But I needed to get to "work" and start thinking about travel plans and sightseeing in Santiago. Eventually I got enough courage to put on my rain jacket, slip into my rain boots, and dig out my umbrella from the piles of warm layers at the bottom of my wardrobe. I went to the Pontificia Universidad Católica and registered for my class, Religions and Christianity, which took all of about 5 minutes... after I spent a good 20 minutes trying to find the Theology department, then figuring out how to enter the building. I'm pretty sure those students in the Study Room and library thought I was crazy for taking laps around the theology building. Oh well!
After spending a lot of time walking around in the cold rain and waiting for buses to arrive (they don't run on fixed schedules, so at the same time on different days you could be running to the bus one day or waiting a half hour the next), it felt good to get home and slip on my Darth Vader slippers and make a nice warm cup of hot cocoa. Real cocoa from Venezuela. Good stuff after I added lots of sugar! :)
Sitting by myself in the apartment, feeling a little lonely and a bit unproductive today, I was rapidly brainstorming in my head what types of things I could still do with my day. Obviously I came up with nothing, but the day still ended splendidly. My host mother and host sister came home with ingredients to make "sopaipillas" (so-pie-PEE-yas). I had forgotten that my host family mentioned this little tradition on the first day I came, of always making sopaipillas whenever it rains. Immediately I was excited to see it come alive.
Even though I feel like a master chef when I make Kraft Mac & Cheese or Funfetti cake, I still have a lot to learn when it comes to cooking and baking. So I mostly watched during this round of Chilean Cooking 101.
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| The dough is made by boiling zapallo (sa-PA-yo) in water, then mixing it with butter or oil and salt until it makes a paste. Then you add flour and knead the dough for a long time, then roll into balls and flatten with a rolling pin. |
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| zapallo |
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| My host sister, Maria Ignacio, showing off the sopaipilla dough. :) |
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| To the right is the oil where the dough will be fried, and to the left is a sauce in which the fried sopaipilla will soak. The sauce is made out of chancaca, real sugar from the sugarcane plant, with orange peel, whole cloves, and whole cinnamon. |
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| Sopaipilla frito!! |
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| The finished product, complete with the typical tecito (tea) that accompanies almost every meal here in Chile. |
Participating in this intimate tradition really makes me feel included in the family and part of the culture. On a rainy day, when people in the US would normally curl up alone on a couch with a book, my family interacted with each other and made food, with great conversation around the table. Sometimes I still struggle to find the differences between such a modern city in Latin America and any city in the US. I think I need to stop searching and comparing, and just start relearning how to live with new traditions and behaviors.
The sauce, with its smell of cinnamon and cloves, made me think of Christmas back home with everyone together in the house and eating Christmas ham. Getting the whole family together for one day out of the year is quite the ordeal, but maybe instead of reserving special family time for certain occasions, we should put a little bit more effort into little get-togethers that depend on something random. Like a rainy day. Even though it seems so isolating in a new place, there's always unity in a little sopaipilla.