Caballos y Bailando

We’d originally thought that we might head to the Japanese Garden today, but just as we were about to leave, my friend Nicole e-mailed us to tell us about an Independence Day celebration in the Parque de Valdivia. The festival promised to have food, costumes, dancing, and a horse show. We figured this would be an ideal way to spend a day, so we asked Nicole for directions to the park and drove to that part of town.

I know Nicole from my past trips to La Serena. She works at CTIO (the other observatory besides Gemini on the Recinto) as the instrument scientist for ISPI, the camera that I used to take a good portion of my thesis data. I originally met her in Scotland when I was there for an SPIE meeting. She’s always been one to cheer me on and she offered me a lot of support when I was struggling with graduate school. I knew that she was an excellent horse rider and I really wanted to see her in action; since she was in the horse portion of the show this seemed like a good opportunity.

The park had soccer fields, a roller hockey rink, and surprisingly, a small zoo. A few cages with a variety of birds and animals were littered around the area - they had among other things, an owl or two, an emu, an ostrich, a peacock and peahen, an eagle, and two large condors. There was also a guanaco, sheep, deer, rabbits, and guinea pigs. After looking around for a few minutes we walked toward the main performance area where groups of children, dressed in a variety of costumes were dancing.

On our way we passed a small area of tents filled with people selling food. We decided to stop for lunch. We bought almuerzo for $2 - one plate of food with salad, pebre, the “best potato salad ever” (according to David), rice with saffron, and a shish kabob. The surprise was that we were handed a real plate and silverware. It’s a nice feeling to walk into a park in the middle of a festival and be trusted not to run off with the dishes.

Food stands at the festival

Traditional Chilean dance

Boys dressed as cabelleros, dancing

We had a great time watching the dancing. We were surprised at the number of boys and teenagers who were dressed up and in the program; our honest thought was that you wouldn’t see either in the US. Perhaps dancing in Chile, which is much more a part of the culture, is considered more macho than it is in the States, which makes it socially acceptable for men and boys to dance without being labeled “sissies”. After a good portion of the dancing was over, a more organized “show” started. This featured a “reenactment” of the defeat of the native Mapuche tribes by the Spanish conquistadors. The dancing was great and the horse-riding conquistadors (including Nicole) were very talented. At one point the horses were galloping extremely fast in a tight ring around the dancing Mapuche; I’m sure it took great skill to make sure no one was trampled!

Conquistadors pursuing the Mapuche

The only part we thought was a tad sketchy was when the Mapuches suddenly (and bloodlessly) “converted” to Christianity and began following a robe- wearing priest. We’re pretty sure the reality was a little less G rated but, well what can one expect. We see the same sort of thing back home. The only US holiday with any mention of Native Americans is Thanksgiving, where we make little kids perform in plays, dress up like Pilgrims and “Indians”, and sit around a table together. I doubt that later on, once the parents go home, teachers make them reenact the Trail of Tears or the Battle of Little Big Horn. The conquerors always tend to gloss over the bloodier parts.

After the reenactment, there was a demonstration with the horses. Five of the riders ran a slalom, scooping up baskets of flowers at the end and distributing them to members of the audience. Next, there was another bit with little kids dancing. At one point, one of the horse riders donned a wolf or dog hat and chased the kids across the field - we had no idea what was going on but it was obviously some fairy tale or tradition and was rather cute. Then, a few teenaged girls and boys did a formal dance in ballroom-style clothing. Afterwards, the young women stayed on the field and partnered with the horse riders in another formal dance. I could imagine that at one time, rich young girls learned these styles of dance in order to be formally presented to society, (but that is just a guess on my part).

Horse rider with basket of flowers

School children dancing

Formal dance with seated rider and young woman

The most impressive bit of horse riding was next. Each rider had one of the past or present flags of Chile (there were several throughout the nation’s history). Carrying the flags, the riders performed all manner of intricate riding patterns including sidestepping the horses in a line, riding in giant figure eights, and crossing each other’s paths at a full gallop. This was my favorite part of the show.

Fancy footwork with flags

Nicole carries one of the early flags of Chile

The riders saved some of the more daring footwork until immediately after shedding the flags. First, they lined the horses up in a horizontal row and rotated the entire line about one end, keeping the horses in formation. Then, (and this was David’s favorite part), the herded a cow around the ring between two of the horses. I thought this was just completely amazing.

The real "cowboys"

At about this time, the show was winding down and my feet were incredibly cold. Knowing that it was getting late and we needed a few things from the grocery store, we decided to leave a bit early.

A “few things from the grocery store” turned into a bit of a challenge as apparently everyone and their hermano shops on Saturday night. We were determined to persevere despite the lines, because we decided that the perfect end to our completely Chilean day would be to make our first pisco sours. This required pisco, limes, sugar, and eggs, in the correct proportion. Of course, “the correct proportion” is a subject of hot debate. After some discussion, we settled on one seemingly reasonable recipe, and after standing in line for about 45 minutes (which required changing lanes 3 times as checkers either closed down right before us or ran into major problems with other customers) we purchased our pisco supplies and headed back to our Apart-Hotel.

Back home, we juiced about 20 limes with David’s new citrus reamer (recently purchased at La Recova), made a simple syrup (our less cook-savvy friends are likely to think this is rocket science or something, really it’s just sugar and water, so calm down), dumped everything into a giant glass filled with pisco, and added an egg white and ice. Unfortunately we were lacking a shaker, so we made due with what we had, which was simply a pitcher. We carefully shook the drink for a while and PRESTO our first pisco sours. For those of you that think the egg white sounds a little gross, you should know that this is what makes the drink so great. When you shake everything, the egg white foams up; when you pour the creation into a glass, you end up with a wonderful froth covering the top of the drink.

For those of you that still think this sounds gross - all we can recommend is that when you come to visit, you close your eyes while we make your drink. We’ll lie and tell you it’s something else, if you like.

If you know anything about making a pisco sour and are wondering where the bitters are, they are sitting on a shelf in the grocery store. The reason for this is that the one drop of bitters that the recipe calls for, which we think is virtually undetectable, costs $6 a bottle, which is more than the pisco costs. We aren’t usually penny pinchers, but this ridiculous. If we have to pick between making more pisco sours and adding one drop of bitters to the few we make, we’ll go with more pisco sours. We think most Chileans would understand (especially since most of the pisco sours we’ve had here in restaurants have also deleted the bitters). We wish we had pictures to show you, but the pisco sours went as fast as they came. You’ll have to come and see us if you want to know what they final product looked like.