.

Cameras have been difficult with their high replacement costs and fragile nature. We've decided to stretch out our artistic capacities and pack Sophie's old manual Nikon in addition to her little point-and-shoot digital camera.  With three rolls of black-and-white and three rolls of color, we're hoping to try a little harder and actually compose that perfect shot—after years of digital-era when we've done our best to unlearn that skill. (Note any and all photographs you've ever seen of Patagonia are so spectacular, I doubt it'll be too too hard.)  If that fails in practicality, the two-gig memory card obtained on a recent run to BestBuy holds four thousand shots. That, and we'll need it to publish any photos here.

Apart from packing, the only other project is getting this blog going, so stay tuned for further developments.