Trips

Yesterday morning we headed to Puren for Jake to pick up some of his advisor’s tools. Tom is letting Jake use his tools, which is VERY nice of him. Tom has worked in Peru and Chile for over 30 years and has had a lot of funding from the NSF (National Science Foundation) and he has tools stashed all over the place. He also had a truck, which would have been great if he let Jake use it, but no dice. Tom will be visiting in January just to check and see how things are going.
It took us about 3 hours to drive to Puren from Pucon. Puren is a very small town. You could blink and you would miss it. The place where Tom keeps his tools in a house owned by a man named Don Fernando. His house is an old hotel that Jake thinks was built in at least the 1920’s. The house was, “leaning”. You could see how the frames had shifted from some of the doors and windows. It was really dark inside and it smelled like mold and wet… Yuck. Jake said he stayed there once in 2006 when Tom was doing a project there. I was happy to leave after 10 minutes; I don’t think I could have stayed there an entire night.

After we got the tools we picked up some bread, yogurt, and some Mankekes (basically a yellow cupcake with Manjar in the middle of it). Outside the store a woman was selling some Merken, which is a kind of chili powder. It is really good. We brought some back with us last trip and we bought 2 bags to bring home this time. If we are lucky we won’t have used it all before we come home!

So, we spent a total of about 6 hours in the car yesterday. Ugh. We had to get up at 6:30 this morning to leave Pucon in time to get to Valdivia (2 hours away) so that Jake could talk to Mario Pino. Mario is the Professor at the Universidad Austral de Chile that is giving Jake the adjunct Professor position. He is a pretty funny guy. Mario has worked with Tom for almost the entire 30 years he has worked here.

After we left Mario’s office we went down the street to the museum where Leonor (Jake’s counterpart Archeologist for the project) works. She wasn’t there today, so we walked around the museum until one of the people in charge could get out of their meeting. Leonor also keeps some of Tom’s tools, so we were stopping to get them and also for Jake to update her on how things are going. The museum is the old house of Van de Maele, who was some rich guy who moved there from Germany in the 1800’s. His house was huge! The bottom level is set up with the furniture and portraits that have been there since the house was built. The upper level is more like a modern museum with glass cases full of artifacts and things. We weren’t allowed to take any photos, stink. After walking around the museum we went outside to wait for the meeting to be over.

When we were there last year there was a group of sea lions that were chillin on a floating dock thing. This year they had migrated down river just a bit to right in front of the museum. There was this huge sea lion that had a face that looked like one of the creatures from “Where the Wild Things Are”. He apparently didn’t like the one of the other sea lions touching him because he let out a roar and tried to bite him until he moved over.

A bit later we were able to get the tools and we put them in the truck. We walked a little ways to across the river. We had lunch at McDonalds before getting back in the truck and driving the two hours back to Pucon. When we got back to the cabin it was cold enough for a fire and some hot chocolate that I had packed for us. It was quite cozy sitting by the fire, sipping hot cocoa.
Jake bought an internet card USB thing for us to be able to use the internet in the cabin. It is very slow and apparently doesn’t work with Skye so we will have to try and see if we can figure out how to get that to work. I tried calling Jennifer last night, I could hear her but she couldn’t hear me. Normally a 20 minute call to the states has cost about $0.10. Trying to call Jennifer and talking probably about 2 minutes cost more than $0.20. I wasn’t able to try Google talk so that may still work, hopefully.

Anyway, hope all is well at home. Heard it was 48 degrees in Nashville today, bet you are glad to be driving my car Jennifer :)

Mandy & Jake