Buenas

Ok, so I've fallen behind. Again.  I know, I know.

But seriously, the month has flown by.  I've been out of town for the past five weekends: Las Cabras with Techo para Chile, Mendoza, San Pedro de Atacama, Pichidangui for the 21st (my birthday and, coincidentally, a national holiday), and Viña del Mar (again).  It's been exhausting, but (mostly) awesome.  There have been some ups and downs (sickness, etc.), but I'll get into that in a second.


So first, some pictures from San Pedro de Atacama.   The top three places the nature shows tell you to visit in Chile are Torres del Paine/Patagonia, Isla de Pascua, and San Pedro; I can see why.  The landscape is absolutely SURREAL.

When we got off the plane, we went to see a copper mine (Chile is the world's greatest producer of copper, and there are hella mines in the north where we were).  I could not BELIEVE the size of those man-made canyons.

Ridiculous.  Later, we went on a bike tour through this beautiful area in San Pedro.  I was feeling sick all weekend, so I was really happy to hear that I could still go on the tour and skip the bike part (I was allowed to follow behind in the truck that followed the group).  Beautiful sights/ancient indigenous sites.

We stopped by some ruins, and found a sweet spirit circle:

And then we climbed a giant sand hill, which was kind of impossible? But worth the effort.

View from the top:

My friends Martin and Julie on the way down the sand hill.

Next stop: el Salar de Atacama.  It's the largest salt flat in Chile; salt, salt, salt, as far as the eye can see:

So that was San Pedro.  Gorgeous.  I'll try to write a little more in the next couple of days and catch you all up.  ¡Que les vaya bien! ♥

San Pedro de Atacama

 

This weekend I visited a family that had alpacas in their backyard.

...I can now say that I am satisfied with my South American experience/life in general.

Techo para Chile

I don't have a lot of time, but I figured I'd put up some pictures from last weekend. We went down to Las Cabras to build mediaguas (emergency housing).  We're still not allowed to go down to the most affected areas; they are still officially "unsafe for travel" as far as our exchange group is concerned.
(Note: all of these photos are the work of my friend Mari; I forgot my camera at home (oops).)

 Las Cabras is the little red "A" in the bottom left corner.

Some pictures:

The building site, with work already started (and a school bus in the back).

Mediagua construction is not rocket science.  You dig some holes, put wooden posts down (pilotes), make sure they're level, then start building the pre-fab "house" on top.  It does help to have a little previous know-how or some leadership if you've never done it before, though (especially if you have a building site as difficult as ours).  The first day, we had neither (just diagrams, materials, and ganas (motivation)).  What we DID have were the remnants of a 200+ year old house, and the nastiest foundation I have ever seen.  Cement.  Bricks.  More cement.  Boulders.  Needless to say, we spent a lot of time digging the first day (actually, we spent the ENTIRE first day digging.  Lots of rocks.  Lots.)

Sadly, this rock wasn't even one of the big ones.  We were unearthing small planets in this yard, no lie.

Leveling the pilotes.

Remnants of the house.  That covered-over, patio-looking part?  That used to be their indoor kitchen.  If you look closely, you can see that the only room left of the house is separated from outside by cardboard (CARDBOARD.  I think about 6-7 people were living together in the one room they had left, protected by CARDBOARD).

More cardboard.  You can kind of see where one of the old walls used to be in the back there.

Two of the kids, with the remnants of their house in their "front yard" (which all used to be house, not yard).

The second day, a helper/leader showed up, and revealed that (almost) all of the instructions we had been given were wrong.  He was great, though! Very patient.

Our friend Colin, with the grandpa of the house (sweetest old man ever).

Gettin' down on the roof.

The ladies of the crew (from left): Jules, Ryann, me, Cintia, KK.  Some bad-ass, strong women here.  (Quote of the weekend? "We don't need no man!")

Anyways, it was hard work, but good work.  I really hope I get to go down again before I leave.  This weekend some of us are heading to Mendoza, Argentina (visible on the map above in the top right corner).  The limitations of our tourist visas require that we leave the country every 90 days, so we're heading over there for a couple of days.  Hopefully we'll come back with some quality wine and leather goods.  Until then, take it easy! Que les vaya bien. ♥

Some fotos

A couple of fotos from our trip to Valpo/Viña a couple of weekends ago (I know, I know... sorry for the delay :) ).  Like usual, I have borrowed some pictures from friends; the source is (always) credited at the bottom of the photo.

First, we visited one of Pablo Neruda's houses in Isla Negra (he has three: one in Valpo, Santiago, and Isla Negra).  Gorgeous! The man had good taste in property.  He built his house with the idea of making it a boat on land; it was really a cool thing to see.  I'm definitely ready to move in.

                                                                                                     

                                                                                                          ©Kaitlin King

 Right on the sea.  Gorgeous.

Later, we headed over to Viña, where our hotels were, and had dinner in Valpo.  Some somewhat blurry photos of Valparaíso:

 

at night...

...and during the day:

Valparaíso has flat parts (the picture above), but something like 98% of the population lives on the cerros (hills).  The houses are literally one on top of the other, connected by a bunch of really narrow, sketchy pathways/staircases:

...imagine being faced with this guy on the way back from the bar, yeah?

Here you can kind of see the one-house-on-top-of-the-other thing.

While in Valpo, we saw a performance by a local musician named Pascuala Ilabaca (click the link to go to her Myspace page).  Really cool.  She played the accordion and sang for us (her own songs and covers of more traditional pieces).  If you click here, you can watch her (awesome) version of Chilean folklore legend Violeta Parra's "Puerto Montt está temblando" (the video is not too great, but it's the only one I could find).  The lyrics describe Parra's experience with an earthquake in May of 1960; pretty fitting given our little "experience" at the beginning of the semester, yeah?

Anyways, after some time in Valparaíso, we visited a vineyard on our way home:

Me and my friend Matt, mid-wine-tasting:

Finally, we paid a visit to the sanctuary of Chile's first saint: Teresa de Los Andes.  It was a beautiful sight to see:

Anyways, that's about it for right now.  This week in school is going to be pretty stressful, but afterward I should have some time to relax.  This weekend we're set to go build houses in the south (FINALLY), so I should have some good stories to bring back from there.  Until then, hope everything is going well with you all; ¡que les vaya bien! ♥

Un poco de Patagonia

Some pictures from our trip this weekend.  I'll probably write more in the next few days, but I have a paper due so I can't spend too much time here at the moment.  

This weekend a bunch of my friends from the CIEE group and I went to Punta Arenas, one of the southernmost cities in the world.  We spent about three days there; we flew in Friday morning early (read: ~4 AM), and flew out Sunday way late (technically Monday morning at 2:30 AM).  We took two tours because we didn't have too much time to spend (trust me, I could've spent two weeks in Torres del Paine alone.  It is gorgeous; a nature-lover's paradise).  The first tour we took showed us around Punta Arenas and the surrounding areas  (Punta Santa Ana, Puerto del Hambre, Fuerte Bulnes).  It was really awesome being right on the Strait of Magellan; we arrived right at dawn so we got to see the icy islands across the Strait right as the sun hit them first thing in the morning.  Some obligatory God-this-beach-is-gorgeous photos (as always, click to make them bigger): 

 Group shot (kids in the CIEE exchange group and me):

After the tour, we took a bus to a town slightly to the north of Punta Arenas, Puerto Natales and stayed the night in a hostel.  The next day (Saturday), we took a tour through Torres del Paine National Park.  It was INCREDIBLE.  Every view could've been a postcard.  I was blown away.  I only wish I could've spent more time there, hiking, camping, canoeing, ice climbing, etc. (as I said, this place was a nature-lover's paradise).  I would've paid big money to canoe or kayak all around the glaciers in the park (or climb the glaciers themselves), if I had only had the time.  See how beautiful it is for yourself:

This lake is 3x as salty as the sea.  Incredible, right?

Fresh glacier run-off.  I can't even describe the color and clarity of this water.  I wanted to bend over and drink it.

 

Would you ever imagine that glaciers would be that blue?  I didn't.  It's like Chihuly glass.

Gorgeous, right? And finally, yours truly on the way to the park:

There are so many more photos (as I said, every view was like a postcard; I couldn't help but take tons of pictures), but I'm not going to post them here for lack of space.  I've put them on my Photobucket account: click here for the rest.  Hopefully that link should work.  Let me know if there are any problems with it.

♥