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| Chile’s red, white, and blue. |
Feliz 18, Chile! It wasn’t too long ago that I knew little more about 9/18 except that the date (the week, the month…) celebrated Chilean Independence and has been the country’s biggest holiday going for the past 201 years. After heading out to our first fondas, I may only have an observer’s knowledge to add, but what a feast of images my loot includes: kites, every kind of meat you can skewer, chupallas (Chilean cowboy hats), camping tents for those committed to making a day of it, sweet drinks, farm animals, flags, games (my favorite was like ring toss, except the bottle was wine or pisco and you got to keep it if you won–but I didn’t see anyone win), and nearly every imaginable toy and object you can lay on a blanket and hawk, from dolls to calendars to pins to scarves to puppets to shoes to sunglasses to all sorts of “dieciocho” realia.
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This hat maker was more than happy to don
his own chupalla for us. |
For our first dieciocho together, Ryan and I decided to stay in the city and both enjoy the quiet, as many Santiaguiños take advantage of the long holiday weekend and flee, and check out our first fondas taking place throughout the city. The fonda, a festival or sorts, can be held in any of Santiago’s spacious city parks or on a smaller family-scale at home. You’ll want to compare the public ones to state fairs or 4th of July celebrations back in the States. They both share a propensity for carnaval food, livestock on display, and rides for the kids. But from the colorful clothes to the professional cowboys to the sheer volume of grilling going on, a Chilean fonda shouldn’t be compared to anything else.
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| Four-footed friends galore! |
On Saturday, for our very first fonda, we appropriately joined two of our very first friends in Santiago,
Emily and Rodolfo, who kindly invited us to check out
XVII Semana de la Chilenidad, one neighborhood over in La Reina, which we learned is just about as far east as you can travel without starting to head straight up the Andes. This was a class-act fonda, complete with costumed equestrians, elegant tango in the dirt, a stagecoach show, a full-fledged rodeo, and an expo filled to the brim with artisanal mustards, honey, jams, wine, hot sauce, cheeses, and just about anything else you can cultivate. We saw every military vehicle Chile has to offer, from helicopters to vintage police cars, but nothing could beat the skydiving performance by paratroopers of the Fuerza Aérea de Chile, FACH (Chile’s Air Force). They appeared to come out of nowhere and landed one after another to fanfare below.
We saw sheep, cows, chickens, piglets, and horses galore. We ate meat on a stick, drank two classic Chile beverages that Emily kindly repeated the name of a good half-a-dozen times so I wouldn’t forget: chicha (an incredible slightly effervescent drink comprised of fermented grapes), and terremoto (a.k.a. an “earthquake” since just one–comprised of some more sweet fermented wine, pisco, sugar, and topped off with pineapple ice cream for good measure–can leave you a litte shaky in the knees. The follow-up drink is appropriately called an “aftershock.”)
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| Cheers to our first chichas. |
And who knew chicha was just what you wanted to wash down anticuchos. Our choice skewers were grilled right before our eyes.
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| And our first antichuros. |
Yesterday, newbies as we are, Ryan was kind enough to take me back to
Parque O’Higgins, where he watched the bicentennial celebration last year. This year, the park–the second largest in the city–was a kite-filled free-for-all kind of fonda. We were apparently a day early for the parade (where the President usually makes an appearance), but I think that was for the best given the crowds we dealt with just getting on and off the metro. My favorite part by far were the colorful kites skipping through the air.
The open field had just enough springtime wind to send hundreds, maybe thousands, of these plastic and paper fliers far above our heads. They created an audible rustle and a visual dance that was a nice change of pace from the fonda’s frenzy. Their white strings criss-crossed our path both above and below, as lost lines scattered over the ground like snail tracks. Many of these flying birds and flags and planes and simple diamonds of color ended up tangled in tree branches. For some reason, these entanglements captivated me more than any of the other attractions. It seemed such a common destiny for the plentiful kites that children didn’t do much more than throw their empty hands up in the air when one of theirs went wayward for good, like a baseball over a far fence.
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| Though there was this guy, who tried to save the day… |
And today we only had to stroll to our very own street corner to take in a proper dieciocho parade, complete with Chilean Military in lined formation, marching bands, and what looked like throngs and throngs more waiting to march up Apoquindo, which on any other day of the year is a four-lane boulevard, but today was wide open for a few hours for all to enjoy.
Since we live just before the parade’s final destination at Escuela Militar, Ryan and I heard the procession coming through our open windows, and I can still here the base drums and snares and horns and cheers all on parade.
After two days of exploring fondas far and wide across Santiago, we’re cooking dinner with a full-blown dieciocho parade going right past our house. Gotta love it. And with one dieciocho down, we do.
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