¡Bandera Chilena!

Abrazo flies the Chilean flag at last: 

Richard took down the US flag, and then moved the Chilean flag from the "guest" position to its new place on the boat.  

The Chilean Customs bureaucracy has officially accepted the valuation of Abrazo as calculated by the tasador from a certain prestigious empressa out of Viña de Mar.  We’re specifically grateful to the tasador, himself, a young man whose Chilean ancestry traces back to the northern Italian area of Milan/Lago Maggiore from whence Richard himself descends.  This appraiser admired Abrazo immensely, inspected her thoroughly, required scans of her original plans, took the book I wrote about her construction in Bellingham, as well as the For Sale flyer (posted in an earlier blog), and also understood that R was going to have to pay a tax of 20+% of the boat’s official value.  We’re grateful to the Agente de Aduana, Sr. Arturo Bello, for his shepherding of the flock of papers through the Customs process.  He charged plenty, si.  Valió la pena, esperamos.

Several bankers played their parts faithfully as the thousands of US dollars were transferred across the country to New York City, and thence over the wires into the Chilean system.  Richard has complied with every request made by his chosen bank here in Puerto Montt, but they are not quite ready to let him have a checking account yet.  So when the money came in from the US, he had to take it en efectivo, cash ... and the largest bills available were 10,000 peso notes.  There must be a better way than taking a six-inch deep stack of paper pesos from one bank and having to carry it four blocks to the bank where the Agente de Aduana has HIS account … but that’s what we did.  I went along as bodyguard.  All's well.    

So, now:  Richard will adjust the sales price to reflect the fact that a buyer will NOT have to pay the 20% IVA.  The dollar is highly valued down here right now, around 540 pesos per.  Pricing is the new challenge.  Right around $56,000 US is the target, I believe.   

But it's not all work.  We had a wonderful time last weekend at a gorgeous performance of Mozart’s opera, The Magic Flute, La Flauta Magica.  

Neither of us knew anything about this work, but our Pennsylvania amiga, Nancy, has infected us with her enthusiasm for the opera, so we jumped at the chance to experience this music in the “world class” Teatro Del Lago in Frutillar.  You can't just call in your credit card number to reserve seats here.  You must call to reserve tentatively, then look for the email from the theater giving you their bank account info.  You email the theater when you've made the deposit, and they ask you to send a photo of the receipt!  Then you've got reservations.  What a system.  

Main floor ... we arrived early.  

 The pic I took of Richard in his balcony seat did not turn out well, but here he is, outside the theater, dressed for the opera.

We enjoyed the sopranos immensely, and the great bass voice of Sarastro impressed us.  It took me a week, after the performance, to read the program and understand the story, finally.  I just loved the way the two young men, Prince Tamino and the bird-hunter, Papageno, each followed his own path to success:  one by the righteous road, supervised by the wise old men, and passing thru hard trials, tests of character; and the other by the natural, winding, happy path of instinct, holding to pursuit of pleasure above all things!


Ah, there's more to tell of that trip to Frutillar:  a delicious lunch at the Lavender Casa de Té, where Kristina, the owner gave us a walking tour thru her blueberry grove and then up into the horse pasture to meet the studs and geldings and enjoy the view of hayfields, woodlots, acres of lavender a-buzz with honey bees, and the beautiful lake, Llanquihue, sparkling across to the volcanoes.
We stayed in a great farmhouse built by German colonists more than a hundred years ago, far on the other side of town from the theater.  Our transportation funds mostly went to a young man named Javier, who delivered us back and forth 3 of the 4 trips.  He brought his wife and two small sons along on Friday night when he met us outside the opera house for the 6 km drive along the lake shore, under the full moon, to our lodging.  And I'm sure he was sorry to hear that our last ride with him the next day was to the bus terminal so we could get back to Puerto Montt.

Next adventure, well, besides selling the boat, is north on Ruta Cinco for about 5 hours on the bus to Temuco, where Richard will rent a car.  We want to go to the tiny town of Capitan Pastene.  Brother Bob saw a PBS documentary about this town and told us about it last week.  The colonists who started the town in 1904 came from Modena, Italy and have made themselves famous for their Italian cuisine in the mountains of Chile's south-central region.  We hope to feast on prosciutto and pasta.  Then we'll get down to the business of marketing Abrazo.

  

 

¡Atropellada! in Frutillar

El Museo Aleman (the German Museum) in Frutillar inspired all kinds of sense memories for both Richard and me, including some from past lifetimes, I think.  

What a fine way to lay out a display!  The millhouse with its waterwheel sits well above the entrance gardens, yet far below the family farmhouse at the top of the hill. A spring house up there, outside the family home, where Mama kept her butter and her cottage cheese for cooling, marks the place where the water starts, in a stream that falls downhill thru green channels and rocky patches till it's channeled into a wooden chute to turn the water wheel. 

No está functionado ahora.   But the various millstones that used to grind the grains lay about.  Coarse meal, fine flour ... the miller could do it all.  

In the Perkiomen River Valley, where I grew up, at least three mills once worked the waters near my home.  Leidy's, Clemmer's, and Pennypacker's water wheels had ceased to function by the 1950's, but their names and their powers continued into modern commerce.  

Richard, born with a mechanical turn of mind, to a father who built dams for hydropower in the great Northwest, saw the power of the turning wheel clearly enough to recognize that this contraption was a lathe:  

No doubt the lathe was used to turn the banisters for the stairways inside the family home ... and what else, we wonder? 

On the way up the trail to the main house, we had a sweet view of the eucalyptus trees on the border of the museum property. These trees always connect us to Richard's Auntie Marian, whose home in Los Gatos, CA was surrounded by them.  

The eucalyptus also links us to our first visit to Chile in 2005 when we learned that Isidora Goyenechea de Cousiño introduced the tree to Chile because she'd discovered that its wood was really good for bracing the coal-mining tunnels in Lota.  Eucalyptus beams gives off a loud creak when moved or strained ... an appropriate alarm method in Lota's underground mining shafts that go for almost a mile below the ocean floor.   

Inside the Casona, many warm interior scenes of family life are easy to imagine.  The kitchen, for instance:  

Is that a bread-slicing device on the counter at far right?  I like the cast iron waffle iron on the table.  We had one of those on our boat, for cooking waffles atop the wood stove.  

I love the clean and sunny look of the "bath room" ... .  Can't help wondering, now that I think of it:  How did they get the used water OUT of those tubs?  With bailing buckets?  Throw the water out the window?  

Each room has special features; each has fine views from the windows.  I would love to have stepped into the nursery to have a better look at that castle/doll house!  

The view from the porch at the back of the house, face to face with Volcan Osorno across the lake. 

 Hedged gardens adorn the lower acres, with a blacksmith’s house and a barnful of ancient farm equipment on either side of the winding creek.  One more photo:  I'm only standing there for scale, so you can appreciate how big that agave plant is.  

Our tour thru the German Museum came at the end of our day in Frutillar.   

We'd enjoyed a delicious lunch of smoked salmon salad, and pork tenderloin with sauteed veggies at the Bistro in the Teatro del Lago ... where we made plans to return mid-month for Mozart's La Flauta Magica. 
In the shade of a huge tree on the lakeside, we enjoyed a free performance by the youthful orchestra from the town of Mellipuhue.  They warmed up with a circus theme from Strauss, and then enchanted us with their version of  El Pantero Rosado by Henry Mancini.

And now for the title story:  ¡Atropellada!  

When we first arrived in Frutillar, by bus from Puerto Montt - about an hour's ride - we walked a long ways around the lake, beyond where the sidewalk ends.  Richard wanted to see the marina, where 12 or so boats were moored, including three J-24's, the kind his buddy Carlos likes so well.  We had a good time talking about what it might be like to live in this lovely town on the very pretty lake, Llanquihue.  What might lake sailing be like?  

On the walk back towards the main attractions of Frutillar, we crossed the road at one point because maybe there was a little more of a grassy shoulder on that side.  I'm sure I MUST HAVE SEEN that broad, big, dark green road sign up ahead.  Maybe my mind registered:  big road sign - must be high enough for a normal woman to clear, walking underneath?  Or, maybe my mind was too much focused on watching the narrow, uneven ground.  Maybe the sun would have been in my eyes if I'd been looking up.  Maybe my sunglasses were smeared with sweat that blinded me.  Whatever!

I was marching along behind Richard, eyes on the ground, head tilted down, when that road sign, a billBOARD, knocked me down.  Crack went my skull against the sharp aluminum edge at the bottom of the sign, and down I went on my butt and left elbow.  What a shock!  And even more shocking:  the hot blood dripping and then flowing down the left side of my face!  Richard was very kind.  He sloshed water from his private stash, fished in my pack for the packet of kleenex I always carry, and swabbed my head wound - an inch wide gash at center scalp, two inches above my hairline.  He had me hold a wad of kleenex on the torn spot, while he dabbed away the blood on my face and hands, and even flooded the bloody spots out of my blouse while I recovered equilibrium.  Never a word of ridicule about not watching where I was going.  In fact, he tried to take the blame.

All's well.  Good to have these humbling incidents now and then, as long as we survive them, right?  

May your own focus on where you put your feet never distract you from what might whack your head!  

Mortars, Luck, Lentils & Loros

2014! 

                          

Imaginations firing in full color at the turn of midnight from the Old to the New Year, Richard and I lay abed, eyes closed.  We'd been awakened by the mortars of Puerto Montt exploding their first loads of los fuegos artificiales out over the bay.  Shouts of approval rose from the gente outside our building, cries of delight emanated from the balconies and windows above & below us – still we did not get up to look out the windows.  For twenty minutes, ¡muy forte! the blasts continued. I’m sure it was a glorious display.  The next day's newspaper confirmed what my mind had fully enjoyed.  

What a miracle that the cold rain that had been threatening since late afternoon did not begin to pound the town till three minutes after the last blast! 

Surely that’s a sign of luck for 2014. 

Forgive me:  I did not know that it was NOT good luck to say Felice Año Nuevo before midnight.  When I returned from the Jumbo with my last minute groceries on Tuesday afternoon, and wished the conserje who let me into the building a Happy New Year, he wagged his index finger at me and said “No, no, no.  A las doce, o a la manyaña!” 

Whoops!  ¡Por favor, disculpa me! 

That bad luck error probably caused whatever cold germs I'd exposed myself to at the grocery store to develop into the sore throat and sniffles that have plagued my 2014 so far.  Life is better today, now that I’ve been BACK to the Jumbo for some real Kleenex, and don’t have to blow my nose in rough paper towels. 

It’s all relative, right?   And there are different kinds of luck.  We had lentils for dinner on New Years Day, and thanks to a Skype chat with Cousin Davide of Ternate, Italy, we know that's a recipe for economic fortune in the New Year.

Our friend G came up to our place for dinner and conversation on NYE, and Richard's excellent risotto satisfied us well.  I'd neglected to take my lemons out of the freezer ahead of time, thinking I could simply grate the frozen fruit for the pisco sours G wanted to make.  (Have you seen that Facebook post about using the WHOLE lemon to get full benefit of its amazing vitamin power?)  We didn't give the grated lemon a fair chance, in my opinion, and ended up thawing the darn lemons till we could juice them, by which time it was really too late for pisco sours!  Who knew G was such a traditionalist?

Speaking of tradition:  the week before Christmas we'd walked to the plaza and captured this view of Puerto Montt's manger scene, all carved from wood.
 Something's missing, though.

Our Christmas Day entertainment was most enjoyable.  Chris and Margi of Hobart, Australia, left their cozy boat in the marina to join us for a midday feast of champagne, hors d'oevres, garlic-roasted chicken (only slightly overdone), spinach pie, green beans almondine (or, more precisely, green beans with blackened almonds, as I left the toasting almonds on the gas burner at a crucial moment to show Margi the Christmas cookies our neighbor, Yolanda, had given us), delicious wine.  We also had perfectly boiled potatoes:  Richard managed to conjure his Grandfather Edwards, who would mash the potatoes just so on his own plate before distributing them onto the grandkids' plates.  We talked religion and politics without any grief, shared cruising tales and harbor gossip, and sight-seeing plans.  R rolled out his charts of the Guaitecas Islands, south of the Gulf of Ancud, to point out places where he'd anchored, as well as places where he'd given up trying to anchor.
Chris and Margi had prepared their traditional Christmas treat:  an authentic English Plum Pudding with Brandy Sauce for our dessert.  What a delight! - and a totally new experience for us.  Please test your imagination and share a spoonful of this warm, spice-flavorful, fruit-rich (yet delicate!) elaboration, drenched in buttery brandy cream.  May it melt in your mouth, bring radiance to your throat and flow caloric bliss through your bloodstream!  

Margi commented that the Christmas creche at the marina had finally been completed by the addition of the baby in his manger.  The gate guard there confirmed for her that Chileans do not expect to see the Baby Jesus until AFTER midnight on December 24th.

Back at the plaza, on the day after Christmas:  sure enough. And there's an angel on top of the "tree," now, too.

Also, couldn't help capturing this chica puertomontina with her Navidad presents on display:  

The local loros are sleeping a little later now that the year has turned.  A certain gang of these green parrots live in the trees just below our windows.  The loro's screech regularly pierces the densest dream in the dark of night. Don't know what had been setting them off at 4 a.m the past few weeks ... hungry baby loros? ... But maybe the trend has passed.  I didn't hear them this morning.

Who knows how this New Year will turn out for all of us?  We hope your good luck outweighs the bad.  Or at least, as they say in Panem, at the start of the Hunger Games, "May the odds be in your favor."