Chile – our first acquaintance

Well, we are not yet in Chile 🙂 Our Chilean friend Sofia invited us to celebrate her country’s independance day together. Chile became free on the 18th of September, 1810. For this occasion, the honour council of this country in Cuenca invited local Chileans and their friends to a small fiesta.

We bought a ticket for $7 which included 2 empanadas (traditional snack here and in Central America – kind of pastry usually filled with meat) and almuerzo, which means lunch.

Everything was happening in Gualaceo village, in the house of one of the Chilean expatriates. He lives here alone for 10 years already. His parents are actually from Israel, so he is not very total Chilean though 🙂

Chile independence day celebrated in a private persons garden in Gualaceo

We got opportunity to listen life music from Chile as there were two small bands playing traditional songs. Really beautiful! Actually nobody cared about tickets. There was plenty of food. Unfortunately for us, almost everything had meat. Instead of big piece of meat for a lunch we grabbed lots of potatoes (in Chile they eat lots of them) and traditional tomato-onion salad. A lot of onion. Sofia explained how they are made so tasty. Onions are simply put into salty water for about 1 hour before mixing it into the salad. We enjoyed this mix very much.

After meat-dish followed kind of a dessert. A traditional Chilean drink. We don’t know its name, sorry 🙂 It contained syrup of apricots, soaked (maybe boiled) groats and the apricot itself. Sweet 🙂 and that was it, we left having sweet dreams about Chile. We are looking forward to visit this country sometime next year. Exciting…

Augustas & Katja