Pichilemu

Last weekend I took advantage of my Friday and Saturday off for Easter weekend, or Semana Santa, and headed with my friend Abby to Pichilemu, a coastal surf town about 3 hours away from Santiago by bus. We had a few minor snags before we left, including an overbooked hostel and a rainy forecast, but I knew when the bus pulled in and we saw the clouds clearing off and the gigantic waves that we had made the right decision.

I'm not usually a last minute person, but we waited a little too long to try to make reservations, so by the time I actually started actively looking for a place to stay,  many of the places were already booked. I should have seen the red flags when one of the places that I had contacted indicated that they were booked already but the next day was showing availability on the Hostelworld website. To make a long story short, emails were sent, apologies were issued, and luckily we were able to book a really nice place to stay out near Punta de Lobos. The tricky part was trying to get my 10% deposit back from Hostelworld, and although the owner took responsibility for not having updated the site properly, her final word to me via email was, "I guess if you really want the 5,000 pesos you can track me down when you get to Pichilemu." Really??? I won't name any names, but I will say that the place we did end up staying, the Natural Surf Lodge, is a really nice place with great views, complete with sounds of the nearby crashing waves. I was also lucky that after a few emails back and forth I was able to get my credit card refunded without having to go track down crazytown herself at her overbooked hostel.

Cactus at the ocean? Who knew?

I want to see someone surfing this wave

In my opinion, too cold for this

Poor guy, I wonder if he's gotten used to the sand between his toes

Yes, we took a carriage ride

Jam packed and waited forever, but totally worth it

Long Weekends

One of the first pieces of information that I perused before arriving here in Chile was a calendar with a list of the public holidays. Some of the days are the same as my days off in the US, but others are new to me so I've had the opportunity to take advantage of days such as Dia del Profesor, which allowed me to sleep in on a Saturday, something I hadn't been able to for several months.
Several weeks ago while you folks at home were celebrating Columbus Day, we also celebrated a public holiday here that's is referred to as Dia de la Raza. This day in some Latin American countries might be seen as a counter to Columbus Day, but in talking to some of the Chilean teachers here they said that they prefer to think of it as neutrally as possible and just celebrate the discovery of the Americas.
For this long weekend I ventured about 6 hours north to La Serena, a popular vacation and beach area that sits adjacent to the beautiful Elqui Valley. I wanted to visit before the tourist season, and although it was very cloudy and a little cold, I managed to spend most of the trip seeing some of the clearest blue skies that I've even seen in my life. The skies here are so clear that this area is home to many international observatories, and although this time I didn't have the opportunity to to take a tour, just star-gazing and identifying constellations myself that I haven't seen for ages made the trip worthwhile.

Vicuna, one of the smaller towns that composes this valley is also the birthplace of the famous Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, the first Latin American winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in literature. We had the chance to visit the tiny museum dedicated to her, and almost missed this opportunity since the time had changed the night before and we didn't realize it. The man kept telling us that the museum was closing at one o'clock, and I kept thinking that this was odd since it appeared to only be 11:45.

We also visited Pisco Mistral in Pisco Elqui, stopped in for a tour and tried some pisco, a liquor distilled from grapes, (you can see the vines pictured below) and most famously present here in Chile in a drink called pisco sours. Delicious!

I was so wiped out from that last long weekend that this time I decided to take the opposite approach and spend my long weekend for Dia de Todos Los Santos right here in Santiago. This Catholic holiday is celebrated on November 1st to honor all of the saints, both known and unknown and is marked by mass visits to the cemetaries. This morning I read in the publimetro newspaper that between Sunday and Monday about 700,000 people visited the Cementario General de Santiago. I asked some of my adults students this morning about how/if they celebrate and some said that they always go to the cemetary, others never do, and some usually go but didn't go yesterday since it was so hot.
I can attest to the heat yesterday, as I was out riding around on my bike quite a bit and at times felt a little light headed. It was a great weekend to get caught up on rest, read, spend some quiet time, and Skype since everyone else here at the house was away at the beach. I plan to relax as much as I can right now on the weekends since I'm working so much during the week and save up my travel time for the upcoming summer months!