Un Buen Accidente

The fact that I came here in this part of the year was a buen accidente. I couldn’t have been luckier. Tomorrow, September 18, is the anniversary of Chilean Independence from Spain. It’s their bicentennial, so the nation is pulling out all of the stops in it’s expenditure for the fiesta de patria. This whole week is known a la semana de chilenidad, the week of Chilenity. It means that typical Chilean patriotism is even stronger in this week, that on every house, and most of the cars, fly one, two, or even three or five or twelve Chilean flags. Everyone is playing the national games: trompos (spinning tops), volantín (flying kites), palo ensebado (something like a May pole), el emboque (a toy with a wooden cup attached to a wooden stick – the object is to catch the cup with the stick). Yesterday, I went with Sandro’s mother and sisters to see all of the students from the two schools in the municipal seat, Melipilla, dance the national dance, la cueca. They said that there were 1,300 pairs, more or less. All of the students are required to dance, or they receive a poor mark. The dance has roots in the agricultural traditions of Chile. The costume of the woman is a traditional dress while the man wears the boots, chaps, hat, poncho and spurs of the guacho. The spurs used in cueca are large and ornamental and are worn so that the stomping movements of the man cause them to ring.
This weekend I am going to pass the fiesta at the site where my host family is building a new house. It’s on a parcel of land near a village called Curacaví. Compared to their previous house, which was in a village called Maria Pinto, or compared to this house which is a rental, the new site is more removed from any other houses, with a spectacular view of the surrounding valley. I can tell it’s their dream, to live in a place this tranquilo.