Welcome, Winter

Winter officially arrived yesterday as all you Northern hemisphere folk said bienvenidos to summer! Today the ground was blanketed in frost – definitely a first for me in June. Yesterday I celebreated Father’s Day with my Chilean family by going to grandma and grandpa’s for a big feast and then out to the town of Canteras for… you guessed it! Another huge meal.

When we arrived at grandma and grandpa’s we were greeted with quite the aroma wafting out from the kitchen, where grandma was cooking up a big estofado. This is basically every meat you can imagine along with lots of onion dumped into one pot. It was very, very rico, or delicious. During our meal the family explained to me that this estofado is a very typical Chilean meal usually eaten on el día de San Juan, which falls on June 24 this year. There are all kinds of traditions that come along with this greatly celebrated holiday, including the following: the night before el día de San Juan young girls are supposed to take three potatoes and put them under their beds. Then the next morning, right when they wake up, they should reach under their beds and pull out one potato. The type of potato they grab will determine the girls’ futures. I don’t remember the types and their significances exactly, but I know some mean you’ll have a long life, others (like a potato with lots of marks on it) mean you’ll encounter lots of struggles, etc. The night before San Juan young girls are also supposed to write down the names of all the boys they like, put them in a bag, and then draw one name from that bag. The name drawn will be the boy they end up marrying! Another tradition also involving potatoes had something to do with putting ink on a piece of paper, stuffing the paper into a potato, and looking at the image formed when the paper is pulled out (although that one may have gotten a little lost in translation…).

All this talk of Chilean traditions led my host family to ask me about any American traditions we have. I told them about the tooth fairy, who they found quite hilariuos because they, too, have a tradition of putting a tooth under a pillow in exchange for money. The purchaser of the teeth in Chile, however, is el ratón, or the rat! El ratón replaces the child’s lost tooth with a moneda, or coin, and also puts a better, bigger tooth in the child’s mouth. Little cultural exchanges like these make all the small frustrations of living with a host family so worthwhile.

After our lunch at the grandparents’ we headed out to Canteras, which is where one of my host mom’s sisters lives. There we were again greeted with an estofada (round two), and some delicious tortilla, or a type of homemade bread. The type of tortilla we’re used to in the states is what chileans call a tortilla mexicana, and you’ll generally find it near the international foods section in the grocery stores. This chilean tortilla was delicious, fresh bread that went quite well with the meat stew estofado.

One last cultural exchange story. When we were at the grandparents’ earlier in the day, someone decided to put in a DVD of photos from my host brother Claudio’s trip to New Zealand. My uncle would go through the pictures in a slideshow and then every time have to ask my cousin how to get back to the main menu so that he could choose the next slideshow. Every time, without fail, he had to have her help him, and the one time he tried to figure it out on his own he ended up doing nothing more than continue to rotate a picture 90 degrees, over and over and over. I told my chilean family that the exact same thing happens in my household: my parents can’t for the life of them figure out the new technology that enters their doors, and one of their children always has to come to their rescue. A certain generation’s technological ineptitude appears to be one of many things our two cultures share.