DIECIOCHO/ Más Encuentros: Comida, Familia, Natura, y Cultura (Further Encounters: Food, Family, Nature, and Culture)

This round of stories about Chile is completed for now, más o menos. It's been a surprising pleasure to extend the time spent inside another culture by reflecting on, writing about, and then sharing the stories with others. In this medium, we get to tell more extended, detailed versions—with photos—than we would ever share in face-to-face, verbal interactions. We look forward to writing more here after a next trip to Chile.

In the meantime, we have started a new blog, Further Encounters: Food, Family, Nature, and Culture, at http://encuentrosusa.blogspot.com/, inspired by a shared, lifelong love of food, cooking, gardening, nature exploration, and the arts. The goal, on this round, is to apply the pleasure of reflecting, writing, and sharing stories from the inside of our home culture.

We will follow the same rhythm as the Chile blog, adding new stories and recipes each Saturday.

—Michael and Jane

DIECISIETE/ Un Día en Santiago (A Day in Santiago)

Las cosas son simples. No sé diseñar, yo invento todo, y todo el mundo puede hacerlo. (These are simple things. I don’t think about designing, I invent everything, and anyone can do it.)
—Violeta Parra

Our last full day in Santiago, Michael and Lucy and I started out at an underground museum, el Centro Cultural Palacio la Moneda. It’s located under a sweep of grass and walkways, the Plaza de la Ciudadanía, on the back side of Chile’s presidential palace, la Moneda. Current Chilean presidents no longer live there, but it remains the central governmental building. Expensive cars line up along the plaza, motors running, their drivers waiting for some important person to emerge from la Moneda. Although an eerie, dark olive-green van with a riot squad inside also sits, all day, alongside the palace, la Moneda’s tall wooden doors stand open, guarded by a handful of elegant soldiers—no automatic weapons in sight.

On the stairway down into the museum, we dropped, step by step, from bright, yellow summer heat into the coolness of a cave. A wall of water spills over white stone along the stairway, replacing the loud hum of traffic, construction, and urban energy with a stillness and reflective shadows. Inside the museum, signage is sparse—what a relief! Skylights flood the concrete-colored space with gray-blue light. The central hall is maybe three stories tall, but everything about the place—joists, walkways, pillars, benches, glass partitions—emphasizes horizontal rather than vertical lines. I felt as though I had dropped down into a lake and was floating there, looking around.

We went that day to see a specific exhibit, Obra Visual de Violeta Parra, on the visual art of Violeta Parra. She is best known for her music and for reviving Chilean folk music in the 1950s and 60s. But she was also a prolific artist. Her images—in large embroidered wall hangings, oil paintings, and papier mâché reliefs—are fantastic and alive. Birds emerge from the fret ends of guitars, flowers grow from people’s heads, the dead and the living intermingle, and household objects open their throats to join in the singing. Something in her loose representation of human beings seems to suggest that we’re no more important than every other kind of thing in the world. The pairing up of surrealism with intense color reminds me of Hildegard of Bingen’s art. The two have some surprising overlaps: twelfth-century German abbess, artist, author, poet, activist, visionary, and composer; twentieth-century Chilean musician, composer, singer, social activist, visionary. And these two women artists so distant in time, somehow, also mirror Native North American images, designs, and sand paintings—an impossible-to-explain series of juxtapositions.

You can hear Violeta Parra performing a song—her voice is reminiscent of Joan Baez’s—with some of her artwork in the background at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ9CeICphL8. For just artwork, go to: http://www.ccplm.cl//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=72&Itemid=4; the artwork is small but gets a little larger when you single-click on each piece.


We emerged hungry and thirsty from the museum and ambled slowly in dry 90º heat through the downtown paseos to sit outside at a favorite café in Barrio Lastarria for almuerzo (lunch): jugos naturales (of course, Michael had a frambuesa), iced coffee, and cooling salads. Two days before, we had stumbled upon a French film crew on this same block along Avenida Merced. We watched them film several takes: first, they stopped traffic, then the dozen-or-so actors unfroze and moved through the brief scene as a camera rolled down the street on a makeshift cart, focusing on a young woman with short red hair. I asked in my limited Spanish what movie this was. A crew member explained in his limited, French-accented Spanish that it was a commercial for a French optical chain. The “optical shop” had been set up across the street; our café had been a “charcuterie.” Today, the signs in French were gone, the optical shop was returned to an empty, peeling storefront, and our café served Chilean food again.


After lunch, we walked slowly back to our little departamento in Barrio Belles Artes and took naps. As we gradually returned to consciousness, which takes longer in the warm breeze from open windows than in air-conditioning, we watched the last third of a movie, Stranger than Fiction, in English with Spanish subtitles. By 4:00 pm or so, it felt safe to venture out again. Not because the air is any cooler yet, in fact the hottest part of the day is still ahead, but because one knows the heat will soon start to lose power and give way to yet another mild, blessedly cool Santiago evening.


Michael took off to climb Cerro Santa Lucía, a green hillside of trees, grass, walkways, and elegant European fountains rising up in the center of the city. On a clear day, one can see out to the snow-topped Andes. We planned to meet up again, along with Eduardo, for a free outdoor play, part of Santiago a Mil, the annual summer theater festival. This particular performance was by Arka, a theater group from Poland. Initially I was reluctant to attend—what language would the play be in? how would I understand it? But, maybe because we were close to the end of our visit, Michael and I decided to just go along and see what might happen.

Meanwhile, Lucy and I caught the subway to Barrio Quinta Normal and rambled back from there on foot, through a park and then through neighborhoods of old row houses. Many of the homes were run down, one even reeked of garbage and human waste, windows all broken out, after obvious abandonment by squatters. But the energy of renovation was clear: a handful of the houses, here and there, had been meticulously restored. Some of the streets are still gray cobblestones, and the stucco houses have beautiful, varied wooden windows and balconies, each a gem with great architectural bones. The area felt both unsettling and beautiful, all mixed up together.


As we ran out of time to meet Michael and Eduardo for the play, Lucy found a subway stop to get us back more quickly. We found Michael at the entrance to el Centro Cultural Palacio la Moneda, once again, which was just closing, and then we headed to the front side of the palace where the play would take place, in la Plaza de la Constitutión. Many people were already gathered, a multigenerational group, from tiny babies in strollers to old people.

The stage was confusing, as it looked wide but very shallow. The objects behind the stage were even stranger: tall, blackened window-frame shapes made out of metal pipe, and two huge ship-like objects, also made primarily out of metal pipe. I wondered what was going to happen. We made our way to the side and a little behind the stage, to take advantage of a rise in the pavement and some grass to sit on. Shortly after the 9:00 pm start time, the entire crowd in front of the stage suddenly stood up and crushed together, making room for even more people to stand there. Only later did we understand that the theater troupe must have instructed them to do this.

Eduardo arrived to join us, and the play started: a bride and groom, a wedding crowd, dancing, drinking, accompanied by blaring folk music. But the wedding scene was abruptly ended by a loud, fiery explosion. Scary, marauding intruders appeared. Then we saw the metal window frames set on fire, the stage split in two—the crowd roared!—and giant burning windows were pushed out into the crowd, as if a town was on fire in our midst. From that point on, successive props—some burning, many huge—were pushed, or seemed to drive themselves, repeatedly through the packed, standing crowd. People waved, cheered, and yelled in successions of fear, elation, or wonder. The language problem was solved by doing away with language; this was a theater of action and reaction.

What constituted the stage? The shallow ramp where a wedding feast began was broken open and expanded to include the entire audience space and, from our vantage point, la Moneda in the background. I thought of our own White House and wondered at the difference: here in Santiago a crowd of thousands thronged, roaring in the dark amid burning props, within a few yards of the presidential palace, and no one seemed to think it odd or unsafe.

In addition, la Moneda as a backdrop added specificity to the universal story of carnage that can take over ordinary life: it can happen anywhere, it can happen in Eastern Europe, it can happen here in Chile, it has happened here. We carry a visual memory of la Moneda itself on fire during the Pinochet take-over and Salvador Allende’s death inside. But, this night, the palace doors remained open. The play’s final, moving object—a huge ship “flying” through the crowd on scarlet dragon wings—seemed to symbolize the joyous return to civility after a time of barbarity. La Moneda’s wide-open doors communicated, in a more subdued way, a similar message.

Friends of Lucy and Eduardo’s also attended the play—Pedro and Evalina, a young Chilean-Polish couple—and we met up with them afterward. Evalina was carrying a large Polish flag (though she explained that she is not normally a flag-waver), and this had attracted other Polish playgoers and interactions with the actors.

It was late and a weeknight, but evening is Santiago at its best, so we decided to find an open restaurant for some more conversation and food. We walked along the side of Cerro Santa Lucía into a quiet residential cul-de-sac with two small, late-night cafés: Café Llave Baja (Cafe Low Key) and Café Oscura (Hidden Cafe), where we found a table. Michael and I felt proud to have discovered these secret spots on our last visit and even more pleased to be able to share them with locals!

We had met Pedro and Evalina before, at Lucy and Eduardo’s wedding. Now, we heard stories of their wedding in Poland. Before the ceremony, following Polish custom, Evalina had to put on a blindfold and find her groom among other young men by feeling their noses. “Fortunately,” she said, “Pedro has a distinctive Chilean nose, so it wasn’t too difficult.” Pedro had to locate his bride by identifying her knee. This was more challenging, but he succeeded with the help of his father-in-law, who held his arm to guide him from one woman to another and eventually hinted at the correct choice non-verbally. It sounds like a fairy-tale in which completing the impossible task depends on finding the right helper and accepting his or her help.

We shared jugos naturales together, our last Kunstmann beers of the visit, sandwiches, and empanadas. Sadly, the evening wound down—one doesn’t want those Santiago summer nights to ever end—and we all wandered home to bed and to sleep. As I drifted off, I felt rejuvenated—washed—by the easy proximity of Chilean art, culture, music, storytelling, theater, and history. It doesn’t feel like work, there, remembering the connection.

Las cosas son simples. No sé diseñar, yo invento todo, y todo el mundo puede hacerlo. (These are simple things. I don’t think about designing, I invent everything, and anyone can do it.)
—Violeta Parra

I want to keep on remembering.

—Jane

DIECISÉIS/ Una Semana Libre (A Week Off)

Chileblog is on vacation this week because we are, instead, hosting a party to celebrate Gaby Castro Gessner's completion of a Ph.D. in Anthropology. Congratulations Gaby! Also attending: Claudia Gilardoni, a visiting librarian from Universidad Finis Terrae in Santiago de Chile.

As compensation, we're providing a link to the Orquesta del Barrio website on MySpace. The song "Carta a Paola" was composed and is sung by Felipe Munita accompanied by Eduardo Rioseco on guitar. They performed it at Lucy and Eduardo's wedding in January 2007 and again at Felipe and Paola's wedding in December 2007. You can imagine, listening to Edo's guitar, how lovely it was for us to hear him practice by the hour throughout our last visit.

Next week: Un Día en Santiago.

QUINCE/ Tres Ríos, Tres Veces (Three Rivers, Three Ways)

En el río Calle Calle se está bañando la luna,
se está bañando desnuda,
Toda vestida de espuma.
(In the River Calle Calle the moon is bathing,
is bathing naked,
all clothed in foam.)
—Una canción de Valdivia (a song about Valdivia), “Camino de Luna” (Road of the Moon)



Valdivia is the capital of XIV, Région de los Ríos. We explored the main rivers—Río Valdivia (called the Río Calle Calle above the junction with the Cau Cau), Río Cau Cau, and Río Cruces—but there are many more nearby. Just a few miles to the north, Río Cruces is fed by five rivers: Río Tambillo, Río Santa Maria, Río Nanihue, Río Pichoy, and Río Cayumapua. I count seven named tributaries to the Río Valdivia between Lucy and Eduardo’s and the Pacific Ocean, no more than 15 kilometers (about ten miles). In addition, Lucy and Eduardo’s yard fronts on the Río Valdivia, so we studied it every day we were in Valdivia. The riverbank and the small, willow-shaded dock were good places to stand a while, watch the sun on the water, and enjoy the breeze.


Over time, we saw lots of boats and birds and sea lions along the rivers. The Coast Guard runs a cutter down to Niebla on the Pacific coast once a day. There are tour boats, sailboats, and fishing boats as well. For a list of the waterfowl, see Jane’s “TRECE/ Aves o Pájaros (Birds)” post.

On our trip in December 2006 and January 2007, we were focused on Lucy and Eduardo’s wedding and did not pay much attention to the rivers. This time, we resolved to engage the water more directly—to get on the water itself and also to survey it from above.

The Río Valdivia, looking downstream from the bridge to Isla Teja. Downtown Valdivia and waterfront on the left bank, Isla Teja on the right.

Every day, tour boats leave Valdivia heading up the Río Cruces and downriver to Niebla. Jane and I took our first tour boat from Valdivia to Punucapa via Ríos Valdivia, Cau Cau, and Cruces. We hustled downtown on foot to catch the four o’clock boat and just made it.

Closeup of the waterfront, the downtown, and the Feria Fluvial.

The trip began with a tour of the Valdivian waterfront, giving us a new perspective on the houses along General Lagos (the street we walked almost every day on our way to Lucy’s house). As we putted down the Río Valdivia to the mouth of the Río Cruces and back, we realized that the houses show their best side, or the front side, to the river, not to the street. Successful nineteenth-century German immigrants built their impressive houses to face the river.

After our second pass of the downtown waterfront and a stop back at the dock to pick up a few more passengers, the captain turned the boat west into the Río Cau Cau and then northward on Río Cruces into the Santuario de la Naturaleza Carlos Anwandter, a large protected area that extends well upriver. Río Cruces is one of the river valleys around Valdivia that flooded during the 1960 earthquake. The land in the valleys around Valdivia dropped seven meters (21 feet), and the water from the Pacific and other rivers came rushing in.

I took this and the two following photographs on a hill west of Valdivia in January 2007. They follow the Río Cruces from left (upstream) to right (downstream) as it approaches its junction with the Río Valdivia. The flooded Río Cruces valley is in the middle of this photo. On the opposite bank of the river is Isla Teja. (click on the photo to enlarge the image)

In the flooded Río Cruces valley, the river surface is dotted with green reed beds. At the far right, you can see the beginning of the highway bridge over the Río Cruces and the Río Valdivia coming into view behind it.

On the right, you can see more of the bridge that crosses the the Río Cruces just above its mouth. The confluence of the two rivers is obscured by the trees at far right. I took the pictures of the sun on the Río Valdivia that are back at the beginning of this post (QUINCE/) from a dock in the trees just to the right of the large ship that is moored on the far shore of Río Valdivia. The land just beyond the bridge is the last bit of Isla Teja before the rivers join on their way to the Pacific Ocean.

The 1960 earthquake measured 9.5 on the Richter scale, the strongest earthquake ever recorded. As a result of the earthquake, the Cruces valley is now an extensive area of marshland extending far to the north (left) of these photographs. These marshes are home to the black-necked swan (cisne de cuello negro) and other waterfowl. We saw hundreds of the swans on our way upriver through the natural area.

Our destination was Punucapa, a small town established in the 19th century that was built just high enough to escape the flooding. It’s a sleepy place with one gravel street and a gathering ground edged with very old trees: tall, huge-trunked alerce trees, and large pines, eucalyptus, and others. I sensed in that place the presence of the very old and the sacred. My sense of the sacredness of that space was enhanced by the Catholic church dedicated to the Virgin of Candelaria, a simple wooden building inside and out.

There is a festival in early February in Punacapa that features a procession honoring the Virgin of Candelaria and several days of fiesta on the gathering ground. We saw photographs of people carrying the statue of the virgin dressed in blue through crowds of people. I imagined the simple booths on the far side of the open area filled with food vendors during the festival, much like the food booths in Niebla where we have eaten local meat and seafood dishes prepared on the spot and drunk pints of Kunstmann in the hot sun.

The views out over the river from the edge of the gathering ground are beautiful. The mountains are covered in evergreen broadleaf and needle-leaved trees. We watched a persistent bank of brilliant white cloud or fog in the west over the ridge, illuminated by the sun but not blocking it. The beauty of the natural world is crosscut with a sense of the lives lost and the houses and farms and animals inundated by the flood after the earthquake, and by their continuing presence underneath the extensive reed beds and open water. Today there are no farms in this area, only fruit trees and berries in the pueblo, and miles of forest running down to the water’s edge. The townspeople sell jam and cider made with their fruit.

We spent a good bit of time just looking. I can still see the scene and sense an odd peacefulness that could change abruptly at any time or could go on this way, more or less undisturbed, for decades or more.

We saw the Río Cruces and Río Cau Cau from two other perspectives: from the heights of Cerro Oncol and from the water level in a kayak on the Río Cau Cau.

Cerro Oncol is a 715-meter-high peak (about 2350 feet) rising out the temperate rain forest of the coast range northwest of Valdivia. The peak is in an area protected by Arauco, the company that runs a pulp mill upstream on Río Cruces. The park is a public relations effort to offset the environmental damage caused by the discharges from the mill into Río Cruces.

The road to Oncol is gravel except the first half mile or so. It seemed like a long drive, but the fifteen-mile distance on an unpaved road likely protects the park from crowds. There is a once-a-day bus that takes you out from Valdivia in the morning and returns in the late afternoon, so a car is not required. Inside the park the road is very narrow and curvy, with lots of ups and downs—even slower going.


We hiked to the peak through a forest thick with bamboo and giant ferns in the understory and a variety of indigenous trees above. As with the other trails we walked, it’s steep hiking: up all the way out and down all the way back. From the peak, we could see the forest flowing away down to the Pacific Ocean to the west and to the long, winding, flooded valley of the Río Cruces to the east. In the foreground lay one of the flooded arms of the valley of Río San Ramón. From the heights, the scope of the inundation after the 1960 earthquake is clearer. The lower reaches of all the river valleys from the ocean for many miles inland have become expanses of wetland and broad water.

We got a third perspective of this area earlier by paddling a rented kayak from the waterfront in Valdivia up the Río Valdivia and then west on the Río Cau Cau. The Cau Cau is little more than a canal about two miles long that connects Río Cruces and Río Valdivia. The Cau Cau probably didn’t exist before the earthquake. I suspect the river was created by the flooding of low-lying land. Cau Cau created an island, Isla Teja, now the home of the Universidad Austral de Chile.

The two-person kayak was pretty heavy, and it was slow going on the way out because we were paddling into the wind. In the three hours we had the kayak, I had hoped that we would gain the Río Cruces easily and be able to go upriver to the north a bit and explore. I misjudged the distance, though, and we never quite made it to the Río Cruces.

We saw a few interesting birds, notably a white-necked heron (cocoi), similar in size, shape, and behavior to our great blue herons here. Just before we turned around to head back, we steered into the reeds and listened. We heard a lot of bird song but the reeds were so thick and tall that we couldn’t see much. Overall, I was disappointed in the sameness of the Cau Cau and its reedy wetlands. Later that day, when we were returning from Punucapa via the Cau Cau on the tour boat we realized that these wetlands are tidal; a sandbar we pulled up to earlier that day had disappeared under the rising water.

—Michael

CATORCE/ Claro y Bajo (Pale and Short)

One of the first things I always notice after arriving in Chile is being looked at. This is especially obvious in enclosed spaces like the subway in Santiago. Every time I glance up, it seems, someone is looking at me. Or seems to be commenting about me to someone else. Or am I paranoid? I don’t think so. Most of the tourists in Chile are from Europe, Canada, or Australia, not the United States, so people ask if we’re German, or French (“French!” I think, “go ahead, think I’m French!”). I find myself noticing Michael’s pale eyes, his pale skin. At home I’m used to seeing him as darker than me, more olive-skinned, with more green and brown in his hazel eyes than my blue-green-gold mixture. But, in a world of black hair, very dark eyes, and pale-olive- to brown-skinned people—and especially now that Michael is white-haired—we are both very pale there. When I see another pale-skinned, fair-haired (rubio) or, especially, a pale-eyed person in Chile, I am invariably, automatically drawn to look. Because the pale human colors contrast so dramatically with the surrounding human coloration. And then I think, “That’s me, I’m looking at what I look like, and this is what happens when Chileans look at me.”

The range of color variation in physical appearance is pretty narrow among these 4th-graders (Lucy's first class of students) in Chile.
—Photo by Lucy Engle.

I’m used to fitting in, appearance-wise, or imagining I have control over when I fit in and when I don’t—by what I wear, for instance. In Chile, I don’t have a choice: I don’t fit in, I can’t hide, and I’m always looked at because of being in the “pale” category. Except, I noticed, on the last few days in Santiago—on the subway with Lucy—when I was aware of people not looking at me: I suspect middle-aged female paleness is trumped by young-adult female paleness, and they were looking at her instead.

In the late 1970s, when Michael was in library school, we lived in student housing in Kalamazoo, MI, with young families from all over the world, mostly Saudi Arabians and Iranis. A group of Middle Eastern kids asked me one day why our toddler Anna had such blonde hair when Michael’s and mine was darker. I told them our hair used to be Anna’s color, and they looked confused; they all had the same black hair as their parents. And when my sister Sig visited—she had very long, orangey-red hair—a group of Saudi kids couldn’t keep from touching it. They asked me, “What did she use to make it that color? henna?” I said, "No, it just grows that color." “But, what did she do to make it that color?” they asked again. My answer obviously didn’t make sense. On the other end of the color spectrum, a twelve-year-old Icelandic girl, Anna Rut, with yellow-blonde hair, used to come by and ask to take Anna Rose to the playground for an hour. I think she liked walking around the apartment complex hand in hand with a toddler who could have been her little sister.

Many Chilean women add blonde highlights, or red, to their naturally dark hair. This is an especially common choice for middle-aged women—President Michelle Bachelet is a visible example. So, we look a bit alike, Chilean middle-aged women and me, except for eye and skin color. Performers and models in ads also tend toward blonder hair. An even more extreme version, in another context, is the use of Caucasian coloration—and facial features—in Japanese animation characters (even in the films of Hiyao Miyazaki, a great director). What does it mean for a dark-haired, dark-eyed culture to adopt the appearance of northern people from European colonial cultures and the United States? Part of me feels uneasy, even though the “chosen” appearance is my own. I wonder if there’s a positive side to the phenomenon, an aspect of cultural globalization? Or, maybe there’s just an inherent magnetism, either attraction or repulsion, or both mixed up together, in every manifestation of difference.

Am I short or tall here? It depends.

The other thing I notice a lot in Chile is that I’m short. Why this awareness in a culture where I’m actually more in the middle height range? It doesn’t make logical sense. But I feel very aware of my small stature in Chile. The only explanation I can think of is Kate’s impression that, since short people are always looking up in relation to others, over time we begin to imagine that “looking up” is actually “looking straight across.” At home, I find that I’m regularly off in judging others’ heights, assuming they’re shorter than they are, maybe even shorter than me, when in fact they’re usually taller. Maybe I notice being short in Chile because I’m in denial about being short in my own, taller culture. In Chile, in this appearance category, I fit right in, I’m smack in the middle, and I belong without question.

—Jane

TRECE/ Aves o Pájaros (Birds)

The river valley cut through rainforest burgeoning with ferny undergrowth, the silence punctuated by the musical prattle of the chucao, a smallish bird with a vertical tail, its trill part of the daily background noise.
—Sara Wheeler, Travels in a Thin Country

WARNING: If you are not an avid birdwatcher, you might want to skip to the link to special bird sounds in the last paragraph of the post.

We brought binoculars to Chile for the first time on this trip, along with Birds of Chile, by Alvaro Jaramillo, an excellent field guide. There’s nothing like starting from scratch, when even the most ordinary birds are new and exciting. We identified more than 45 bird species on the trip. Some highlights:

Black-crowned night-heron (huiaravo), in two locations, a group of juveniles asleep in a tree we happened to collapse under for a rest in the shade in the Jardín Botánico de la Universidad de Austral, right in Valdivia (they were so close, one shat and missed Michael’s face by inches), and an adult pair at dusk near the furthest western point of our travels into the Andes, toward Argentina, on the shore of Lago Maihue.

Endangered red-legged cormorant (lile), hundreds of them nesting on a series of haystack rocks just off the Pacific coast at Pilolcura, the end-of-the-dirt-road beach north of Niebla.

Black-necked swan (cisne de cuello negro), viewed from Lucy’s house on Río Valdivia, all along Río Cruces, and at the mouth of Lago Maihue. Their population dropped a few years ago due to pollution from a pulp plant up the river. Following a round of environmental protests, pulp production was restricted for a time, and the swans’ number have now increased dramatically. But we were told that the pulp mill has again been allowed to return to full production. In 2007, when Michelle Bachelet visited Valdivia and spoke near the Feria Fluvial, we saw protesters dressed in dramatic black swan costumes (reminiscent of Bjork’s swan dress at the Oscars), loudly advocating for more permanent protection for the swans, but it hasn’t happened yet. They are graceful and majestic birds, very beautiful to see along the rivers, so I hope they will have a chance to continue to thrive.

On the way back toward Niebla from Playa Pilolcura, we happened to stop in a grassy parking lot above another beach, Playa Misión, and within an hour saw: rufous-collared sparrow (chincol); long-tailed meadowlark (loica or lloica—the Mapuches tell a legend about this bird), a male-female pair, the male has a bright crimson breast; spectacled tyrant (run-run), a robin-sized black bird with white outer primaries, white eyes surrounded by startling, round, pale-lemon “spectacles” and a sharp yellow-white bill; and grassland yellow finch (chirihue), a large flock of them.

Where the mouth of the Río Calcurrupe spills out of Lago Maihue, we watched a long close-up of a ringed kingfisher (martín pescador), with startling orange breast; many black-necked swans; yellow-billed pintail (pato jergón grande); a snowy egret (garza chica); many more grassland finches; and—seen by Lucy and Eduardo—a flock of parakeets, either the austral (cachaña) or slender-billed (choroy).

There is only one common hummingbird in the Valdivia area, the green-backed firecrown (picaflor chico), and we did see one, feeding on slender, crimson four-o’clocks in a willow brake along the Río Cau Cau in the Botanical Garden. But unfortunately the mid-day light was so bright and blinding that I can only say we knew we had seen a hummingbird and what kind it must be, rather than that we “saw” it. I look forward to many better views.

Along the rivers of Valdivia, we saw the white-necked heron or cocoi (garza cuca—the largest of the Chilean herons, equivalent to our great blue heron but grayer), great egret (garza grande), snowy egret, white-winged coot (tagua chica), falcon or southern caracara (traro), black vulture (jote de cabeza negra), and great grebe (huala).

In towns and fields: Chilean mockingbird (tenca), roufous-tailed plant-cutter (rara), Patagonian sierra-finch (cometocino patagónico), black-chinned siskin (jilguero), rock dove (paloma—kernels of popcorn sold on the street are called palomitas), and Chilean pigeon (torcaza)—a beautiful purple dove.

On Pacific beaches: Peruvian pelican (pelícano), osprey (aguila de pescadora), dark-bellied cincloides (churrete), whimbrel (zarapita), blackish oystercatcher (pilpilén negro), South American tern (gaviotín sudamericano), and elegant tern (gaviotín elegante).

Jenny and Michael at Las Lanzas.

In Santiago: monk parakeet (cotorra), after meeting Eduardo’s mother Jenny and sister Carolina for coffee at Las Lanzas, a café in Plaza Ñuñoa. Jenny introduced us to the cortado, “striped” coffee, with a layer of espresso, a layer of heated milk, a layer of whipped cream—very tasty. We heard about Carolina’s cooking school classes and the family’s experience buying an apartment in Santiago for Sebastián, Carolina, and Alejandra. The conversation shifted from English to Spanish and back again.

Carolina at Las Lanzas.

When we walked back to Jenny’s new car, alongside the plaza, there was a luscious monk parakeet walking across the windshield wipers. As we exclaimed and wondered how to entice the bird off the car, a parking attendant strode up (they track parked cars and arrive for payment as you return), gently scooped up the bird in his hand, and offered us a close look before releasing it toward the trees. It was deep lime-green on the back, fading to warm yellow under the belly, with a bright yellow, curved beak—a richly tropical sight. We noticed, then, many parakeets chirping in the tall, sequoia-like alerce trees above. In Birds of Chile, Alvaro Jaramillo comments on the monk parakeet: “Cagebird escapee that is quickly colonizing Santiago. Builds large colonial stick nests, often in city parks.”

A bandurria.

Everywhere in and around Valdivia, including Lucy’s yard: the ever-present ibis (bandurria), southern lap-wing (queltehue o treile), chimango caracara (tiuque—a small, brown urban hawk that walks like a chicken), white-crested elaenia (fío-fío), southern house wren (chercán), austral thrush (zorzal), Chilean swallow (golondrina chilena), and tufted tit-tyrant (cachudito o torito).

We haven’t seen a condor (cóndor), but on this trip I did hear a story about them. Pedro, a friend of Lucy and Edo’s, described seeing condors for the first time, hiking at about 3,000 meters (about 10,000 feet) with his wife Evalina and father. They were unbelievably large, Pedro said, and were obviously drawn together to eat something dead on the mountainside. I asked how many. “Nineteen,” he said. “My father counted them. He is 70, grew up in Chile, and had never seen any condors before.”

At Parque Oncol: Michael and Lucy saw the beautiful black-throated huet-huet (hued-hued de sur). And we heard, all along our hike in the parque up to the viewpoint on Cerro Oncol, another haunting, mysterious bird sound in deep thickets of bamboo, without ever actually seeing the bird. We would wait and watch, over and over, but never saw it—very frustrating. And from that point on the trip, we continued to hear that mystery bird sound in virtually every other non-urban location. “There’s the mystery bird, again,” one of us would say, “damn.” You can hear this mystery bird sound yourself at the Parque Oncol website, as it’s one of the background sounds for the site: http://www.parqueoncol.cl/. Wait through the initial round of bird sound—chirps with a ticking sound behind—followed by the sound of running water … and then comes the mystery bird sound, a sharp whortle, repeated after a pause. We suspect this is the sound of the chucao tapaculo (chucao). Jaramillo describes the sound this way: “Unmistakeable, explosive song, accented at beginning, crr-CHU’Chu’ Chu’chu’chu, lasting nearly 1 s and repeated infrequently.” See what you think. The next bird song after the chucao is, I think, the sound of the black-throated huet-huet, which ends on a descending series. I hope to confirm these identifications at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

—Jane

DOCE/ The Christmas Office Party, Chilean Style

The language institute where Lucy teaches English held an office Christmas party one evening, and we were invited. Since the three of us—Lucy, Jane, and I—had already eaten, we conspired to arrive at a later hour to miss the main part of the meal. When we did arrive a little after 9 o’clock, still early by Chilean standards, we were warmly greeted with hugs and kisses, from all of the fifteen or so staff members in attendance.

This is the standard Chilean greeting ritual: between two women and between women and men, every person stands and hugs and kisses the new arrivals one by one. This happens again upon departure. Male-to-male greetings vary from handshakes among acquaintances to hugs among extended family.

The party tables were laid out end to end in a long hallway on the first floor of the converted two-story house. The remains of the meal still occupied the table, mainly the bones and meat of a lamb, empty wine bottles, and leftover potatoes and salads in serving dishes.

The lamb had been raised by the boss for the occasion, butchered by the assistant jefe of the institute, and then roasted on a spit in the back yard of the institute building that afternoon, using the wood of a dead fruit tree from the yard cut earlier.

Inside, the fluorescent lighting lent a somewhat unfestive air to an otherwise lively gathering. There were three other English teachers besides Lucy, and the two nearest us were fluent and eager to practice their English with us. We in turn were eager to practice our Spanish with the Spanish-speaking teaching and administrative staff. As we talked, we were amply supplied with Chilean wine by the jefe. It seemed like he was getting us up to speed with the rest of the crowd.

The founder and current chief of the institute reminded me of Ricky Gervais in the British version of The Office. Talkative, lively, teasing, and a bit too chummy perhaps, but, unlike Gervais’s character, this guy is a passionate entrepreneur who saw a need and started his own successful business to fill it. When we asked about the origin of the institute, one of the staff pointed to the institute’s seal on the wall. Even though I've forgotten the details, I remember the pride in the jefe's voice as he explained each of the elements in the seal's iconography.

The evening rolled along until the penultimate activity, the giving of the gifts, following the amigo secreto (secret Santa) format. One of the staff pulled gifts from a large bag in the hallway beyond the head of the table and the recipient went to the head, opened the gift, posed for a photo with gift in hand, and then tried to guess the name of the giver.

The first few gifts were innocuous enough, but toward the end, things picked up a bit. The women received soft, feminine things: scented candles, body lotions, etc. The guys got macho gifts culminating in a carved wooden Mapuche joke figure, apparently a standard item in Chile, which, when manipulated properly, displayed a large erection. Not your typical office fare in the United States.

Near the end of the gift opening, the boss’s present to one of the young women was a rather large box with a picture of a DVD player on the outside. There were lots of oohs and aahs from the staff, while at the same time it was clear that the gift was not actually a DVD player. Inside the DVD box was a series of nested, ever-smaller boxes ending in a very small box containing a coffee cup with a photo of the boss on the side. The recipient didn’t know quite what to say, nor did anyone else. There was an awkward silence. Was their boss really this narcissistic? In a piece of fine comedic timing, the boss waited just long enough for the reaction and then, holding up the cup for everyone to see, he removed his photo which, it turned out, had been printed on a piece of paper and taped to the cup. Underneath, on the cup itself, was an attractive photo of the young woman. Everyone laughed with relief. The unfolding humor of the situation was a delicate mixture of embarrassment and familiarity.

The boss broke out the champagne de piña, poured over chirimoya ice cream. Bottoms up. After the champagne course, we excused ourselves along with some of the other staff, followed by the usual departure hugs and kisses. Lucy, our designated driver, took us home. We left with a inside view of a Chilean workplace that is rowdier, warmer, and more sexually explicit than our northern version.

—Michael

ONCE/ Chistes y Errores (Jokes and Mistakes)

In Chile, I find myself making up corny jokes in Spanish, maybe because everything about the language is still fresh and surprising. So, for example, after watching cattle grazing on the ocean beaches north of Niebla:

“Porque la carne sabe más salteado en Chile que en los Estados Unidos? Porque en Chile las vacunas pasten en la playa.” (“Why does meat taste more salty in Chile than in the United States? Because in Chile the cattle graze on the beach.”)

The small cattle herd next to Huequecura, the cabañas on Lago Ranco, having their daily, late afternoon drink from the lake, sometimes followed by an hour-long stroll on the beach with the cowherd, his little grandson, and their dog. On the ocean beaches, it was also common to see cattle grazing on the beach, though mostly without anyone tending to them. Photo by Lucy Engle.

And noticing horse manure on a bridge named “Descarga” over the Río Calcurrupe just before it spills into Lago Ranco: “En la Puente Descarga, los caballos descargan.” (“On the Discharge Bridge, the horses discharge”—slightly funnier in Spanish than in English.)

Here are a couple of mistakes we made in Spanish (obviously there are many more we don’t know about, and polite Chileans have refrained from sharing): Michael went to the grocery store for a bit of beef to go into a soup I was making with zapallo y habas (winter squash and fresh fava beans), and he asked for “cuatro kilo de lomo.” Even in large grocery stores in Chile, meat is cut on the spot in the amount requested. So, Michael watched as the butcher pulled out a slab of beef and started stripping off the fat, then prepared to cut off a huge chunk, which cued Michael to quickly re-state the request as “un cuarto kilo”—a quarter of a kilo rather than four kilos! The butcher looked crestfallen but complied. This is a mistake compounded by the fact that Chileans regularly drop the final “s” from most words in spoken Spanish. So, “cuatro kilos,” the correct way to say “four kilos,” would still be pronounced kwa´tro ki´lo, with no “s” sound. It’s taken me a long time to begin to hear this not-quite-silent “s” in spoken Chilean. I say not quite silent because a tiny space is left for the unspoken “s.” An air “s,” a tiny breath. A fraction of the space a sound would take up if it were spoken. Silent letters in English, which take up no aural space at all, must be even more difficult to learn.

Tiny Café Hausmann to the left, here, of La Sombrería 'La Capital', a great hat store.

On our last visit to Café Hausmann in Valdivia for crudos, I ordered “tres por dos,” gesturing to Michael and then back to myself, intending to ask for three crudos for the two of us. I always try to add body language to reinforce my stumbling Spanish, and it fits in with the more expressive culture. The waitress, who was new to me, gestured back and repeated, “tres por dos,” nodding, so I thought I had done rather well. But when she returned again, after delivering the beers, and dropped a plate piled high with six crudos in the center of our table, I realized the misunderstanding. She heard “three for each of us,” reinforced by my gesture. I should have asked for “tres por todos,” “three, total,” with the gesture. I’d eaten two crudos at a sitting before but never three. We decided to eat the mistake this time, however, as it was our last chance to taste such excellent raw beef for a while.

—Jane

DIEZ/ Escote y Cuerpos (Cleavage and Bodies)

Chileans tend toward the short and stocky, with small, flat butts, a bit of round belly in front, and little side bellies (what we call “love handles”) pushing out just above the hips—the Mapuche influence, perhaps. On my first visit, I thought they just carried their bellies softly, without tightening the stomach muscles as we are taught to do. But now I think rounded bellies are the Chilean standard.


Chilean women have large breasts for their height and weight. (Although, as Lucy says, “All women have bigger breasts that we do.”) And they display a lot of cleavage: daytime, nighttime, dressed up, dressed down, anytime. They carry their breasts proudly, without shame, as if they’re valuable jewels, which of course they are. It’s shocking to return to the United States in winter—where’s the cleavage that surrounded me? I feel deprived.

Also, in Chile, bodies, male AND female, are much more exposed on television, in ads, on book covers, in museum exhibitions. It’s easy to think of the United States as sex crazed and using sex to sell everything, which is true. But we remain a prudish culture at base, while many others, even a traditionally Catholic culture like Chile’s, display explicit visual body images much more calmly. We saw a photo of male genitals, for example, on the cover of a paperback standing up on a bookshelf in the Valdivia public library.

Mostly, I prefer this more relaxed attitude. At the same time, however, I was uncomfortable watching five violent Hollywood action movies on a daytime bus from Santiago to Valdivia with many young children on board. The sound was piped loudly throughout the bus, and the movies were not “edited for content.” One included a violent, drawn-out rape scene. I didn’t see any obvious discomfort among parents on the bus, although I’m also not sure I would know what that discomfort might look like.

At the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino in Santiago, we saw a very sexually explicit exhibit on Moche ceramics, “Morir para Gobernar: Sexo y Poder en la Sociedad Moche” (“To Die in order to Govern: Sex and Power in Moche Society”). The Moche lived in northern Peru from around the beginning of the common era to 750 or 800. They left behind elaborate ceramics showing men and women engaged in non-reproductive sex acts and body mutilation. This particular exhibit was based on one anthropologist’s attempt to make sense of the pottery. His take is that the Moche had to help their king—who was believed to be water/rain incarnate—return after death so the culture could continue to grow food effectively and survive in a very arid climate.

The people’s contribution toward his renewal involved two types of behavior: (1) non-reproductive sex—oral, anal, in all possible postures, carefully and explicitly represented in small ceramic water vessels and free-standing figures; and (2) body mutilation—decapitation, collection and drinking of the blood, and removing noses, ears, fingers, etc., from captives—to make them look more like skeletons and strengthen the culture’s identification with the dead. These practices were believed to facilitate the very difficult passage of the dead king from purgatory into heaven, from where he could begin to act powerfully again, aid the survivors he left behind, and be reborn as the new king.

Like all the special exhibits I’ve seen at the Precolombino, the pottery was presented in darkened rooms. I’ve assumed in the past this had to do with protecting fragile, ancient artifacts. However, in the case of the Moche ceramics, the darkened space also facilitated taking in their content. None of the other viewers spoke above a whisper while I was there, no one commented or snickered. The atmosphere invited quiet consideration.

What impressed me most about the Moche exhibit was not the ceramics themselves, which were stunning and strange and beautiful in muted terracotta colors, nor the theory, also fascinating, but the fact that such an explicit exhibition was shown so calmly and straightforwardly. No warnings about sexual explicitness or checking IDs at the door, no evangelicals protesting outside (though their presence in Chile is quite obvious), just the ceramics—“this is part of our history”—and one interpretation of their story. Just that.

Note: You can see some beautiful (and not sexually explicit) examples of Moche ceramics in a recent New York Times article, and in the accompanying slide show, at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/arts/design/05amer.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

—Jane

NUEVE/ Pebre (Chilean Salsa)

FOOD PORN WEEK ON THE BLOG

Q: What advice would you give to people who are looking to be happy?
A: For starters, learn how to cook.
—Charles Simic, Poet Laureate, interviewed in the New York Times Magazine

This was the year of pebre verde (green salsa) for me in Chile. I adore the traditional tomato-based salsa versions: finely chopped tomato, ají (the ubiquitous, pale-green Chilean pepper, called ají verde or just ají, which is similar to an Italian pepper but smaller and narrower, with a unique taste all its own), cilantro, and onion, with lots of lemon juice, a bit of olive oil, and salt; eaten before a meal, slopped up with the small, everyday Chilean yeast breads; or slathered on whatever else one might be eating at the time. And there are many different versions: at a Brazilian restaurant in Las Condes, mango- and piña-based pebres, for example. Every pebre adds freshness, a taste of living-in-the-present, to the meal.

A morning's haul from the Feria Fluvial and a favorite bakery, Mi Pueblita, in Valdivia.

But, this year, I fell in love with the ají verde–based pebre, sin tomates.

(1) At a seafood restaurant in the Mercado Central in Santiago: Chilean peppers, finely chopped, along with equally finely chopped onion and cilantro, flavored with lots of lemon juice, salt, and a little olive oil, and then slopped up with bread ahead of eel soup, caldio de cóngrio, the dish Pablo Neruda celebrated with an ode.

(2) At Café Hausmann, the minuscule German café where the Valdivian specialty, crudos, is king: a smashed layer of raw, deep-red, sweet, grass-fed beef on a thin piece of white yeast bread, topped with a bit of raw onion and, then, for Chileans, slathered with a healthy squeeze of fresh lemon juice (if one can say “slathered” about lemon juice), and a bit of salt. A dollop of their pepper pebre adds a delicious sharpness to the crudos. This is a pebre made of Chilean peppers, maybe a bit of onion, very pale green overall, with some salt, lemon juice, olive oil, and nothing else. No tomato, not even cilantro. A travesty, possibly, if you love the tomato-based pebre, but nevertheless delicious.

(3) At Eduardo’s aunt Kika’s in Barrio Ñuñoa in Santiago for lunch: chopped Chilean peppers, garlic (no onion), cilantro, lemon juice, salt. Yet another variation.

When I tried making versions of this pebre myself, on New Year’s, at Lucy’s, at our hostal on Pérez Rosales, it was initially, invariably, much too hot. The Chilean ají verde peppers vary in hotness but usually fall in the middle range, like Anaheims or New Mexican green chilies here, but they seemed to take on extra hotness initially in the pebre. However, after sitting for a time, the juices of the peppers are drawn out by the salt, and the taste softens and ripens to a delicious, sweeter, more gentle hotness. Fantastic and addictive. Here’s a recipe for the United States:

Pebre Verde

2 Anaheim peppers (or 1 Italian green pepper and 1 jalapeño), seeds removed
¼ to ½ of a large, sweet onion (or 2-3 cloves garlic instead)
½ to all the juice of a lemon
¼ to ½ c. chopped cilantro (optional)
1 T. olive oil
plenty of salt to taste

Slice the peppers as finely as possible. Then rotate the cut strips 90º and chop again, to make very fine dice. Do the same with the onion. The amount of onion is entirely dependent on your taste; I like to chop a pile about as big as the pile of peppers. Squeeze the lemon and add juice along with pulp. Add chopped cilantro, or not; both versions have their virtues. Add the olive oil and salt. The salt draws out the pepper juice, which is really the essential taste of pebre. Enjoy with chips or bread or on potatoes or omelets, or with any other food.

Note: The more traditional tomato-y pebre includes 1 medium or 2 small ripe tomatoes, very finely chopped, and about half as much pepper. It's a juicier pebre, and the cilantro is probably not optional.

—Jane

OCHO/ Nuevas Comidas (New Foods)

Each new food we taste adds two weeks to our lives.
—Japanese saying

Damascos. The biggest, most perfect damascos (apricots) I’ve ever seen or eaten, from the Mercado Central in Santiago. I ate them for breakfast three days straight along with smashed avocado on fresh bread and coffee—is there a better breakfast? And between meals, apricots with perfect English walnuts from the same fruit stall. At home, I’ve eaten as many fresh apricots as I can manage. Some years, we get small, local apricots here at the Ithaca farmer’s market. But I’ve never had enough. So, even though the apricots I ate in Santiago don’t qualify as a “new” food for me, each one added weeks of color and satisfaction to my life.

Inside the Mercado Central in Santiago.

Lúcuma. One day in Santiago, our favorite fruit lady at the mercado had a box of fat, dark-brown fruit, about tangerine size, sitting out front. So I asked her what they were: fresh lúcuma. My first encounter with lúcuma was in the form of lúcuma helado (ice cream), a large scoop filling the center of a half-cantaloupe, the stunning dessert Eduardo’s mother, Jenny Cavalieri, served each of us in Curicó on our first visit to Chile in 2004 when we met Eduardo’s family. The maple-y taste of the ice cream combines energetically with that of cantaloupe. Lúcuma ice cream is often made with walnuts as well: lúcuma y nueces. And lúcuma is used to flavor the cream layer in tortas and kuchens.

But I had never seen the actual fruit before; we must have missed the window of lúcuma season on previous trips. So, I asked the fruit lady what they taste like. Without speaking, she chose one, held it under my nose for a sniff—a faintly tropical smell—then pulled it apart to reveal the startling pale, golden-orange flesh. The texture looked dry, stringy almost, like the inside of a squash, but obviously much softer since it pulled right apart. She gestured for me to take a bite. The taste is not sweet but not tart either, almost neutral on the sweetness scale. I thought of mild squash, but that seemed odd, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. But then I took another bite, and hints of vanilla washed in, and other mysterious fragrances I can’t yet name. Now I liked it very much and ate the rest.


Ojos. The blackest cerezas (cherries) I’ve ever seen, from the Feria Fluvial (riverside fish-fruit-vegetable market) in Valdivia. Even the darkest bing cherries I’ve eaten before were actually dark purple with flecks of lighter red-purple. These ojos are really almost black, another significant notch darker than bings. Ojos means “eyes,” and most Chilean eyes are very dark, so the name makes sense. They taste like the cherriest bing cherries ever, a more concentrated cherry taste, like a food some great chef might come up with, although in this case the chef is nature and horticulture working together.

Nectarines, smashed avocado on bread, and coffee for breakfast.

Durazno-plátanos. The words mean, literally, “peach-bananas,” but these are pale-colored nectarines. Very juicy and fragrant, with an added tropical banana flavor. I had previously eaten “only” duraznos (yellow peaches), exquisite nectarines (Chileans don’t have a separate word for nectarine), and conserveros (paler canning peaches, what we would call white peaches). What a delicious array!

Peruvian food. On the eve of Lucy and Eduardo’s first wedding anniversary, the four of us walked to a highly recommended Peruvian restaurant, La Calesa, in an elegant, pumpkin-colored building on General Lagos near downtown Valdivia.

La Calesa serves an excellent pisco sour, the classic Chilean drink: fresh lemon juice, pisco (Chilean brandy), and powdered sugar topped with whipped egg white. If you click on the upper photo to enlarge it, you can see to the left of the lawn chair a stunning, several-years'-old rosemary plant. Smell that?

The restaurant is small and by-reservation-only, and it has two season-dependent seating locations: indoor winter rooms with 15-foot tall ceilings and Peruvian appliquéd wall hangings, and the summer terrace and garden overlooking the river at sunset.


Of course, we sat outside, despite the cooling evening air and eventual darkness. A two- or three-year-old boy and a cat (both belonging to the owners, I imagine) roamed the garden and terrace during dinner. By the time our food arrived, the sun had set, and I couldn’t make out all the different mariscos in my spicy mixed seafood over rice, but they were delicious. Unfortunately, none of us knew to order the classic Peruvian dish, Ají de Gallina. But we did get a first taste of delicious Peruvian spice mixtures, and it will not be the last. I have already ordered a Peruvian cookbook; so far, what I’ve learned is that the base for their spice mixtures is the Peruvian ají—a yellow-orange pepper.

Iranian food. Lucy, Eduardo, Michael, and I were invited for dinner by a Bahá’í Iranian family. Both parents are teachers who met in the United States before moving to Chile, and they speak fluent Farsi, English, and Spanish. The housing development in Valdivia where they live is clean but visually boring. The inside of their small house, though, is decorated with colorful, delicate Iranian art and fabrics. Their two sons study guitar and piano with Eduardo. We ate a multicultural meal together: pilaf—rice with saffron and, from the bottom of the rice pot, darkly browned slices of potato; a spicy lamb and tomato main dish (topped with French fries—an adaptation to make Iranian food attractive to teenagers?); the typical Chilean tomato salad (peeled and sliced tomatoes, slices of onion, lots of lemon juice, salt); pebre verde (green Chilean pepper salsa); and for dessert a tray piled with slices of sandía (watermelon).

Muchos tipos de pescados y mariscos en el Mercado Central, en Santiago.

Pescada. The “ordinary” fish (pescado) Kika cooked for us, her favorite. Poached with peppers, onion, garlic, and served with Chilean tomato salad (minus the onion), pebre verde, Chilean rice, jugo durazno, and sandía for dessert.

Merquén pizza. In Barrio Belles Artes in Santiago, we found a small Italian-style pizza café, Verace, that serves a Chilean/Italian pizza with a very thin, chewy crust, a thin layer of mild tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, and a sprinkling of merquén. Merquén (also merkén) has a slightly smoky taste, like chipotles, and I use it at home on anything with avocados, potatoes, or eggs. And I have now added pizza to that list.

I had assumed merquén was made from Chilean ají verde chiles, ripened to red, then dried, smoked, and crumbled. But in The Chilean Kitchen, Ruth Van Waerebeek-Gonzalez calls it a spice mixture from southern Chile made with ají cacho de cabra—maybe this is the larger, dark-red, dried chile I’ve seen in the mercados? Her recipe, adapted for what’s available in the United States: 4 T. dried oregano, 2 T. ground coriander, 1 T. cayenne pepper. I have doubts about so much oregano, though, since the Chilean merquén looks and smells essentially like smoked red pepper.

Wikipedia en español describes merquén as an ancient Mapuche spice (the word merquén comes from Mapudungun, “merken” with a flat-line accent over the n) made from dried and smoked ají cacho de cabra, semillas de cilantro (which we call coriander), sal (salt), y otros especias (unnamed additional flavors). Ha! And a site about the mercado in Temuco (northeast of Valdivia) shows a photo of the ají cacho de cabra chiles—they are the dark-red ones! “Cacho de cabra” means a little bit or horn of the goat. Ah!—why didn’t I bring some home? Next time.

—Jane

SIETE/ Siestas (Naps)

At my age sleep takes you when you least expect it and never when it should. I mean at midnight, when you’re in your bed, which is just when the damn thing disappears or plays hard to get, and leaves old people wide awake.
—Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

We read out loud from The Savage Detectives in Chile, and I recognized the wakeful nights Bolaño’s character Amadeo describes (in the quote above) but not the “sleep takes you when you least expect it” part. However, that was about to change.

I haven’t been a daytime napper since the 1980s, when I stayed home with young children, so I was amazed to find myself happily falling asleep most afternoons on the trip, even in strange positions and in other people’s spaces: upper body slouched across Lucy’s couch with legs awkwardly propped on a wooden stool; flat on the floor at the beach house; on the sand at various beaches; in bed at our hostal in Valdivia right over the busy, noisy dining room at mid-day; sprawled on a bed in a small, very warm apartment in Santiago; on Eduardo’s aunt Kika’s bed.

Michael and I happily asleep on the floor of Roger and Magdalena's beach house, above the Playa de los Amorados.
—Photo by Lucy Engle.

It didn’t seem to matter where. I would be up and fine and doing things and then, early-to-mid-afternoon, it was as if small weights suddenly appeared and attached themselves to my arms, legs, eyelids, jaw, pulling me toward the horizontal, and I would think, “Oh, a nap would be good.” If I closed my eyes, three minutes later, I’d be out. Maybe for only fifteen minutes. Maybe for two hours. Sometimes when I woke up, the weights would still be exerting a downward pull, so I just let myself sink right back in again. Maybe for a few minutes. Maybe for another hour.

I have several theories.

(1) We were in the culture of siestas. Others were doing the same thing at that time, or had in the past, whether I saw them or not. Stores close in Chile between 1:00 or 1:30 in the afternoon until 3:00 or 3:30 or later. What are people doing during that time? Eating lunch, meeting a friend, having sex, taking a nap? The opening-back-up time for stores seems to vary from day to day, maybe because the storekeeper took a longer nap that day?

(2) It is exhausting to struggle day after day with hearing and speaking a new language. Maybe there are people who just get more energized from the task, but I’m not one of them—I find it tiring. It’s helpful to just let the whole project fall away regularly.


A view of sleepy leaves out the window of our bedroom in the cabaña on Lago Maihue.

(3) We were on vacation for five weeks, the longest Michael and I have taken time away together in at least thirty years, or maybe ever. We slept ten hours a night despite paper-thin walls at the hostal in Valdivia AND took naps, during summer. Although we had come from winter, when it’s natural to sleep more hours. We both experienced a flood of dreams, many per night often. And the dreams seemed to be constructed primarily from fresh, immediate, day-before materials—where we’d been, what we’d seen, how it felt in that recent moment—without many biographical threads. Maybe one is already halfway asleep, living in another language on a long vacation far from home. It’s a relief to live for a time outside the U.S.-influenced view of the world. And, it’s also another kind of relief to step out of one’s personal life and anxieties and established patterns. In Chile I’m more extroverted and more focused on the here and now, so long-term worries can move to the back burner.

Sometimes after waking up from a short nap, I’d test this new nap ability. I’d think, “Wow, I just fell hard asleep. Can I do it again?” So, I’d deepen my breathing and let go. And, bam! I’d fall back in and wake up some time later. Sometimes I tested it three or four times in a row, for fun. And it just kept working. Now the question is whether it was solely a long-foreign-vacation phenomenon. Or has the doorway into sleep been nudged open a little wider after a month in the southern Chilean summer?

—Jane

SEIS/ Views from a Santiago Apartment

I love the color of this building seen out our Avenida Mosqueto apartment window in Santiago de Chile. It's a summer morning in mid-December 2007, just before the solstice.

In the upper left of this photo you can see the green hut and the tile roof that appear in this next photo:

A little complex of roof and wall angles. There is a Chilean palm among the trees in the nearby Parque Forrestal. Childishly, I imagine living in the hut with that large stovepipe sticking up from the roof. Staying warm by a wood stove in the chilly winter. Note: no central heating in most Santiago buildings. Wood heat would be very lovely on a gray day.

Leaning out the window a bit and looking further to the right, I see the hills north of the city in the background. Nearer on the right is a little part of the roof of the Museo de Bellas Artes with an interesting ornamental object projecting from the top.

A little lower down and back to the left is this little apt:


Further left, facing northwest:

I love the Chilean palm tree shadow splashed on the red roof. I see various types of construction in this photo: the stone building on the left (a common type downtown), the mortared bricks in the nearer buildings, and the pale mauve brick apartment building on the right. Someone has added a nice penthouse porch to this building. Now look at the parallel curving shadows cast on the corrugated metal roof in the far lower right corner.

I believe that shadow is cast by one of these railings on this apartment building.

No need for a clothes dryer in the Santiago summer. The dry air quickly sucks the moisture out of your wet clothes. And you!

Oops. I was wrong about that shadow. It comes from the patio railing at the very bottom center. I can just see the corrugated metal roof at the lower left. How about that honker black chimney/flue thingy just beyond the patio wall! At the upper left I see a closer view of the penthouse porch I mentioned earlier. And I notice, if I click on the photo to enlarge it, that this building does appear to be brick.


I must have fallen asleep. It's late afternoon already and the sun is in the west. The city air is cooling down. Siesta is over. The streets are beginning to fill with walkers. The best time of a summer day in Santiago is just beginning. Time to head to a café for jugo de frambuesa!

—Michael