From Sunny Santiago

So, it has been a pretty busy week away from Santiago and lounging on the beach. It´s a tough job but somebody has to do it. I left Friday the 6th with some family for San Sebastian where we went to a different beach everyday and ate ice cream as full meals. The first picture is of me, my cousin Paulina´s husband Keko, and cousins Paulina, María Paz, Juan Enrique and María Soledad waiting for pollo asada. I don´t know if you can tell but Sole is very pregnant and due on January 22nd (an excellent day to be born) . The boys know some English but they are trying to practice their accents and on this night Keko wanted to know the word for ¨print¨so I said ¨pr-i-nt¨and he responded with ¨tr-ee¨it was hilarious, but I´m sure I sound the same way speaking Spanish sometimes. On one drive we passed by the house of Pablo Neruda but it was full of touristas so we didn´t stop, the places we did stop though were beautiful. btw-I heard about the 33 straight days of rain over in Seattle so I´m sorry if this news of endless beaches and sunshine from 6am to 9pm is hard to take... it will be summer over there soon enough. Oh yeah, we beat the ¨how-many-people-can-we-stuff-in-this-car¨record with 10, the 9 in the second picture plus me taking it.

So we returned from San Sebastian on Tuesday the 10th, unpacked and washed our our clothes then packed them up again for our next excursion to Coquimbo up north. This trip was just Tia Ximena, María Paz and me mostly to see Cerro Tololo, a huge observatory with 7 telescopes, but we did the toursity things too. We spent a day in the neighboring city of La Serena, visited the Cruz del Milenio which is a huge cross on the top of a hill that was built as a place to pray at the sanctuary there ("It´s a cross" "Across from where?") and walked around the downtown and port. Then on the 14th we took the 2 hour drive up to Cerro Tololo to tour the facilities. From the top of Tololo (cerro=hill) we were surrounded by more hills as far as we could see. Although they should be considered more of mountains because we were so high up that we were continually warned about altitude sickness but everyone remained fine. The view was incredible, the telescopes were massive and it was totally worth the near 8 hour drive from Santiago. We left Coquimbo at midnight last night and returned home at 6am this morning for my family to vote in the presidential elections. The winner should be known tonight, surprisingly they don´t have to wait months before a new president is named. So I had a great time on the auxiliary vacation but I am glad to be back in the city to get this annoying cast off on Wednesday and get ready for the family party on Saturday. Hope everyone is well and don´t let the rain get you down. Chau.

Update: The woman candidate, Michelle Bachelet, won the elections. The house where I am staying is only about 10 blocks from the city center and we can hear all of the honking cars on their way downtown. The family here didn´t vote for her because she was supported by communists among many other reasons but some other family members love her and what she can do for Chile. It has made for some pretty tense meal time conversations that will either be amplified or diminished by the recent outcome. We´ll see.