November 5: Southern Hospitality

Word of the Day:
kuchen- German for cake, it is pretty much just that. but with tons of delicious variations involving different fruit, crumbles, and creams. The Germans have given Chile a lot of really nice things by my estimation...

I awoke around 6: 30 which was absurdly early given that I had arguing with seatmate Jon about politics until about 1 in the morning. Luckily, it was beautiful when I awoke. Pastoral countryside, green, lush, trees and forests, rivers and gigantic azaleas and rhodedrehons.

We arrived in Puerto Montt around 9 am, to a lot of rain. It was sort of cold and reminded me of the Adirondacks, maybe a Saranac Lake crossed with a bunch of German immigrants and a vague Hamptony touch. Unfortunately, our original plan of kayaking around Lake Llanquihue with the Volcano Osorno reflected in the water seemed unlikely to happen. It was downpouring, but more importantly, the volcano was absolutely nowhere to be seen with the heavy fog blocking it and remained invisible for the rest of the time we were there. We wandered to our hostel, perfectly adequate and as the oldest hostel in the town, full of interesting quirks such a floors and stairs that were completely slanted and woodstoves. After, we went exploring for a bit, checking out the Church of the Sacred Heart, a beautiful and very Germanic castle looking national landmark. Then it started to sleet! Deciding there was not much we could do about the weather, we wandered a bit more looking for the historical neighborhood with Germanic style architecture for which the town is famed. This sort of failed as we ended up in a random neighborhood for a bit that was purely residential and not notably historical. We called it quits for a bit and searched for lunch, stopping into a little hole in the wall for some delicious cazuela, soup with beef, part of a corn cobb and a potato, which warmed my freezing bones. Since it was still raining after, we figured a little kuchen and coffee couldn’t possibly hurt, especially after questionable amounts of sleep the night before.
Afterwards, we finally found the Barrio Historico, which was quaint and pretty. We ran to a small verdulería get some vegetables for dinner and ended up having a half-hour long discussion with its Costa-Rican owner. People in the south love to talk, and since its rude to rush away, we found that this meant that it was wise to pad the amount of time planned to accomplish activities by a least half an hour. It was nice though, and certainly great for getting language practice :)

Afterwards, we climbed up into Parque Philipi, a beautiful vegetation laden hill with some nice views out towards the towns.
We went back to the hostal where I cooked dinner, which was wonderful as I hadn’t cooked anything since I’d been up in the desert. The cooking process was interrupted for a good 45 minutes though, when I ran into the hostal owner in the kitchen and became part of an extensive chat about everything from employment and crime in the south of Chile, president Piñera, experiences with the earthquake and the woes of Haiti. Eventually, I got back to cooking, and the hostal owner gave us some homemade ají, let us dry our clothes by the woodstove, offered coffee, all very "acogedora": welcoming. We had a lovely dinner and after a bit of hanging out listening to music we crashed hard.