Rabuco

Rabuco is about a 45 minute drive outside of the city. We loaded ourselves onto a bus at 8:30 on Friday and headed out to the foothills...the entire day I couldn't stop looking up at the mountains—the views here will never get old.

We spent the day at a flower farm owned by a couple, who were originally engineers in Santiago. The property was beautiful. They were up on a hill with a panaramic view of the mountains and the surrounding foothills. The owner took us on a tour of the farm and it was fascinating to learn about the germination, planting, and harvesting of the unbelievable variety of flowers they grow.

My favorite flower was "repoyo de colores" or colored cabbage. It is a flower in the cabbage family that has the taste, texture, and smell of cabbage, but is really beautiful. They sell them in bouquets and grow them in three varieties of color combinations.

 

After the tour, there was free time to play soccer, make kites, or just sit back and enjoy the view.

A culinary profesor taught us how to make sopapillas, a fried dough made with pumpkin. They reminded me of the fried cookies we make at Christmas dusted in powdered sugar.

The food was phenominal. We had sopapillas with different salsas, giant empanadas with pino (a mixture of ground meet and spices with the token one half a hard boiled egg, one olive, and one raisin inside) and for lunch plates of tomatoes, avocado, rice, corn and rosemary chicken cooked in a traditional oven!

For our last activity, we learned to dance the Cueca, the traditional dance of Chile. A couple demonstrated it for us and then we broke up in groups to practice. It has three main parts with countless  rules, many of which are situational and impossible to keep straight!

Here is a video of the dance (which in no way resembles my attempt).
My partner Emily and I made it to the top five round in the Cueca competition, so we were pretty pleased with ourselves.

It was a wonderful day full of amazing and welcoming people, good food, and so many new adventures. It was fun to see a family farm in Chile—it was pretty much the same as the ones in Kalmazoo and northern Michigan: the people were friendly, passionate, and hardworking, the food was delicious, and there were kids and goats and chickens everywhere. Tomorrow, a new adventure begins with a hike up Cerro Mauco, the tallest cerro in the area!