Chilean Labor Day

Kathryn >> We began the day with some new resolve; when ship-wrecked in the desert with no where to go, you have to do something. We have until now, managed to cram almost nothing into our days, eating, perusing facebook and sleeping, the last of these being the only really enjoyable exercise! We decided to start exercising and learning Spanish. Taking James running is always entertaining, firstly for the strange noises he makes, I call them his 'dying noises' secondly for how irritable he becomes as we snake through a random selection of suburban streets. Listening to James try to learn Spanish is equally as entertaining as some sounds seem to evade him completely.That said, ideas like pronouncing 'll' as a

'sch' sound and the often crazy backward sentence structures of Spanish are quite challenging!
Most of the afternoon was spent parroting sentences like 'the horse eats lettuce' at our phones and constructing interesting ones like 'Tilly is a long dog' We were rewarded with news from our phones that we are 1% fluent in Spanish! Later we met with our new Spanish tutor 'Antanina' who is a Belarus, married to an Argentina who works in Copiapo. She speaks Russian, English, Spanish and French and teaches mainly English and French to Chileans. Being the worldly folk we are, we later googled Belarus, and discovered it was a small landlocked country. Antanina, although stating that she likes it here, seems to be equally disappointed with the Chilean cuisine, work ethic and being stuck in a desert. Although busy, she agreed to help us while we were here, and organised for us to go to the house of one of her students the next day with her. Interestingly she told us about the rains they had last March although only about 30mm fell on the city, vast quantities of mud washed down the valley into the town. They were without power and water for over a week and there was up to a meter of mud left in the streets. A massive clean up operation ensured, but the mud dried to a hard and heavy mess, and the dust from it still lingers everywhere! On the walk home we noticed the signs of the mud - some houses still having it dried half a meter deep it in their yards.
Later that evening we wandered back into the city centre (4

blocks from our hostal) hoping to find an exciting dinner. Being Chilean labour day, almost everything was closed. Other than a slight increase in horn honking, we hadn't seen much evidence of celebrations of the day, it just seemed like a public holiday (on a Sunday?). There was however an impressive increase in the number of police and their awesome looking vehicles in the streets. In the end we settled for a place called 'CAFETERIA' where we were treated to a menu of hot dogs, hamburgers and grilled meat with various sides. I chose grilled chicken and a side of tomato and beans, James; Ham steak with chips; it was as gourmet as the description! Returning to the hostal I did have to wonder, as the flavour combinations of our hand soap far exceeds the food!