Chile: February 25, 2007

February 25, 2007

We arrived back in Santiago Chile just a little while ago, as most of you know we’ve been in Temuco since last Saturday. It’s been quite an adventure and I thought I’d update you all on what we’ve been seeing. Sorry this is all at once, we’ve been without an internet connection. I’m not going to get into a ton of details because I’ll be writing a 20 page paper on the subject later and I figure you all just want to see pictures anyway.

These are some photos I took from the bus on the way down from Santiago… I love Chile, it’s so beautiful.

Temuco is in the south of Chile, not at the tip or anything, but it’s on the way down to Antarctica. It’s quite a large place, originally I was expecting smaller… This is a picture taken from the top of the mall.

This is the center of Temuco, this statue tells the story of the Mapuche people. It’s a great but also sad story, I’m trying hard not to go into too many details with this post.

This is the indoor market in Temuco where you can buy all kinds of things ranging from drums, leather stuff, turquoise and meat. Don’t ask…

I took these two photos at a fruit stand. I’ll just say that you can’t imagine how good the fruit is here. Well, certain fruits anyway… Some of them don’t compete with Costa Rican fruit by any stretch of the imagination… but then there are the grapes…

These two photos show the parking garage. If you’re from the states you probably can’t imagine this either, I know I couldn’t before I saw it. The way it works is this, you drive the car into the lot and hand the guy the keys. Then the guy with the keys takes your car and drives it to the next open square foot of space. When you want to leave the guy comes around and moves the cars around yours. The funny things is they don’t use the keys to move the other cars they just push them around and play a game of Klotski. The first picture is from the doorway looking in, the second is from the car looking out.

This is the church itself, it’s 45 minutes away from Temuco in a small town called Mellalin. I’ll start at the outside and work my way in. There are a few shots of the outside and then a few shots of a typical service.

I took a picture of the wheat after it had been harvested. I really like fields of wheat, the color is amazing. I was having trouble catching the proper color, I guess cameras aren’t able to compete with the human eye. You’re surrounded by wheat whenever you’re at the church or nearby area, it’s incredible.

This is the way many people get to church and back, walking. But sometimes I wondered if maybe walking would be less painful than sitting in the back of a truck going over rocks like the following picture… And then there’s the dust that we’re covered in and probably are inhaling.

I’m going to skip over the dental photos since most of them involve awkward photos of people’s mouths. I will say this, I have a new respect for the people who translate for the medical profession or dentists. I had to do some of it and I’ll just say it was difficult, such a specialized set of language.

The next shots are just some photos of random things I saw while I was there.

Then there are the volcanos, I really like volcanos…

Overall things went well, I’ll have to see how the video side of things turned out back in Kentucky. Look for those sorts of things in the future. I’ll be back in the states Tuesday morning, at this moment it feels like that is going to be very strange.

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