We're bringing joy to students!

Sort of. Carly and I have started volunteering at an English-language school. This school has been around for decades and is in the middle of downtown here in Valpo. So far we're having a great time! We've given a couple PowerPoint presentations on Seattle with pictures and amusing anecdotes. We also went in Wednesday to talk with the senior citizen group. Their English level is still very low, so it was a very basic conversation. But they were all pretty nice old ladies.

Carly and I were supposed to go in last Saturday to help out with the younger students. Since kids go to school until late afternoon on weekdays, they can't squeeze in additional English classes except on Saturdays. There was like 120 students from 5 years old all the way up to high school seniors.

However, Carly woke up at like 4 a.m. on Saturday and had a HUGE lip. It was enormous! Just the top lip though. I joked that she made Angelina Jolie look like she had bird lips. Carly looked a lot like the girl in this article. It's kind of gross! It went away in less than 36 hours. We're guessing it was some allergy to this weird bread stuff with garlic and who knows what else we ate on Friday night.

So, Carly missed the volunteer day on Saturday! I had lots of fun though. First, I spent nearly two hours helping 13 and 14 year old students put together a TV news broadcast in English about global climate change since Earth Day was this week. The teacher filmed it to make a real video. There were two news anchors (shown in picture), a weather girl, several student journalists who interviewed other English teachers, and I played an expert scientist who was interviewed on camera. It was fun.

We were also going to have a little chat session with students about recycling, but I was on my own. It turned out to be an entire auditorium of people. Parents of students came. All the teachers were there. It was crazy! So, for 20 minutes I was talking to this huge crowd of people and educating them about the three R's: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. I think I did pretty well. Everyone seemed to enjoy it too, but then again many probably didn't understand everything I said. Here's a photo from the speech.
This week, Carly and I ate at Pizza Hut TWICE because it was so delicious! Most pizza crust here is thin and hand-tossed. We wanted some pan pizza and it turned out to be better than at home. We also got salad on Tuesday; a good, basic salad is something we haven't experienced in Chile yet, so it was nice to have.

We also just bought our plane tickets to visit the Atacama Desert. It's way up in the north of Chile. We had originally planned on taking a bus, but the ride is well over 20 hours each way from Santiago. The 8-hour ride to Argentina was so unenjoyable that we paid a bit extra and got plane tickets. The flight is about 2 hours each way.

The Atacama Desert is the driest place on Earth! Check it out. We're going from June 9 to June 14! Carly's going crazy to see alpacas and/or vicuñas and/or guanacos.

Con Con and Its Delectable Seafood

Today it was in the mid 70s and really sunny so we decided to go visit Con Con. It's a beach town that's north of Viña del Mar. We originally went because we found out that they have a park full of dunes and we wanted to ride in a dune buggy. We ended up not being able to find where the dunes are or if they even offer dune buggy rides. We did however end up eating a huge 3 course meal that consisted all of seafood.

Con Con is the gastronomical capital of the region, but they serve mostly seafood. The streets are lined with restaurants offering seafood specials and many varieties of empanadas. We decided to treat ourselves to a large lunch since we hadn't eaten anything. We sat down at one of the restaurants and ordered the lunch special which consisted of salad or rice, fish, and an empanada. We knew we were ordering seafood but didn't quite know what types of food we were getting. We both got a cheese empanada, reinata, and rice. Our cheese empanada was quite large for an appetizer. I thought that it tasted a bit like seafood then we discovered that it was a cheese empanada that was packed with mini shrimp. It actually tasted pretty good with the shrimp.After our empanada they brought us out these huge bowls of soup called paila marina. It consisted of a bowl with a bunch of clams in the shell and out of it. We were both surprised because we thought we had ordered fish and we both aren't very keen on shellfish. We figured the reinata must be in the soup. The soup was actually pretty good and I drank a lot of the soup broth. I avoided eating most of the clams though. I did eat one whole clam which tasted like a rubbery chicken with a fishy aftertaste. There were also these little strips of white stuff in the soup that tasted like chicken. I decided I don't like eating clams because they're gritty and rubbery. Also, I don't find their black pouch of poo very appetizing. Jeff had a really difficult time eating the soup because he has phobia of all things from the sea. He did manage to eat some of the fish he had in his soup; sadly mine didn't have any fish only clams. Needless to say we did not finish all our our soup and we were a bit grossed out by it.

My paila marina. I filled the huge clam up with all the clam bits in my soup then turned it upside down so it'd look like I ate it.

After they took our soup bowls we then found out that the next course was actually our reinata and rice. By this time I was pretty full already. They brought us a plate of fried reinata with rice. It was actually really good but I could barely eat half of it. The whole meal plus bebidas only costs about $9000 clp. They also gave us really good bread with a spicy sauce. We both ended up eating more seafood than we would have liked. I think we both had enough seafood to last us the rest of our trip.After the seafood we went to check out the beach. It was a nice flat beach with really fine sand. The water was still freezing cold but there were some people boogie boarding. There was also a place where you could rent horses and ride them along the beach. It was all very scenic.
Before we left we got some churros, which were delicious! They weren't too sweet and they didn't overdo it on the powdered sugar so they weren't too messy. It was 8 churros for only $1000 clp. Overall, it was a fun day trip. We are going to do more research on where exactly the sand dunes are and if they have dune buggies. We would both like to go riding if it's even possible.

A Super Busy Week

We had a super busy week with our friends Debbie and Devin visiting! Because our friends were here, we turned into super tourists and took lots of pictures, so we're including lots of them here with brief captions. Enjoy!

Kraftwerk opened for Radiohead live in Santiago on March 26. The music was good for techno, but it was just four guys using computers on stage. For one of the songs, this picture, they put robots out to play in their place. It was a bit weird.

Radiohead was everything we had hoped for. They really know how to put on a show. There was a lot of people there and everyone was recording the show with a camera or their cell phone (see all the little lights in the audience?). They have a lot of light effects too, so it's extra cool. Since it was their first show in Chile ever, they played lots of older songs that they don't play much.



Check out this crazy road on the way to the pass between Chile and Argentina. The pass reaches 11,483 feet!!! The ride was about 7 hours from Santiago to our destination of Mendoza, Argentina, but the ride we pretty scenic. Look at the next few pictures.

Plaza Indepencia is the central park in Mendoza. They have a fancy water fountain and lots of people just hang out.
Debbie tried to ask the police officers what was going on across the street. We think it was a protest, possibly by communists. Debbie is not sure if she understood what the officers were saying, but she thought that they asked for money. Hm. Maybe Debbie needs some more Spanish classes.
On our wine tour, we went to one of the biggest wineries in Argentina, Bodegas Lopez. 95% of their wine stays in Argentina because it's "affordable." Really, that just means that it's not high enough quality to export. They had a pretty cool tour though and jumbo wine bottles for us to pose with.



Carly posed with our wine tour bus when we stopped at the other winery, Cavas de Don Arturo. This was a much smaller, family owned and operated winery. They export all of their wine to...Kentucky! They have a family connection there, so all their wine goes to Kentucky and gets distributed around there. They sell very little in their shop and the area. We bought a bottle because it was quite tasty.

They also had the wine dog who oversaw all winery operations. He was pretty friendly. He also enjoyed eating cabernet sauvignon grapes. The picture below the doggy is the cellar where they age some of the wine in casks.



After making it back to Valpo, we had a couple of touristy days. We got a sweet deal on a boat tour down at the port. It gave us a great view of the city. We had been wanting to take a boat ride, so I'm glad we finally did. After our boat ride, we went up on the hill near where Carly and I spent our first day in Valpo. It has a great view of the city and port. There are several souvenir booths up there and Debbie went all out. She supported several Chileans in one afternoon.

Domo Domingo is Back!!

Last Monday Domo took a trip to Mendoza Argentina for some wine tours and to get our tourist cards renewed. We'll do a detailed blog with lots of pics tomorrow.