Summer's over...

It's been almost a month since our last post, and a lot has happened over the last few weeks. We had a great finish to our summer - it was the Lessek family's turn to visit, and my dad and Lynda came down a couple of days after we got home from Panama.

Their arrival was slightly delayed because Lynda was detained (temporarily) by customs officials for sneaking an apple from the U.S. into Chile. The irony is that the apple, bought in the U.S., was actually imported from Chile in the first place. Hmmmm... Anyway, here she is with her "Welcome to Chile! Here is your fine!" documentation:

Before heading out on a road-trip, we spent a few days around Santiago. A hike in a nature sanctuary near our school:


My dad attempting to conduct some business from the hike, Claire mocking his efforts from behind his back:


Empanadas in the city center:


One of many exhibits from the Santiago Museum of Contemporary Art (this particular piece was a birthday party where all the attendees were dogs that were eating from plates of butter. Next door to this room was a similar set-up except with cats.):


From Santiago we went to Cajon de Maipo and stayed in a cabin at a place called Cascada de las Animas ("waterfall of the spirit"):


We were there for three days and two nights, and we spent the first day hiking in the canyon and visiting some thermal springs near an old mining camp:


(Wouldn't be Chile without some goats along the way...)




We went horseback ridin the next morning:



Me honing my chilean-rodeo skills:




After that we went rafting and then hiking to the nearby waterfalls:



From Cajon de Maipo we drove to winery named Casa Silva near the town of Santa Cruz (about a 150 km south of Santiago) and stayed for a couple of days:



From Casa Silva we took a day to drive to Zapallar, a coastal town north of Valparaiso. (My dad and Lynda deserve some credit here for sitting in the back of our little Suzuki for this whole trip!) Along the way we stopped in San Antonio for an empanada lunch:


Zapallar was incredibly pretty, with an ocean-walk that reminded us a little of Newport, RI. The hotel was on a hill that overlooks the water, and we spent our time in Zappallar on the beach, by the pool, and taking walks along the cliffs:





After a couple of days in Zappallar it was time to head back to Santiago. We stopped in a tiny town called Valle Hermoso, which had nothing but small storefronts selling handmade sweaters - of which there were probably 200, all in a row. Needless to say, Claire was pretty into it...


Our last stop was another vineyard. It's called Errazuriz (one of the largest in Chile), near San Fernando:



We were sad to see my parents leave, and we were almost as sad to have to report back to work the following week. Now we're back in full swing, already a couple of weeks into the second semester (which feels kind of strange - coming back from summer break to the same classes and students you had beforehand). We're both coaching this semester - Claire is doing girls' basketball and I'm doing boy's futbolito (a smaller-field version of soccer that they play during the off-season of 11 on 11). We're getting back to a normal routine, and picking up the way we left off in December (even the weather is the same - it hasn't rained since early November, and it's not likely to rain again until late April).

In the spirit of returning to the familiar, we'll leave this post with The Mullet of the Week. I can only assume from his t-shirt that this particular gentleman is touting the fact that he has been growing this mullet-strand for sixteen years, and so from this point on this style can be called The Dieciséis ("The Sixteen"). Here it is, in all its precisely-aged glory:

We miss everyone back home and hope that things are going well!

Panama

Hi everybody! We just got back from an AWESOME week in Panama. We met up with our friends Joe and Steve (and our new friend Mark!) in Panama City and then flew to Bocas del Toro for a week on the beach.


The first thing we did when we got there was head to the beach. The second thing we did was watch Joe dislocate his shoulder while swimming.

It's happened a few times before and so it wasn't a total shock, but he's always had to go to the hospital to have it re-set. The only problem was that we were about 45 minutes from "town" in Bocas, and a plane ride from the closest real hospital. Here's Joe right after his shoulder got dislocated:


Here we are using wikipedia and YouTube to try and research how to re-set a dislocated shoulder:


Here we are actually trying to re-set it:


and... SUCCESS!


We felt pretty cool after that. (I think most of the credit actually goes to Joe, because the hardest part is relaxing your muscles enough to get the bone re-set - at least that's what wikipedia says).

The rest of the week was fantastic and for the most part injury free (except when Joe and Steve went horseback riding and Joe's horse decided he'd had enough and laid down while Joe was still on his back, resulting in a largely black-and-blue finger). We spent the time surfing and hanging out, and it was awesome. We stayed in a really beautiful house that was right on an incredibly pretty and completely empty beach, and we made the most of great company and a great spot.







Hilarious side-note: We needed someone to rent surfboards from and take us to surfspots, so the owner of our house recommended a local guy named Clay. It ends up that Clay was a retired country music musician and song-writer from Texas (wrote for George Strait and Barbara Streisand, among others). I highly recommend his album "Rumor Town"*:

*I have not actually ever listened to Clay Blaker or Rumor Town

Our main mode of transport was Ron's truck (Ron was the owner of the house we stayed at). Here's Claire, Mark, and Steve:


One day we took a boat to a nearby island and explored a cave - the only camera shots I got are these pics of bats that I took right at the entrance (I had to leave the camera outside because much of the cave was in chest-deep water - pretty scary!):




There were tons of cool animals right outside of the house (that's a howler monkey on top):



My dad and Lynda got into town on Thursday morning and so we've been exploring Santiago for the past couple of days. Tomorrow we head out on the road to spend some time in Cajon de Maipo, Santa Cruz, and then Zapallar. Hopefully we'll have some good pictures and stories for our next post.


The days are already starting to get shorter, and I guess that's good news for everyone up there in the northern hemisphere. We hope you're keeping warm!

Buenos Aires

Greetings to all! Our whirlwind summer has continued to live up to expectations. We are currently on a 3 day traveling hiatus here in Santiago. With no offense to my family and no intent to imply anything, our apartment feels huge without 6 enormous (minus mom) people in it. I spent the last day with my family lying on the couch vomiting, weak as a damn kitten. I still feel bad to have ruined the last day of vacation (although Andrew rejoiced in having a day where he didn't have to "do stuff"). We dropped Kris, Terry and Andrew at the airport on Wednesday night and Justin, Meg and I flew out the next morning. Actually, the next afternoon. They canceled our original flight and since no Chilean likes to bear bad news, and despite the fact that we had made contact with at least 2 agents who clearly knew that our flight was canceled, we were not made aware of this until we were handed our tickets . Classic Chile!

Our plan in Buenos Aires was to meet the indomitable and ever-zesty Sarah Natchez at the apartment we rented in Recoleta. By the time we got there she had already connected to the internet and made several critical phone calls to strategic Argentinians. This included contact with a group of graphic designers that had been hired to build her company a mascot costume. Sarah runs a company that provides soccer programs for kids. They are called Super Soccer Stars. Their mascot is a big gold star named "Kick" (or Spanky and Wing-Ding or whatever). In any event, Sarah had volunteered to retrieve the mascot costume in Buenos Aires and hand deliver it back to her company. This didn't happen right away in the trip, but I can't resist showing this series of pictures straight away.

Dancing Kick:

Kick and Claire posing for prom pictures:

Kick taking a tough one in the Kick-family-jewels:

ooo--sorry Kick, that smarts

We would start each day with coffee drinks (never just coffee) and media-lunas (croissants but with more sugar--I can still feel their buttery sugary goodness flowing in my veins), and by the crack of noon we'd be ready to hit the streets.

Palermo

Recoleta
San Telmo

We have totally adjusted to Latin American eating times so usually ate breakfast around 11, lunch/snack around 4, and dinner around 10. I'm a pretty big fan of this on vacation. I could never do it during the schoolyear, but for vacation it forces you to slow everything down a bit. Plenty of time to go home before dinner and wash the two inches of Buenos Aires dirt and pollution off my face. We mostly spent our days rambling around the city, putting down many many miles a day in between death-defying taxi rides. A few of the more memorable sights...

This area is called La Boca. Touristy but also quite cool and filling with people doing dramatic tango things in the street. Our rendition of this is included.



This is a memorial to a guy named "Gaucho Gil" who was a Robin Hood-esque character in Argentinian history.

A major highlight, of course, was the designing and creation of Justin's mullet. For this privilege, we visited Javier Luna, a hair designer of apparently great acclaim in Argentina. His salon was filled with fashionable males and clippings about him from all sorts of Argentinian fashion magazines. Muy famoso. Javier himself sports a close buzz cut. Now, you might be wondering how such a man can be entrusted with hair. In fact, this very question was posed to him in one of the articles that had been clipped and was on display. His answer was that people saw gynecologists without vaginas all the time, so why not a hair designer without much hair? Touche, Javier, touche.

To properly document's Justin's emergence as a butterfly from his 10-years-of-self-or-girlfriendlaterwife-administered-haircuts cocoon (the record should stand that this was his first real haircut in a decade), we took some before shots:

As you can clearly see from these pictures, Justin's eyes are not being properly highlighted and his beard is WAY too dark for his face...at least that's what Javier told us later. Here is the first shampoo Justin has ever received from another human (since the time that he was big enough to wash his own hair). I assured the elfish imp doing the shampoo that I was only taking a picture of Justin but I lied; he was just too pretty!

Javier next fully appraised Justin's head, taking careful note of his features, head and ear shape, hair texture, etc. Our instructions were to please leave it long in the back (he somewhat complied, but to our dismay took about 3/4 of inch off) but other than that, to do his most glorious. In the words of Sarah, "you are the artist."

There is an important sidenote here. In Javier's salon there are men with extremely stylish haircuts doing blow-drys. The routine seemed to be:

Hombre #1: shampoos/preps customer
Javier (when he is damn well ready): appears, cuts quickly and decisively, moves on
Hombre #2: does blow-dry

Aside from the stylishly-coifed men, there was one more entity: Javier's chihuahua, "Maxima". Or, as Javier referred to her, his "wife." There was some serious love between man and dog going on here.
Maxima was generally skittish and suspicious of all people that were not Javier. According to Javier she only likes the beautiful people. Low and behold...




Javier took his task of giving Justin a hair-makeover very seriously, constantly appraising his work. We were all awed and inspired by Javier's attention to detail (which the exception of one sideburn that he forgot to trim...it was later decided that this was part of the look and that we should not question Javier). This was no cut-and-go like his other customers, many of whom were looking on with disgust and jealousy at the attention that was being lavished on Justin. I'm really not kidding about that. There were some pissed off women in the salon.


In the end, we could not have been more pleased with the outcome. Butterfly: emerged.


A couple of other random things to behold and consider. Lots of statues in Argentina look extremely cranky.
As in Santiago, there seems to be an obsession with enormous doors in BA:

Who knew?


Spectacular bookstore. This was billed by the TimeOut BA guide as the second most beautiful bookstore in the world. Haven't seen the first, nor was it named, but this place was really gorgeous. It was converted from a theater and still has the balconies and all the intricate artwork. The cafe was on the old stage.

Street in BA with at least 16 lanes. I'm not kidding.


Old man enthusiastically shows off bird-friend in San Telmo, home of street tango and the best street music I've ever seen:


All in all, we can't thank Sarah enough for being our guide. We had a fabulous week in BA and really can't wait to go back. The trip to Argentina also helped us appreciate more what is unique about Chile. They really are two very different places. BA felt like New York to us in many ways: bustle, a very cosmopolitan feel, cranky people working in stores and restaurants. For all that Santiago is, it is not bursting with flare. The flare is subtle and subdued. BA is the opposite.

Love to all. We travel to Panama with our friends Shafer and Pyka tomorrow night. We can't wait to surf. Many thanks again to Sarah and to Meg, who was our faithful adventure companion for the last month. We miss you!