8. El Dieciocho

Chilean Independence Day is marked on the 18^th of September. I say marked instead of celebrated because “El Dieciocho” is actually a week-long party in the entire country. Everything was covered in red, white, and blue bits of paper and plastic, and Chilean flags were EVERYWHERE (and of course it looks to me very much like there were Texas flags everywhere, hell yeah).

            I haven’t spent a Christmas here of course, but they say that el Dieciocho is the bigger holiday. Normally the 18^th and 19^th are holidays; the University here planned a half-day on the 17^th, and while the 14^th, 15^th, and 16^th were supposedly normal workdays, there was an Independence Day lunch on the 15^th that turned into a whole afternoon of eating, drinking, and dancing for the grad students and professors. Only ALL OUT eating, drinking, and dancing.

Empanada, Anticucho

Calzon Roto

            Traditional food is abundant and delicious. Empanadas are to be found all the time, but eating one becomes an act of patriotism this time of year. Anticuchos, a kind of extra-meaty shish-kebab, are something I hadn’t seen before but were all over the place last week. Special pastries also come out this time of year – I tried one called calzones rotos, which, in my Tex-Mex Spanish, translates to torn underwear (I enjoyed this too much to ask for a translation). I was with a group of other internationals when this happened, so I’m not sure what the Chilean perception is; the verdict of the other foreign kids was it was really greasy, sat heavy in the stomach, and was way too sweet. I tried it and I’ll be damned if it didn’t taste exactly like a New Orleans beignet (Yandee agreed!). Eating is a huge part of the celebration, and I’ve heard statistics saying the average Chilean gains about seven pounds over the week. Since most of the food is meat-intense, I was able to avoid this outcome myself… until I found a restaurant making vegetarian versions of everything with seitan. I’m so glad my bathroom scale is in storage.

            There’s also a lot of drinking that goes on. Chicha is a fermented beverage made usually from grapes, but sometimes also corn. It looks kind of like Hawaiian punch and tastes kind of like Pine Sol. My curiosity quickly turned into politeness on this one. Lots of Chileans are crazy about it though, and even lots of the other international kids at school. Fortunately I’d never seen any before, so maybe our paths have parted ways for good. Also fortunately, there were other choices: at our department party (which, I will mention again, was on a Tuesday afternoon and was sure to last only an hour or two), there was at least an empty bottle of wine for every attendee. Chileans, as some readers of this blog will be aware, make very good wine and are very proud of it. There is also another Dieciocho specialty named the terremoto – the earthquake! It’s a cocktail made with wine, grenadine, and pineapple ice cream, and I’d been warned since I arrived in Chile how dangerous they can be. They’re very tasty and the alcohol is hard to taste. Thanks to all the warnings, I and all the other foreign researchers managed to keep out of trouble.

            In Chile, there is a national dance. It is called the cueca, and it is danced during the Dieciocho. Here’s a link to some pros. Not everyone dances cueca but it goes on all the time. You can hear the music and people clapping in the street, and even in the grocery store on Wednesday about a dozen people, dressed in full costume with huge skirts and giant spurs, were dancing in front of the check out line.

            After I got to Chile and started working in the lab, I started getting to know some of the other students and researchers. It turned out several of them are really good dancers, and they were teaching the internationals in the lab to dance cueca a couple of times a week in the evenings. Somehow I got talked into it. I never got very good, but it’s a lot of fun! Somehow, I got shanghaied into a dance competition at the lab party. And unfortunately, someone took pictures.

Here’s me with the prize I won! 

(for effort :-P)

So where does all this eating-drinking-dancing occur? At the fondas! There was one here for Valparaíso and one in neighboring Viña del Mar, so we had our pick. The fondas are full of little booths called ramadas (for all the rustic branches adorning them) where food is available, as well as other shops, dance areas, games, and carnival rides.

If you think this is starting to sound very much like the non-rodeo part of the Rodeo, you’re not alone. The biggest differences are that EVERYONE is at the fondas at night – the streets were eerily empty on the way there and back – and that the fondas are not so hot.

Apart from the fiestas, there was, of course, another event this past week – an 8.3 earthquake with the epicenter just off the coast, several hours to the north. While towns closer to the epicenter were heavily shaken and inundated with tsunami, Valparaíso suffered very little damage (the tsunami didn’t crest the seawall, no buildings were damaged as far as I know). It scared the hell out of everyone though. Yandee and I were at the grocery store when it started rumbling – I was trying to pick out juice and didn’t realize what was going on at first. It was like walking over a bridge while a really heavy truck crosses it, just a barely perceptible wiggling. It was a second or two before I remembered I wasn’t on a bridge and everything shouldn’t be shaking, and by then it was getting much stronger. A few things started falling off the shelves, and we, bewildered to say the least, tried to see what the hell the Chileans were doing, and pretty quickly ran after them out the door. Even with all that, we didn’t really understand how big it had been until we saw how many people were hugging their children and crying outside the store.

            Our Chilean roommate, who is just the nicest and most incredibly thoughtful person in the whole world, ran across the street from the apartment to get us. We ended up staying in the parking lot together for an hour or so, listening to the tsunami sirens at the bottom of the hills below warning everyone to literally head for the hills, and waiting for the aftershocks. Everyone’s been asking if I was scared during the earthquake or how I handled it, but the aftershocks (in this case, since nothing actually happened in town) have been worse. They’ve been several times a day, some very strong to where you can hear the building shaking, others almost imperceptible. Neither is really a worry, but now that they’ve been happening so often I’ve started to expect them - it’s like the phantom phone vibrating in one’s pocket, except it’s literally everything phantom vibrating. It is absolutely the most maddening thing to not be sure if the earth is moving under you.

            But that really is the worst thing here – everyone is fine, all the labs at school are fine, nothing even fell in the apartment, and I managed to text my parents before it hit the news. I can probably manage some minor neurosis a few days more. Maybe by the end of the year I won’t even feel these little tremors – the Chileans claim not to, and I find myself believing them when they can throw such a great party after a shock like that.