Fiestas Patrias

Here's Jorge. He owns our house, and he's happy because 1) he has a delicious anticucho, 2) he's a happy guy in general, and 3) because it's Fiestas Patrias, the national holiday of Chile, during which every country-loving Chileno covers his house with the Chilean flag, pulls the grill out of the shed, gets his wife to cook empanadas, throws on his funny, black, wide-brimmed hat, and gets down to some serious binge drinking. It's like the whole country explodes in a patriotic orgy of gluttony and debauchery. It's a miraculous thing to witness. We, being gringos, knew relatively little about the whole thing going into it, and I was originally under the impression that it was the Chilean independence day. It's apparently not, however, and as far as I can tell, if they're celebrating anything, it's the abundance of cheap wine and chorizo sausage.

The first evidence I saw of Fiestas Patrias was a game very similar to a cup and ball, only way more complicated. The Chileans have actually figured out a way to turn the cup and ball into four games. The ball has been replaced with a peg of wood, and the opening of the cup has been narrowed to be just large enough for the peg to go in. The idea is to get the two to go together in one of four ways, and which you do is determined by your gender. The easiest way is theoretically reserved for females (not very politically correct, but that's the country we're in), and it involves popping the cup up vertically and trying to get it to land on the peg. All other ways are slightly harder and are done by young Chileno men to impress and seduce women. All of them are pretty fun.

Our Fiestas Patrias began with a party thrown for all of us foreigners by Jorge and his wife, Marisol, on Friday evening (the official start date of all festivities). Jorge lit the grill, and we all ate empanadas and anticuchos, a traditional food that's basically just a meaty kebob, and washed them down with ponche, some sort of wine based punch. Afterwards, the dancing started. I've been personally ridiculed on several occasions while in this country for the quality of my dancing, but after seeing Chilenos dancing the Cueca, a traditional jig, I don't really know why my skill is in question. The dance basically involves finding yourself a white handkerchief, waving it around in a circle above your head, and prancing around like a chicken in the general direction of any girl present. They can all do it, and they mostly do. Other dances were demonstrated, but Jorge's dancing, an interesting combination of hip wiggling and shimmying, was generally considered the best. The next morning, we woke up to find Jorge starting the grill again, and this time we ate choripan, easily the best part of the whole holiday. It's just greasy chorizo sausage on bread. I wish I was eating one right now. (Erin's editing note: this choripan business was purportedly the best thing that Nate has experienced since being in Chile. The boy loves meat.)

Afterwards, we decided to venture out of the house to visit the center of Chilean holiday culture, the fonda. A fonda is kind of like a fair, and there are actually lots and lots of them scattered around in parks throughout the city. Each one is different, but they do share certain characteristics. They all sell tons of choripan, empanadas, anticuchos, wine, and beer and they all have live, costumed performances of the Cueca. The first one we went to focused more on the beer and food side of the fonda, and we both ate choripan to our hearts' desires, before heading home early to avoid the drunk Chilenos. By the next morning, the city was starting to show signs of abuse. While walking around we spotted a well-dressed man passed out on the grass of the park near our house, a woman bathing naked in a public fountain in the center of town, and a suspiciously large red wet spot on the sidewalk. We decided to take it easy and stay home most of the evening.

Monday was our last real day of celebration. We visited another fonda, which was a short walk from our house and seemed to be more family oriented. It still had food and beer, but it also had a circus and a small zoo of domesticated animals. We also got to see some pretty elaborate cultural dances, one of which involved scantily dressed hula girls and even more scantilly dressed fire-wielding guys. Erin swore she could see one's ass, and she probably could (Erin's editing note: I did, in fact see his ass... and much, much more). There was also another dance that was basically just choreographed sexual harassment. The male dancer would chase around the female dancer and try to use his hat to lift up her skirt. In response, the girl would wave around some balls on a string and try to smack him in the head anytime he got too close. In the evening we tried to go to a final fonda, but we were pretty much out of luck, as it turned out to be a bunch of people just drinking and milling around in the street around a stand that sold choripan. When it started to rain on us, we decided to trek home.

That pretty much does it for our holiday. The only other story of interest I have to share has to do with something that actually happened several days before, on the anniversary of the death/alleged murder of Salvador Allende, who was the socialist president of Chile prior to a coup led by Pinochet, the much-hated dictator. While the date isn't exactly a holiday, it's celebrated in the same way every year--namely riots. Rioters are, generally speaking, teenagers and early-20-something-year-olds, none of whom are actually old enough to remember Allende, Pinochet, or the years of dictator rule they are rioting over, and most sensible Chilenos (and foreigners) stay out of the center of town, go home early, and watch the whole thing on the evening news. The several hundred who decide to go out do so in an incredibly violent manner, looting shops, breaking windows, tossing molotov cocktails, getting sprayed down with fire hoses and tear gassed by the police force. The next day, everything goes back to normal.