La familia Chilena

We left Puerto Aysen and headed back to Coyahaique. Still not knowing much about the city, we headed back to the bible store/cyber place. As soon as I walked in with my large backpack on, the man at the register asked if we wanted a place to stay for the night. It must have been around 3pm so we still had a good portion of the day ahead of us. We went for the offer site unseen. We also neglected to ask about the price. Oppps, a big travelers no no. Luckily this was not an issue. We ended up getting quoted the cheapest of all the rates we had seen in all our travels. As one might suspect, cheap accommodations translates to poor facilities. This did turn out to be true. It was Sunday and we had not eaten in some time so we decided to leave the bible bookstore and head for food. We wandered the streets for over an hour and checked out 6 different restaurants. All closed. Sunday in Chile also means many places are closed, even in a fairly tourist location. Finally we found one restaurant open and ate an over priced meal. Laura, who many of you know, can devour books. She has already read 3 and a half books and two New Yorkers. Therefore, we were also in search of her next literary kill. Luckily we found an open liberia (bookstore). Funny thing is the bookstores in Chile and Argentina do not always have books. Many of them turn out to be places to buy work/school supplies, like pens and notebooks. This one did have books, but a small collection. All of them were in Spanish. While we can both read Spanish, while on vacation, something in English was definitely preferred. Then ended up having one book in English, "A Brief History of Chile". We passed and continued the hunt. In the store we encountered two of the sweetest elderly people. They were the owners and were sad to see us leave empty handed so they filled us with information about restaurants in Coyahaique. I now know what restaurants are good, where they are located and which ones to avoid. Apparently then Samoan restaurant is dangerous and should be avoided. Truthfully, I am not sure I can recall all the directions. They were given to us all at once in Spanish and without a map. When checked back into the Bible bookstore and headed to our home for the night. It was now 9pm or so. The house was about a half a mile out of town in a heighboorhood that looked nice. We walked into the house and the family we were staying with was entertaining guests from the country side. Not wanting to interrupt their dinner, we headed up very steep and narrow wooden stairs to our soon to be home for the night. The stairs had no railing and one false move or shift in backpack weight and we would be gonners. Also some of the small steps that just would barely fit my size 12 feet were duct taped together. Thankfully neither of us fell. The dark musty room had just about enough room to fit the two twin beds and our backpacks. Upon being left alone in the room we paused to recall that this was not quite the typical honeymoon accommodation. We set our bags down and felt a little more at ease without the weight and the thought that this is only for a night. After checking out the bathroom, and the 5 minute hot water rule, we decided against using the showers at the house. We were not ready for bed and still needed to arrange our transfer to the airport for our 10am flight. This required us using their phone, but we did not want to burden them nor interrupt their dinner party. After a moment we decided to head downstairs and ask to use the phone. Our thought was that this would be a quick endeavor. Wrong... They were pleased to see us and actually invited us to be a part of the party. Figuring out how to call the transfer to the airport turned out to be a small ordeal. We first tried their home phone without success. The phone systems are funny in Argentina and Chile. Certain phones can only be called from ones from the same company. This was the case in particular with calls to cell phones. We still have not quite figured the system out, regardless, we had been using phone cards and going to central phone stores in towns. We pulled out our phone card and they assured us this method could be more successful. The family called up to their 16 year old daughter to help out. At first I thought they brought her down to help and speak in English to us. WRONG again. She did not speak to us in English and actually of all the people in the house her Spanish was the most challenging to comprehend. She spoke at lightning speed and peppered it with slang. It bits and pieces we made out what she was saying. She was going to put the phone card into her cell phone, but then we would lose all the minutes and they would remain on her phone. We figured what do we have to loose. The other option was to head back to town to call or wake up early. So we lost our minutes and gave the nice family our remaining minutes (about $6 worth of minutes). I think she was pretty psyched about the new cellphone freedom and minutes. We reached the transfer and arranged for our morning pick up. What we thought was going to be a brief interruption did not end there. The father of the family handed us two glasses of Fanta orange drink. We sat and talked with the 6 people around the table. The typical questions came up, like where have you been, where are you from, do you like our country...After we pleased them with all our glowing answers there was a brief lull in the conversation. Four of the guests decided it was time to leave and head back to the countryside. Then the famous question came up about how everyone here knows who the governor is of California. This led to all sorts of political discussion. It also so happened that while we were in Chile the presidential election was happening. A business man likened to Bush and a women (Michel) was in the final run off for president. Laura and I ended up staying up for an hour longer with the father of the house talking about politics and such.... It was a fascinating discussion. Each time we would ask an open ended question (like, what do you think of the war in Iraq?), he would sit, grunt a couple times and stare at us what felt like several minutes and then would answer. At first we were not certain if he was comfortable with the questions, but we soon learned that he was very well versed in world politics and even wanted to go on for hours more. He tended to have very similar world views as Laura and I, so it was refreshing to see that our political network extended to Chile. The next day he was at work when we woke up. He had been a heavy machine worker in construction, but lost his job. Now he drives a taxi and aspires to run tours. As we were having breakfast, his taxi pulled up to the door and he made a special trip to see us off before we caught our transfer....