‘Pio Pio Pio’ gritaron los Pollitos:

For those of you who do not know, I took an incredibly privileged trip with my parents last December to visit our neighbors (from Mill Valley) in their various estates in their native countryside of Medellín, Colombia. We spent a week experiencing how Latin Americans spend their leisurely vacation time, escaping the noise and bustle of their urban lives by fleeing to a family members house in the country. The notion of time and responsibility seem to evaporate at these homes, and the chores of your daily life fall away to make time for your refined hedonism.

If my anecdote has served it’s purpose, I have properly framed the circumstances which defined my previous weekend, during which I was treated to a similar campo experience, with less Colombian extravagance and more of the rustic homeliness that defines the Chilean pastoral.

Kisko (who’s names is really Cristóbal) is a friend of that big group of Catalanes that I’m friends with, and is originally from Chillán, a smaller city 6 hours south of Santiago. Chillán is the central vein of this country’s chorizo sausage industry, so you can imagine the significance of this city in a country that takes it’s asados (BBQs) as seriously as it takes soccer games. Kisko’s family is from the city, but like any well established Latin American family, they have a house in the campo in the town of Pemuco, an hour and a half south of Chillán. Kisko invited us all down to the house for the weekend to spend a few days among the horses, baby chickens and forests of eucalyptus trees. There was 11 of us who made the trek down south, communally looking forward to escaping the concrete jungle that sometimes becomes a dominating presence in Santiago.

We drove along dirt roads lined with eucalyptus trees to get to the house; a spitting image of Bolinas, California was seemingly unfolding in front of my eyes. The house was situated the exact landscape I expected it to be, with a collection of old wooden colonial style houses, a large patio with the ever important parrilla for grilling. There were horse stables, large turkeys and hens being followed diligently by their baby chicks. Inside the house, the living room appeared to be the only space intentionally decorated, as every other room was filled to capacity with a hodge-podge of beds. It was the ideal setting in which to escape from the world with a big group of friends and enjoy the wildly fresh country air, spectacular night skies and sing songs, meat and drink in hand, until the early morning hours.

Saturday was the only full day we got to enjoy there and it began at around 1 pm when everyone had finally crawled out from their beds. The horses on the property were more or less trained and each one of us got a chance to hop on a horse and trot around the huge green open space we had at our disposal. Apologies for the cheesiness, horseback riding is still very much a novelty for me, but the view of the vibrant rolling hills, framed by the snow-covered Andean mountain range is truly spectacular atop a horse. I’m sure that will soon be added to the list of ‘Stuff that White People Like’: #247- Exotic Panoramic Views on Horseback.

That night a group of Kisko’s friends from Chillán came to the house, bringing with them a plethora of instruments and their seemingly endless thirst for covering classic American/British rock songs. They were all tremendous musicians and truly did justice to many typical tunes of the Beatles, Radiohead, Pink Floyd…etc. Still the majority of it was music from Latin America or Spain and it was fun to kick back a listen to everyone singing these classic songs I’d never heard in my life. Throughout the weekend I felt really lucky and one step closer to experiencing the real Chile as Chileans themselves experience it.