Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Asados in Chile

So I´m in another internet ciber in Curacautin, Chile, and I can´t upload any fotos. The computer won´t recognize my USB, and the one time it did it said that there was something wrong with the connection. Oh well, it was in castellano.

Anyway, so last week I was in San Martin de los Andes, which is a popular vacation spot for the residents of Neuquen. We went to a different playa everyday, and the water everywhere was really nice. I burned my back really bad though, even though I put on sunblock every 20 minutes and I was wearing a shirt when I wasn´t in the water, so I don´t know how that happened. We stayed in a really nice hotel, it had two floors, with a kitchen, 2 bathrooms, and 5 beds. We also went to the centro a lot too, and it´s bigger than downtown SC. In general the trip was really fun, but it was also really hard. Argentine families are uber uber close, and right now I still don´t feel completely part of the family, although it gets better everyday. It was really hard to watch how close they all were, and not be able to communicate everything I wanted to. I´m not really sure if my spanish is improving yet, one minute I feel like I´m getting better or that I will get better if I put in more effort, and the next minute I feel like I´ll never learn spanish and that I´m completely lost and helpless. I´m just hoping that my spanish will really improve once I start school (March 3rd).

Anyway, so now I´m in Chile visiting my host families relatives. If I wasn´t confused with Spanish before, now I certainly am, because I had to adjust to a different accent. It was slightly easier than beffore, because the accent here is more similar to the way were taught in spanish class, but people talk so fast. Another thing I noticed is that people sometimes just leave off the last syllable of a word. Like, my cousin was telling me something about school, and she was saying the words viernes and domingo, days of the week. But when she said it, she said viern and domin. It is all just so utterly confusing I don´t know what to do. Yesterday, my tio was teaching us card games, and after an hour of trying to understand I felt like I was going to pass out.

Chile isn´t that different from Argentina culturally, at least from what I´ve seen. They also do asados, which are barbeques. Today we went to the ´campo´or the field, of one of my tias, and we had an asado of lamb. The thing though is, here, since we were on a farm, we had one of the lambs from their farm. When we arrived, we went to pick out which one we were going to have. They wrangled it and put it in a wheel barrel, and brought it out. And then they killed it. Here, in Chile, its a local specialty to have sheep blood with lemon juice and bread. So instead of just killing it straight away, they bled it into this pan of herbs and lemon juice. After about 15 minutes I think it was dead, but it was still twitching a little. After that they skinned it and stuff, and a few hours later we were eating lamb asado.

And I tried the lamb blood. Is it bad that I kind of liked it? Seriously, a little cilantro and lemon juice and you can´t even tell its blood. The only thing I didn´t like was that some of the blood clotted at the bottom of the pan, so there was a sort of clotted bloody jello at the bottom. It was kind of chewy. Anyway, I had 3 spoonfuls and some with bread. If I hadn´t known it was blood, I probably would have had more than that. I have lots of great fotos of that...

I really hope that this post makes some kind of sense. I´m really exhausted for some reason and I can´t really think straight.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This lamb blood business may be a throwback to the McCarthy Vampire syndrome where lots of cats and dogs were missing in Massachusetts for many years and of course the Irish got blamed and the McCarthy's took the rap. So, be careful of the lamb blood especially in sacrifices and stuff.
Hugs and have bloody fun!
Johnny