Chile Is My New Favorite Country

Why is Chile so great? Two words: Cheap Beer.
This weekend we learned a valuable new word-Schop. It means beer from the tap. Yesterday we ate at Schopdog in Viña which is where we discovered what schop meant. We had seen it before in other restaurants but never knew what it was. It was at Schopdog that we also found out how cheap tap beer is. A liter of Escudo was only $1.590clp (about $2.55us)! I got a pint of Escudo and that was only $1.090clp. I never want to leave Chile!

Not only is their beer cheap (at least by American standards) but it's also delicious. Their two main beers are Escudo and Cristal. Cristal comes in lager, red ale, and dark. I've only had the lager and red and they're both good. I love Escudo too. It's a lager but it tastes more like a really light brown ale. I was surprised at how good the beers are here especially since they mostly drink lagers. Jeff loves Chile because everyone here drinks soda and I love Chile because the beer is good and cheap.


Anyway, all this beer talk is making my mouth water. We had a pretty relaxing weekend just hanging out. Saturday we didn't really do much. We walked around at the port and near Plaza Sotomeyer (pictured above). Sunday we spent all day in Viña Del Mar. We took the metro to Viña around noon then took a bus to the mall. The buses here are quite small and a little confusing. They have signs on the windows of which streets they go down so you have to know exactly where you want to go.

A View of Viña from the Valpo Port














The mall we went to was surprisingly large. It was three floors and actually had two sections that was connected by a skywalk. Both sections were big and each had a theater. We went and saw Madagascar 2 in Spanish. The story was okay and easy to understand even without knowing any dialogue. It was pretty funny though I'm sure it's a lot funnier if you actually knew what was being said. We bought popcorn to try the dulce (sweet) kind. It tasted just like kettlecorn. In Chile they have two different types of popcorn: sweet or salty. When we saw Yes Man we got salty popcorn and it was the saltiest popcorn we'd ever had! It was drenched in salt and it made our lips and tongue tingly.


After we walked around the mall we went up the block to the beach. All the beaches were packed! They looked pretty nice though the waves looked a bit rough. We never actually went in the water so I'm not sure how warm it is. There were vendors all along the boardwalk selling jewelry and food. There were also some bungee trampolines on the beaches that you could pay to go on. There's even a huge, fancy looking casino near the beaches. We were going to go in but they charged an entrance fee of around $3.600clp.

We walked along most of the coast of Viña and ran into Nacho. Actually, Nacho ran into us. He and his girlfriend came into town just for the weekend and he was on a jog. He looked pretty gross; we took a picture but decided not to put it up. We met up with him and Maria Jose (his girlfriend) later in the evening for gelato at Bravisimo. We didn't end up getting home until 10pm.

Nacho was telling us the beaches are crowded because people from Santiago and Argentina come here on vacations. A lot of Chileans that live out of town own an apartment in Viña and rent it out in the summer because they can charge $400.000clp a night! They can pay off their apartment in one summer. There's also a lot of tourists from the tour boats. A Celebrity Cruise ship was actually docked in Valpo this weekend. While at the Metro station in Valpo a guy asked me if it was the metro to Viña in broken Spanish. Apparently he thought I was a local. Which is pretty funny because Jeff and I don't really look like Chileans.

Today was the first day of our Spanish classes. We started at 9am and went until 1pm. We have three teachers and each teaches a different subject. There were only 4 people including Jeff and I in the beginning class. The other two were guys from Germany, Robert and Christian. There was also an American girl, Emma, and a German girl, Marie, who were in the intermediate class. There were only six students altogether.

The class was pretty intense and it was all in Spanish. I understood most of the class but when we started grammar I was a bit lost. We started by filling out a packet of basic information about ourselves that was all in Spanish then reading it to the class. The teacher asked us questions about each other from the info in the packet. After that the two girls went to the next room and we learned a bunch of breakfast and lunch words such as different types of food and silverware. We practiced describing items too.

The grammar section was for the last 45 minutes. We went through different conjugations of ser and estoy. When we got to the pasado conjugations I was a bit lost. Robert and Christian seem pretty good at Spanish already. When Arturo, the instructor, was giving examples of the conjugations I had no idea what he was talking about but they seemed to understand. I was happy when class was over because my head needed to unwind. I really hope after two weeks I'll be more proficient at understanding and speaking Spanish.

I'll end with a cute puppy we saw at the pet store in the mall. He was uber soft! Pets are expensive here. Bunny rabbits are about $100us and gerbils are like $20! Sadly, they didn't have any ratties at the pet store.