Posts Tagged ‘cooking’

This post is a bit overdue, but I’m sitting here in a café a few blocks from my apartment, enjoying fast, free wifi, and I figure that finally updating about my trips is as good as any reason to put off reading an actual book, so here we go.

A week or two into our Intensive Language Program we were given the assignment to take a weekend trip, in groups, out of Santiago to another community and then to give a presentation to the rest of the EAP group about the place we had visited. I was with a group that decided on the general assignment of Papudo/La Ligua/Zapallar, three small towns in the same general vicinity, all very different. We decided to stay in Papudo and head out from there.

This is not where we stayed, but I found it pretty funny. The name means "Open All Year."

A couple of hours in a bus later, we arrived in Papudo and proceeded to a hostel at the side of what could generously be known as the “center of town,” a plaza filled with grass and trees, a busted phone booth and a snack stand. The hostel was a nice place, run by a friendly couple with several rooms in the back, with anywhere between one and four beds per room.

We had had a brief misunderstanding with the prices, as we had thought it would cost $5 per night (dos mil quinientos), but it in fact would cost $25 per night (doce mil quinientos). Still, the place was quite nice, and came with breakfast, and we managed to haggle them down to $20 per night if we all stayed both nights. Still a bit much, but the best we’d be able to find. We quickly split up into our rooms, with people generously letting me take one of the singles due to my hacking cough at the time, and we settled in.

Papudo is a beach town, almost entirely based around tourism and fishing, both of which are far more lucrative exploits in the summer. Going in dead winter, we found the town next-to-deserted, with empty restaurants, beaches and streets with a few local kids and the occasional Santiaguino couple that decided to get out of town for the weekend.

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Full update to come, for now a few key highlights:

People in Papudo lie. A lot.

• Beach at night

• Pasta with crazy sauce (with crazy)

• wine

• the Pacifier / Rambo – the two movies that can be most easily translated to Spanish without losing the nuance

• 7 people in a 5-seater

• Empanada with palta (avocado, are you mad?)

• Ridiculously elaborate ice cream sundae

Eat your heart out, City.

• cheap taxi

• sunset

• just enough cooks in the kitchen

• wine

• rock hike

• crab cake(s)

• pregnant horse