Alright, pictures......
This is a homemade empanada. Filled with diced beef, onions, a hard boiled egg and an entire olive(including pit or its a bad empanada!).
Empanadas make me happy. I am going to miss these, unless anyone wants to learn how to make them, I hear that it is fairly easy?Hiking in the Andes just south of Santiago.
Haircut from the host mom and Kelly, my housemate from UCSB. They did a great job hahahahaha, but seriously my hair looks amazing as usual.
This is my host mom at the largest cheese shop in Santiago, so they say. I think they just mean that it is really big and well known. It is located at "La Vega" marketplace up in comuna Recoleta. This is a huge market that covers a fee acres of land that sells anything you could ever need in food. They have barrels and barrels of everything from onions to olives to some fruit that has not yet been identified. The best is shopping in the large lots behind the market where vendors come with fresh produce. They sell behind the market so they do not have to pay a fee. There, bargaining and haggling is law. If you are not yelling, then you are not buying or selling. The entire dynamic out there was crazy, I kept expecting fights to break out among the vendors, loiterers and just people whom seem to hang out there. Regardless you could buy 10 heads of iceberg lettuce for $1.50. That makes it worth it.
More of La Vega and potatoes.
La Vega and a quiltro (street mutt). One other cool aspect about La Vega was seeing many restaurant owners there (with their apprentices) looking at produce and stocking up on various items.
This is homemade ceviche. Absolutely unreal. Chile has taught me the importance of a few key items in many meals: cilantro, tomatoes, peppers, spicy peppers, onions and green onions. These are staples. (Also a little bit of curry in risotto)
My host brother Pablo's birthday cake. (bags of chips in photo for scale). Cake was unreal. Huge first of all. It consisted of heavy pancakes layered between manjar(dulce de leche) and a kind of sweet orange paste/jam. Unreal.
Last picture. Campus and Cerro Plomo. Never gets old.
Chao.
