It was a weekend packed full of activities. On Friday evening I met Aranka, Marja and lots of other people to eat dinner at a restaurant called los Canallas which used to be the sort of left-wing resistance place during the years of the regime in Chile. It was pretty interesting with lots of notes and pictures on the walls from famous people. We ordered a plate of meat for four and could barely make a dent in it. It was kind of strange looking too and we weren't sure what some of it was. There were a couple of men playing the guitar and songs that all the Chileans knew and were singing along to and then they played a few that we outsiders knew so we could have a sing-along. Great fun and certainly didn't intend getting home at 2 a.m.!
On Saturday I met Marja, Renee and Mattias and we went to Patronato with the intention of going shopping for cheap clothes but in fact we ended up in Mercado Central having lunch. It all started with poor guidmanship or maybe we just couldn't decide who was the guide so we ended up on the wrong side of the road in the wrong place but finally got to Patronato. We walked through Patronato and decided that we were hungry so we took an extremely long detour to Mercado Central where fish and vegetables and stuff is sold. What is best for is its really cheap restaurants with good food. We finally settled on one restaurant and all hat Reinata (I think that's what it's called) which is a really delicious fish. We had to hurry on from there though because us girls had to go to the Sean Paul concert. Oh yes!
We got there at 5.30 ish which ended up far too early as the doors didn't open until 6. After a few spilled drinks and general clumsiness the doors opened and we went in...and straight to the toilets after all that water! Everyone else ran in to get a good place (we were in the standing part but not the front standing part.). We sauntered in and got the last good place without too much effort and proceeded to eat our very large tub of popcorn-yummy!-whilst we waited for the first act to come on. It was a good while before the first act came on but it was fun waiting anyway. We saw the Mala Rogriguez and Sean Paul who were both great. Sean Paul's dancers were the best though, he had some woman doing Jamaican style dance and we were all in awe. The concert finished about midnight and I said bye to Aranka as she was leaving for the North for two weeks and headed to bed.
I had to get up REALLY EARLY on Sunday to meet Marja and Renee to go to the ski hire place. We arrived just as they were opening their doors and just as the sun was showing signs of coming up. We spent a good while getting our skis fitted and trying on ski clothes to hire for the day and then all hopped in the bus for Colorado. We arrived at about nine-thirty and went to get our lift passes for the day. Unfortunately the incompetent ski company had fitted my skis wrong so I had to get them adjusted which was a pain but only a small hindrance.
The snow was great! There were no icy bits and the view was sensational. You couldn't really see Santiago as it was in a cloud of smog as always but I knew it was there. We stopped for hot chocolate (they call it Milo here) a few times because it was simply too cold to stay outside for long and the lifts were slow so we froze until we got to the top. One of my students told me that quite often a lot of people don't go skiing in June because it's too cold which explains why there weren't so many people around.
We decided at 4 that that was enough and we headed down to the bottom for more hot drinks. The bus collected us at 5 and we drove down the mountain in the sunset. Beautiful!
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