1 month in Chile - more pics

THE FIRST WEEK IN SANTIAGO

dancing and flying beside the ¨mighty river Mapocho¨ on a cold and blustery day - we pic-nic-ed here on some benches after admiring the sculptures at the nearby Art Gallery in downtown Santiago; Bellas Artes.

Delia and Hero - we climbed up a small hill in ¨Santa Lucia¨ where a Spanish fort still stands (see below) and Hero sang out an original composition the whole way which wasn´t really very patriotic to our surrounds. one lyric: ¨Argentina¨

a local humoured us for another jump shot - can´t seem to keep from opening our mouths like muppets every time we do it...

Waiting in the metro for the next train... something we´ve been doing a lot.

Heroe´s spot.

she´s the man.

Heroe was such a ´model´ of customer satisfaction after purchasing her several-shades-of-pink parka... Dan, doing a pretty convincing ¨Wictor¨

¨that´s right - the hood stays lady!¨

the 10 seconds that her parka remained clean as we dined in a pizzeria with an apperatif of oversized juice, bendy straw not quite articulated enough...

a gathering of some new Bahá´í ¨friends¨ from the regional Santiago area for a ¨Cluster Reflection Meeting¨ - the Duhart brothers and an Argentinian musician, Dario, bring some sing along guitar strumming to the event.

Baquedano Metro Station - hands down the coolest one. Art all over the place. Here, a wooden man is sculpted from the branch of this mighty trunk balancing above our heads.

THE OUTING

Hero´s first ¨nieve¨ - and Delia´s first in over 10 years! (still haven´t seen it fall though...)

Father and daughter looking into their futures...

¨My hands are frozen and my butt is wet - but I like it!¨

eating the snow was the main objective - and boy did that look good!

Go Dan Go!

Yeee -

-Haaaa!

Javier, Matthias, Sol, Sofia, Dan, Delia, Indiara-Hero.

THE FARM

Hero: Bringing back the pregnant butterfly gumboot look - where did it ever go?

Pants Shmants.

Taking after her Moogie... ¨why won´t this bamboo - flute?¨ she calls this activity ¨slooting¨ - still has trouble putting f and l together.

Fender, Fenix & their moma - they be sleepin...

and sleepin´...

a lie down. in [think Prince] ¨the most uncomfortable bed in the world¨ (old futon. slatted bed frame. say no more.)

José, master house and cabaña builder. good man.

Hero helps.

eucalypts and bamboo are all we need for this one!

Hero enjoys the dappled bottle light in the ¨baño seco¨ (drop toilet) with adobe walls and bamboo and grass roof...

it really is a very pretty dunny.

in Talagante, the farm´s township, under impossible telephone wires. Every phone appears to have its own line, like in the good old days.

STAYING WITH THE KINGS IN QUILLICURA

back row: Kaleb, Dan, Jerry, Forrest. front row: Ingrid, Delia, Noel. (Hero in bed)

Hero and the rabbits. it´s love. a moment later this black and white one (one of them is Toby?) escaped. no harm done though...

The Cart. Jerry is an ¨i can do it¨ man. This is how he gets their groceries from the nearby open market.

Holding on. Having fun. i think.

Good times.

gathering ourselves for the trip down south

Our little stay with the family of ¨Granja Orgánica¨ has ended after 2 weeks, which brings us to the end of week 3 of our Chilean Adventure. We´re now in week 4 and receiveing the warm and generous hospitality of a Bahá´i family in yet another communa of Santiago, called Quilicura. The Kings. They are a Bahá´i pioneering family from North America with 3 teenagers: Noel, Forrest and Kaleb; all very patient and generous with our little Hero, so all´s well. Ingrid and Jerry both teach english, Jerry all over Santiago, Ingrid in a school, and she´s organized for us to go and sing for and interact with a couple of her classes today, which should be fun! Looks like that´s the kind of thing we´ll be getting up to until Friday at least at which point ¨Lilian¨ from ¨Escuela Feizi¨ is ready to receive us in Temuco...

Some more reflections on Chile: We noticed especially in our first week wandering all about the city and hearing various radio stations and cd choices in restaurants that the music tastes were sort of stuck in the 80s, which is great! in the hostel they were constantly tuned into a station 103.3 i think it´s an internet radio station with nothing but classic indi - rock/pop/folk; Beck and Bjork featured a fair bit and a whole lot of 80s and 90s gold! Then in an italian resto that we went to it was nothing but U2. Even a few ¨recent¨ songs by local artists have that heavy synth and drum beat going for them. A local suggested that it may be because they didn´t really experience the ¨80s¨ pop culture while it was happening everywhere else so they´re making up for it now. no complaints here!
Also, Chilenos have some strong qualities which are becoming clearer to us now: one, they are very hard-working. They´ve lived through a ´military´ government into a pretty poor ´independence´ and they´re used to a ´living´ being a struggle. But they haven´t been waiting around for hand-outs. They´ve all just got up and done something! Thus all the vendors i mentioned in the previous blog of reflections; people doing something/anything for a buck. Every ¨micro¨ we got on to go to or from Talagante people would get on to sell either chocolate bars or drinks and then one guy got on and launched into a very dramatic monologue, ending crouched in the stairwell, clapping for himself!
Graffiti and other is very prevelant but not very creative, and a very lovely man called Alix who gave us all a hitch from the farm to Santiago had some interesting insights for us on that and a few other things besides: Namely, that when you´re oppressed or poor or both there isn´t a whole lot of time and energy left over for a luxury like developing your arts, when one can rarely live off them. Therefore, that whole scene is not very rich. there are a lot more tradies than artists and actors. And one will mostly see political statements sprayed on the walls and a whole lot of tags.
Education is not free, and not remotely subsidised by the government. Those who want to, and whose parents have not been able to save enough for the SEVEN years that it takes to gain most ´professions´, they live and work abroad to save up enough for their education and gain a second language in the process. That´s what Daniel from Santiago was starting to do in Sydney. So in that sense, people get to be quite self-sufficient from early on i guess...
However, apparently there is also a strong culture of community support in times of trouble(through the years of military oppression and perhaps also because of this lack of government assistance, if not because it´s a natural impulse in this particular people); it is true that there are almost no beggars to be seen sitting around asking for money, and among those that we have seen none have had a visible disability. Apparently support for people with a disability is really strong, stemming somewhat from this culture of spontaneous community support.
ooh!! Dogs! There are dogs everywhere!! The streets are covered in them, and they´re almost all big dogs, like German Shepherds and such (and domestic dogs too are all big, i´ve seen only one small dog, and it was the unwanted stray dog at the farm called Biodiversidad) ; they look well-fed too, although they clearly live on the streets. Someone told me people like to give them food, so there´s a kind of reciprocal relationship there. AT one intersection, i counted 10, either sleeping or prowling the sidewalk, or having adopted the doorway of any given shop. They own certain streets and give cars a hard time, like a gang protecting its turf. The dogs of Santiago, like the cats of Haifa.

well... got to go now. Breakfast for little poppet and then it´s off to school with us! More photos and news soon.

Chile - no.2 Santiago and environs

First week in Santiago, and after a day of rain the smog cleared to reveal the amazing Andes.
Made contact with the Bahaí community and even found some creatures of a similar size to Indiara Hero.

On the 25th July we set off 40 mins by bus south of the centre of Santiago to a organic farm near the town of Talagante. The family running the farm have two kids, Paco, aged 10, and Manuela, aged 5.... so Hero is happy!

Delia specialises in sorting and packing produce called 'porotos negros'!

Daniel specialises in weeding the carrot field with the other ´trabajadores´.

The farm is incredibly self sufficient. Here we are making gnocci. Food is vegan and very good!

Hero helping with the bi-weekly ´cosecha´ or harvest. She is picking edible Calendula flowers to put in the expensive organic salads to take up to Santiago.

Of course, most of the time is spent amusing herself.

After a week we came up to Santiago on the 1st of August to take part in the reflection meeting for the Bahaís in the Santiago cluster. The property where the event was held has these views of the mountains.
One of the local friends, who is also a well known musician and producer, invited us to stay with his family. The next day they took us up to look for snow!

Javier Duhart.

This was Hero´s first experience of snow.

With Sophia and Sol using car foot mats as sleds!

So after two weeks here, we can say that all is well..! We are very cold but happy and learning much, especially spanish (though Chile spanish is pretty hard to follow as it is spoken quickly with the ends of words missed and with lots of slang..!). Over to Delia for more musings soon!

So! ...it seemed at first that this was an ill-fated journey due to a few false starts, the result i think of a very difficult transition psychologically from the uber-vacation mode to the uber-vigilant mode of international travel. However, although at certain moments we thought we just had to be detached everything worked out in the end (all i´ll say is Thank you Air Vanuatu!) - so i guess it was a warning shot. and since then we´ve been very good with our stuff.

From tropical Vanuatu we arrived in cold and windy Sydney and at¨Home backpackers¨ where on the first morning in the shared kitchen we encountered some good omens: a whole lot of South Americans! ..one of them being a guy from Santiago! and his name was Daniel! so he got to give us a couple of pointers. A lot of posting took place: shedding skin (more! what were we thinking leaving Adelaide with so much!?) and also some souvenir presents sent to various newly weds whose wedding we missed, and friends assorted... a lot of walking about in the lovely company of ¨Great Aunty Helen¨ and both Dan and i took separate opportunities to see a movie at the Uber Greater Union where seats are allocated and the theatre is packed (i saw Harry Potter 6 - fun) lots of people dressing up in costume...

Then off on 16 hour plane trip to Santiago, Chile; they tried to simulate a night for us and get us acclimatized... but it didn´t quite work. We arrived at 3 in the afternoon and were all totally dream - state zonked!! After arriving in Barrio Brasil, one of the oldest quarters which in the 1930s was the fancy neighbourhood and is referred to as the ¨Bohemian¨ neighbourhood had a lot of old buildings and a grungy sort of happy poor feeling. To keep ourselves from falling asleep we wandered about and discovered a Jem!!: Plaza Brasil, which apparently is renown, full of children and their entire families playing on large brightly painted concrete playground equipment and others with trolleys assorted sugary things and shiny plastic toys. In another corner of the same park were a large group of musicians each with a drum of some variety, beating out a bouyant merengue beat from Brazil... in yet another corner a couple set up a little ´theatre´and proceeded to perform a very impressive magic and puppet show. Hero LOVED it, and became very attached to one particular large frog puppet which, after the show, she sought out and hugged at length. sorry, no photos. not long after this hero had a hissy fit and fell completely asleep on my shoulder. we returned to the hostel with a couple of local specialities: completas (hotdog with guacamole and tomatoes and sauces aplenty) and daniel wisely went to bed while i watched a crappy film on cable tv with spanish subtitles. it´s an interesting way to learn new vocab!!

Anywaaaay, since then, impressions and highlights have been, in no particular order:... cold cold cold Santiago. a bit dreary and sombre. smog overhead. no sight for the first few days of the magnificent Andes which ought to overshadow the city, because of the smog. Beautiful stone sculptures in the the museo de las bellas artes. so many different colours and tones to the 33 different communas of Santiago. Found the more ´yuppy´/young part of town: Providencia with a bit of a shock but the pleasure of seeing more colour and a bunch of interesting second hand stores. clothes, books... searching madly for warm jackets for Hero and myself in anticipation of a predicted 2· wednesday. managed to score both in time. so many winter sales going on. hero happy in a big dusty pink parka. big impressive lunches: little soup, salad, mains, dessert, all for $4. put that in your pipe! crazy theme restaurants that go all the way. maritime themed one that we went to with no bare piece of wall: boats, uniforms, steering wheels, head of boat maidens (i´m sure they´ve got a special name but hey! i´m no sailor. ) there´s also a viking themed one, a really scary one that we can´t quite pick theme of but in one room (seen through the window) every bit of wall is covered in wooden masks... it really made us wonder how awesome people here would be at dressing up for theme parties! lots of street vendors, selling anything you can imagine. hats, gloves, socks, ear warmers, mint pastilles, (what looks like) goats balls, etc... and where are all the buskers?? well, we just found out yesterday when we finally took a bus (the metro system is so comprehensive we´d only travelled underground): they get on with their voice and instrument of choice, do a little intro and then play and sing - we encountered three and they were really good!! not many people got excited about it (i couldn´t hold myself back from a bit of a ¨whoo!¨personally) but they very often contributed as the musician went around after a few songs, with their open hand. it was pretty good. captive audience. not so cold. no money lying around to be stolen. i can see the logic... now the question is, do dan and i have the guts to pull something like that off?? ask us in a few months. great hostel. fresh fruit, scrambled eggs, coffee, toast etc. although, it´s getting a bit that way that even a really good thing when repeated, becomes hard to swallow... awesome staff too! lots of long late night conversations in stumbling Spanish as i learn learn learn. they´re very encouraging. spent almost an entire (particularly cold) day sleeping. re-creating jet-lag for ourselves. have met up with lots of beautiful bahaí people and gone to a couple of sublimely spiritual devotional meetings with them, shared some music, seen the Bahaí centre, seen the model for the upcoming new Bahaí temple here. now have a bit of plan for after our stay with the wwoofing couple. there´s a school and organic garden project in a rural area of Temuco (waaay down south) which is in harmony with the indigenous Mapuche people. this is run by some baháis and apparently theý´d love to have us for a while. so we´re thrilled... although a little tremulous regarding just how much colder it´ll be down there. oooh!! it rained and cleared the smog and we got a really decent and GLORIOUS view of the GLORIOUS Andes capped in snow. i just cannot get enough of big mountains.

but we leave Santiago tomorrow for nearby Talagante, where we´ll be for at least 3 weeks, and that should be good. photos to follow soon.

Vanuatu - no.6 Last few days

Up to ... July 17th
So our three month epic stay in lovely Vanuatu has at last come to an end...
It was very special to spend so much everyday living time with Dan's parents. I don't know who was more spoilt : Hero to be attended too in such an easy going environment; Delia and Dan to have had a 5star home "B&B" holiday; or the grandparents to have had an adoring little munchkin first thing in the morning everyday!?
Here is a sprinkling of pics from near the end of our sojourn :

The big camping trip to "dry creek" on the other side of Efate...