Paseo a Pomaire

Hola po! So my weekend was pretty bacán (cool, groovy, hip, slammin', neato). Friday night I went to a fiesta at the YMCA where I volunteer. The fiesta was an early celebration of los días patrias, which is pretty much a 5-day celebration (starting this Wednesday) of a couple different things, but most importantly, Chile's independence. Anyway, at the fiesta, they had cueca dancers (la cueca is a national dance) come in and perform for us, which was super neat. I sat with the people I help teach English to, and they attempted to teach me some Chilean dance moves. Que entretenido!

Saturday, my program took un paseo to the pueblito de Pomaire, a little town known for its mastery of greda (type of clay) making. A lady from Pomaire invited us to her house and fed us breakfast and lunch. After breakfast she led us into town and took us to a greda making factory. Here, they dig the greda from the ground, grind it up, make some sort of pottery out of it, and bake it. We all got to make little pots too, but I'm pretty sure the minute we left, they took all our creations and mashed them back up so they could make decent looking pottery instead of ugly little bowls.

Here's me making my bowl.


















I accidentally pushed the first one off the wheel and smushed it, so I got to make another.


















The finished product!


















This is how the professional does it. It takes him less than a minute to make a pot.



This probably took him a half hour. I have no clue how he can make them all so similar. Que loco.
























After that, we walked to the other side of town (yeah, and it probably took all of 5 minutes -- it's a pretty small town) and were met by a lady who helped us make piggy banks! Here's my finished product. It kind of looks a lot like a fat bear, but whatevs, it'll hold my pesos.



















Saturday night, a few friends and I found a wee pub called O'Flannery's. It's everything you could ever imagine an Irish pub to be. Except it was filled with Chileans. Which I found to be hilarious. But maybe that was just the pisco. Anyway, on they were also hosting karaoke, and golly, you know me. I shoved my way up to the stage and told them I wanted to sing:

"What do you want to sing?!" they asked.
"Anything in English!!" I replied.

And 5 minutes later, I'm singing for some R-E-S-P-E-C-T. And after that, the rest of the gringos joined me, resulting in the worst rendition of Piano Man ever sang. Immediately after, they told us to go sit down. It was super fun though, and I'll definitely be going back. The people were super friendly, and didn't pull the usual "Oh you don't speak Spanish? Well, I see you're trying but I'm not even going to try to understand you because it's not perfect Spanish. And I'm too good for you" thing.

And yesterday I did absolutely nothing. And it felt wonderful.

Oh, and by the way, today it was in the 70s and the sun was shining and I wore flip-flops!! Yaaaay!!

Besitos!