Santiago to Valdivia

Good afternoon from Valdivia! We just ate a delicious lunch followed by a kilo of fresh oysters. Next time we will hopefully have the self-control to wait until we get home to eat the oysters so that we can wash the sand off! But anyways, since we last wrote, we couchsurfed a bit in Santiago. We spent two nights with Paris and Jaana, our hosts. We started off Thursday night with a classic Chilean "once" which is a light dinner mainly of avocado and bread then watched a Chilean "western" film called Sal. On Friday they had to go to work so we explored more of the city, and we went to La Chascona. La Chascona is one of Pablo Neruda's homes, named after his third wife who lived there. We learned a lot about the life of Pablo, I never knew how active a communist he was, and how much trouble that got him in with regards to the various Chilean governments of yore. All the books, furniture, and other accoutrements in La Chascona were brought there later on because this home had been sacked and all the contents stolen many years ago. Many of the items had been brought in from his other homes in Chile or Europe. After our visit to La Chascona, we went to two of the markets to get some supplies for the typical American meal we were going to cook for our hosts, hamburgers! Luckily, finding ground meat isn't too difficult in Chile, and the other elements are easy to come by anywhere. We ended up meeting some other friends of our hosts and hanging out until very late/early in the morning. On Saturday we slept in and took a walk to the sculpture park. Here there are a few permanent sculptures as well as some temporary pieces of artwork. We also went to a very delicious Peruvian restaurant where Sarah had corvina en salsa de jaiba, or Chilean sea bass in crab sauce.

Saturday evening we caught a night bus to Valdivia and arrived early Sunday morning. We headed to the fish market and had a quick breakfast of sopapillas, which are sort of like fried bread donuts (very healthy) in sandwhich form. We bought a couple fish filets for lunch as well as some accompanying vegetables. That said, we ended up napping in the early afternoon and eating lunch very late, just in time to go to the annual beer festival! We tried many of the local beers, from small microbreweries and from large breweries like Kunstmann. All were delicious, and Sarah got to wear a really cool hat! We had a quick snack afterwards, and went to sleep after chatting with some other travellers for a bit.

This morning we had the excellent breakfast provided by our hostel (which has a very friendly pet duck for some reason), and then went down to the central market for lunch. We had something called a pullmay, which is basically a steamed bag filled with shellfish, chicken, beef, and sausage. That wasn't quite enough so we ended up buying a kilo of oysters for about $6 and eating them right on the water. Next time we will take them home first as we learned that when oysters are that fresh they tend to have a bit of sand in them them still. So here we are in Valdivia, still haven't decided exactly where we will be going next, but when we do, we will let you know!