Dieceocho!

We've been pretty busy over the past week or so - Saturday was an incredibly nice day and we went skiing at a resort called El Colorado (about an hour from Santiago), and on Sunday we went to see Chile play Brazil in a World Cup qualifier match. Our spring break starts immediately after work tomorrow (celebrates Chilean Independence Day) and there is (1) a big gringos vs. chileans soccer match we're playing in tonight and (2) a party tomorrow that the non-chilean staff puts on for the chileans that involves a skit that we have major roles in.

Skiing first... Here's Claire and our friend Lissa as we're about to leave:

We now own our own gear (ridiculous, we know). Renting everything down here costs around $40 US a day, and we got a hook-up through a friend at work to buy everything - skis, boots, poles, and helmets (which, if you've skied since 1992, the last time I had, you probably know that everybody wears now) - for around $90 US a person. The sale was extremely easy, and involved us going to a (somewhat shady) part of Santiago we'd never been to and meeting a dude who had a shed FULL of all kinds of ski equipment that he "gets used from Andora." Hmmmm...

We got up early on Saturday and met up with our friends Ian and Lissa (Lissa is our office-mate and Claire shares a classroom with Ian). It was about as nice a day as we could have hoped for. My memories of skiing when I was younger involve lots of fun but also lots of FREEZING cold toes and fingers, but the temperature on Saturday was probably right around 30 degrees F and it made for an extremely comfortable day.

Here we are getting to the mountain:



Here's a view of the tiny town surrounding the mountain:

More mountain (you'll notice there are NO trees on the mountains up here, and that's one of the things that makes it pretty different from skiing in the US)...

There's a place on the way to and from the mountain that has the best bread we have ever had in our lives (called "pan amasado" here). I am very intently looking at some bread...


The soccer game was Sunday night at 9pm (they love starting things late here because it seems like nobody gets up for work until 10am or so). We got to the stadium a few minutes after it opened at 7pm, and it was already PACKED with people singing and jumping up and down. The crowd was amiable, and a couple people near us wanted to try out their english by talking to us. One dude who spoke english extremely well introduced himself and told us that he had spent three years living in Mobile, Alabama and was back for vacation (incidentally I think I inadvertently ended our budding friendship when I meant to ask him his name again and it came out as "te amo" [I love you] instead of "te llama" [what should I call you]).

Outside the stadium, just before going in:
Inside the stadium...

Here's a sweet cowboy (caballero) that gets the crowd pumped up before the game...

Some Chilean stadium food:

Stadium security can also double as baseball catchers in case a spontaneous game breaks out:


The Brazilians had a lot of their top players in the game because they've been slacking lately and were behind Chile in the standings, so it was cool to see Ronaldinho and Robinho. The Brazilians also looked enormous compared to the Chileans. The final score was 3-0 Brazil, but even though towards the end of the game the Chile fans had become pretty deflated they were still waving flags and singing "Chi-Chi-Chi, Le-Le-Le, Viva Chile!" (plus a few other group sing-alongs that involved Brazilian mothers' anatomies and also, oddly, the sexual orientation of Paraguayans - we never quite figured out how or why the people of Paraguay were brought into it).

Some pics from inside:


Here's our friend Becca representing Chile in red by wearing Sarah Natchez's old Cornell jersey:

Finally, here are a couple of the mullets that were sitting near us at the game - first, the ROOSTER MULLET (named for the puff of hair on top that goes with this particular style):


Next, the SALSA DEBIL (WEAK SAUCE) MULLET for those not ready to grow it long or style it:

Independence Day is coming up on September 18th, and so we have a full week off of school starting this Friday afternoon (spring break!). Every year the non-Chilean staff puts on a party for the local school staff on the Friday before break. New teachers are responsible for the entertainment, and Claire and I (along with Ian and Lissa) have written a skit that revolves around us making inappropriate language slip-ups or double entendres in our efforts to speak chilean spanish at a restaurant. We'll see how it goes...

Our friends Chris and Erin are coming in from Oakland on Saturday morning, and we're looking forward to a sweet road trip up north to the Elqui valley and the Pisco region. Hopefully we'll have some really great pictures and stories in our next post!

Talk to you soon!