Fiestas Patrias is celebrated on September 18th, and the boys get the entire week off from school. Spring is just beginning to be sprung, and you can feel the joy of the Chilean people building the entire month as they celebrate their country's independence from Spain but also the beauty of their country as it heads into spring. Everything is green. It really is a lovely time to be there. Festivities began on the Friday before, where at school each class performed a traditional dance from a different region of Chile. Avery's class was performing the membrillazo, which is what Emerson performed last year, so luckily we already had the outfit for that.
Emerson's class performed a dance from Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, the place with the moai statues we were able to visit last May. That costume was a bit more complicated, but luckily the moms of the class helped me out. I did have to figure out where to buy skin colored leggings, and, did you know, there is a store for that here! Leggings of every color imaginable because you never know when you might need a specific color like I did.
With our time off from school, we traveled the 6 hours back down south to Chillán to ski, the same place Drew was a week prior with Evan Carey. We arrived on Saturday and skied Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. It was definitely spring skiing conditions: icy and hard in the morning but warming up to almost uncomfortably hot in the afternoon, turning the snow to mashed potatoes. So, needless to say, we weren't getting early starts, but we'd ski til last chair every day. The boys also skied the Tres Marias run which is the longest ski run in South America! On Tuesday we took a day off from skiing, and we went to the Valle Hermosa hot springs for the day: 3 outdoor pools of varying temps with views of the ski slopes. I don't have any pictures from that, but it was a lovely break. Not cheap though.
Marco, his wife, and 4 kids joined us skiing on Wednesday and Thursday, and the kids had a blast skiing together. The first half of the week we were parked outside of a hostel owned by one of the parents in Avery's class, but the later part of the week we camped outside the Airbnb in Las Trancas that Marco and fam had rented so the kids could more easily play. We also hung out together on Friday, the official Fiestas Patrias Day, and celebrated with an asado. Super chill.
One slightly disconcerting moment from that day was we got a text from a friend saying "Hey, you guys are in Chillán right? Are you ok? Just saw that the volcano there had a pulso (or pulse)." Uhhh, say what now? Apparently while we were having our asado in the woods in Las Trancas, a few miles beyond, the volcano just above the ski resort had a "pyroclastic" event, which, in volcano terms, means a spout of ash was spewed 400 feet into the air. But that was it. Nobody in the town seemed concerned; apparently this happens on a semi-regular basis. It did make the news though. And we didn't even notice because there was no noise that we heard, no smell as the wind carried the ash in another direction, no lava, no sirens, no evacuation, nothing. Life just continued on like normal. Huh. And they didn't even change the volcano's activity status after this event either, still yellow. I wonder if you can buy volcano home insurance in Chile. Is that a thing? People didn't even stop skiing.
