Sun, lake and jolly good company!

This past weekend was without a doubt the best weekend in a long time for me. Took a bus southwards to meet up with a good friend from the US who is on a visit in the south of Chile. We met in Valdivia, which is some five hours south of where I live -though, the trip took seven hours because the bus driver made a stop in every single flippen village on the way.  That's one of the things you don't get to know beforehand when buying a bus ticket, by the way ; no one would tell you all the details of your trip. Welcome to sloppy Chile!

Having a lovely day and cuddling the inner joy while I was on the bus it all turned even nicer when I received call from work saying I could have a free Sunday - I was travelling on Friday, made a special arragement to not work on Saturday- and now I was going to have an extra day since the person I was going to replace on that day at the hotel had already arrived from his holidays. I couldn't be any happier!

I love the Chilean southern landscape. All the leafyness  and emerald tones you spot here and there makes you go ape about not actually living in the countryside.

This is the lake Puyehue located some 45 minutes east of Osorno. I visited this nice spot with some American friends. Nice shy people living around it. The picture doesn't show it very neatly but there is an awe-striking volcano at the background.

This is one of the places I would have loved to be born in. I try to spend as much time as I can in contact with the countryside. My friend Luke commented that I should have brought my CV so I could have seen the chance to work somewhere around here. Shoot! He was so right!

The locals were sometimes agog with curiosity to hear people speak English around them. I could notice some of them believed none of us spoke Spanish. Heh! That was a funny experience.
On our way, looking for a chance to talk to some locals about the farmers' life, a nice bloke stopped and gave us a lift to the north-western shore of the deep blue lake. He told us that the previous night a small group of Mapuches (a pre-Columbian indigenous group living in the south-central part of Chile) had attacked and burnt down the house of a farmer and that he and his family escaped the flames providencially.

The time at the beach was truly exquisite. Casting skippers to the lake, a nice talk and, obviously, getting the feet wet are godly delights! Childish as it sounds, it is hard to fathom how a moment like this can make life be worth living again.

The sky was awesomely blue! A true summer's day in March which is often dimly, thickly clouded in the south of Chile.

The village we stayed in was nice. It was a little tricky to get transportation from there back to Osorno but all in all we managed to get one bus with available seats. Again, people became curious to hear others speak in a foreign language. This is the nice considering that we live in such globalized world. The south of Chile is, nonetheless, too far off from out there.

People in this area were for a long time detached enough to get visitors from other countries. Probably the only foreign language they heard around was German since the whole region received numerous settlers from central Europe in the mid 19th century.

Back in Osorno I had to wave Luke and my two other new friends, Ben and Maria, good-bye; wallowing in sorry since I had such fun and, more importantly, a great time in their company!

Out from the unwelcoming box that is the city bus station, I jumped forth heading towards downtown. I walked for a good many hours around different parts of the city, staring at wooden houses, since I love them, and paying a visit to a charming small local museum that had a display of old photos of the first settlers that came to the region.

 It is not hard to tell who owned these houses. The Germanic air is overwhelming in some streets. Houses having the traditional "pararrayos" (lightning rod) reveal the origins of their builders. Chilean houses do not have lightning conductors because the weather is often mild in winter and lightnings are not nearly as common as in, say, central Europe.

The traditional house style in the south of Chile has a lot of wooden shingles in order to prevent the wood- the commonest building material- from rottening quickly in the hardcorely rainy wintry days.

The museum I visited was very interesting. It made me value the old objects I have at home even more;  mute witnesses of a slowly vanishing past that few or none care to remember.

At times I think I should become a teacher of German and help in preserving the "Deutschtum". Perhaps this is my mission in this country. But alas! Perish the thought! I don't want excuses to stay.

The problem with Chile is that it is full of Chileans who dwell in total ignorance of history and lack in genuine altruistic appreciation for the strip of land they live in.  When the War of the Pacific between Bolivia, Peru against Chile broke, someone in the goverment back then cried "bring two million Northmen to save Chile!". Probably that man had regarded his fellow Chileans as wholly uncommitted and unreliable, like I do now, and that it was necessary to change the national mentaly, a monumental task which would be only possible by filling the country with new able-bodied settlers. Who knows.

What a nice weekend! Sun, lake and jolly good company with whom I could really relate to, keep dialogue, discuss philosophy, faith matters, sing along and laugh with! That's my idea of paradise.