Now, for the first time, I’m moving back to a place that I once considered home. It feels good. Comforting and familiar in the best way.

Haven’t heard the news? We are packing it up in Chile to live in our Seattle home again, just in time for summer. We haven’t suffered an actual winter since early ’09!

Forest’s mother Jane has kept the hearth warm while we’ve been gone. I’m going to enroll the boys in our neighborhood school for the first time. We have a lot to look forward to.

Why are we moving? Well, there are many reasons. But the main one is that we would rather be home.

There are work issues: Forest wants to be closer to his Buuteeq partners in the US and China, which will help scale back his travel and enable him to ride the momentum they are building.

There are school issues: We have a handle on what our kids need, and have more familiarity with the resources available in the States. Caetano needed a new school, and rather than go through a lengthy process of exploration, admissions and guesswork, we want to take this important step to a place that makes more sense for everyone.

This Chile sojourn was only meant to last a couple of years. After almost one year here, we came to a crossroads that forced us to stop and evaluate our priorities as a family. Our feelings have changed. We’ve gotten the travel bug out of our system. The flow is taking us home. It’s all good!

We will miss the kids gaining total fluency in Spanish, which is just around the corner. They have learned a lot though. This country is beautiful, and we got to live for a few months in Pisco Elqui, a magical place that my heart never left after we moved to Santiago. I’m sad to leave this amazing house behind, with the park-like yard and view of the Andes mountains and sturdy construction that survived a huge earthquake. Our maid, Aurelia, has spoiled us with outstanding Peruvian cooking and helped me in so many ways. We found a lot of great new friends. Hopefully, our favorite Chileans will come to visit us in Seattle. Chileans with means to travel love to go abroad–because when you live in a small country locked in by sea and a huge mountain range, the world doesn’t exactly come to you. We came though.

See you in the Northern Hempisphere!

It has been a long transition for us to finally arrive at a peaceful rhythm of school and work. The earthquake kicked us into the distinct mode of get-to-it-ness that has swept the nation. All over the country, Chileans work on reconstructing of roads, homes, churches and businesses.

Meanwhile, our kids are working really hard in school, learning Spanish, and projects at home.

Carlos is amazing. He is so happy, and has surprised me so much this year, really jumping into this reality with a great attitude. Sometimes he misses his old school in China, but as he gets used to the Montessori environment and learns more Spanish by the week, he finds more to like about it. He’s kind of advanced in math, and as it is nonverbal, he continues to make progress. But he also has to do lots of reading, writing and verbal expression to the class, rising to each occasion. It surprises him a bit that he can now understand the Spanish comic books we bought months ago. Now he is writing his own comic book in Spanish, a farce with an anti-Indiana Jones crime fighter who keeps losing his hat. Carlos claims to be motivated solely by money as he wants to sell these masterpieces, but Forest and I are just thrilled that he likes expressing himself this way.

Caetano just turned 7! We had a fun little birthday party with three friends–all bilingual boys. He had to learn the guys’ names to invite them, and realizing he does have buddies helped his attitude about school…a little. Forest and I have had many meetings with the teachers and after about a month we all decided that he can’t handle being at school for an 8 hour day. No surprise there. I didn’t really anticipate however that we would be going back to a pre-school schedule of 8:30-12:30. After lunch he is just a general nightmare to have in the classroom. So now I pick him up, we eat at home, do homework and some Spanish work from a Kumon tutor that meets him twice a week. We do craft projects, bake, read, play a game. Whatever we want! Last week we went to a park in the city and rode bikes for 2 hours. Sometimes he just plays on his own, building a fort out of cushions or curls up with a book. He started an art class that he loves. The school asked us to take him to a psychiatrist to asses whether he has ADHD or Oppositional Defiance Disorder or what. We’ve been down this road before. Same issues all came up in Beijing. I’m doing everything I can, and we are really having a lot of fun. In his own way at his pace, he’s learning a lot, and chattering a lot in Spanish. Funny thing is that he doesn’t have a problem with hyperactivity or defiance when he is in the smaller classes after school. Hmmmm.

This posted from my new iPad, my fingers hurt from pecking at the screen for this much text,

Ice-Cream argentina style—really, really good!

Before we left, we set out getting the paperwork in order for our party—both passports for the people and documentation for the car.  This led to a goose chase to track down about 5 different documents that we needed to procure for the car, including a sworn affidavit so we could leave the country with the car since the car is in my uncle’s name (we couldn’t buy the car when we arrived because we needed a RUT #, another wonderful paperchase unto itself); we also needed a international insurance policy (which we bought at a department store akin to Macys), and we needed to find the equivalent of the car’s pink slip (which had been mailed to us in a non-descript envelope that luckily we kept out of uncertainty, about 4 months earlier), and as luck would have it, it was also the time of year to renew the car’s circulation papers.  On the passport front Emilio had to leave the country and come back as he has been here for 180 days without exiting, and we had to dig up and find our “residence permit in transit” papers to show that we are ok to be here for more than 180 days which it has been since we arrived.  Alas, we found everyting, a miracle unto itself, and promised to set off FIRST THING in the morning on Friday so that we could avoid the expected crushing traffic at the border from other weekend trippers heading over in search of great steaks!

Checking out the wares at the night market in Mendoza’s Plaza 

A lazy morning and late departure later at 9:30am (as opposed to the goal of 7am) and we had a lovely drive up the valley which is really amazing in how quickly it rises, getting narrower and crazy steep very quickly and culminating in a series of switchbacks that traverse the last 1000 meters of vertical rise in a mere few miles, culminating in a tunnel that goes through the border and into argentina.   The Chilean side topography and flora are completely different than the argentinian side, so it is very dramatic to emerge from one side of the mountain on the other—most notably, the slow and undulating slope down from the mountain on the argentinian side hints of the less violent nature of the mountain formation on that side of the tectonic action.

Then our “3 hour tour” illusion was burst, as we pulled into the joint border processing center, about 5 miles past the border, where we pulled into a nicely compacted line of cars that turned out to be a 2.5hr snail crawl into a large building where no less than 5 different government functionaries stamped and reviewed our various documents—the car getting the worst of it (are there a lot of cross border car thefts?)  The kids were remarkably fine with the long drive in the car, kept busy by Little Lulu books and their Nintendo DSs + some Simpsons episodes on the iPod. 

The remaining drive down the valley and into Mendoza was lovely, along really pretty river terrain but with worsening traffic as we connected with the Mendozino day trippers who had escaped to the mountains for some hiking and river rafting.  We arrived at our hotel after 6pm, a solid 10 hr drive (including a break for lunch).  Yikes!!!  Much more than bargained for.

Of Mendoza, i’d say: beautiful, large european style promenades, gorgeous old homes throughout town, great outdoor restaurants and ice-cream shops, bustling nightlife (of course!), and delectable Steaks and Pasta!  Really surprised us how nice the city was, significantly more interesting and entertaining than a similarly sized chilean city would be.  The wine culture there has developed a nice tourism halo around it, with lots of wine tours and foodie activities (we were with kids so didn’t fully appreciate).  We had a great saturday walking around town, must have done a good 10km of walking total—kids were troupers although their feet hurt at the end of the day.

Lovely Mendoza streets, lined with trees! 

And for the ride back—in terror of facing a long border crossing and Chilean car traffic returning from the long weekend, i forced the family to get up and be in the car by 6am, which turned out to be fantastic as we had NO traffic, no wait at the border, and made the return trip in 5 hrs door to door!  I wouldn’t do the drive again on a holiday weekend, ever, as we heard that the border can take 5 hrs to get through just in immigration/paperwork and i think that would have really driven me over the edge of sanity.  Definitely would return to Mendoza, our visit was too short.

The ice-cream shop had 6 different variations of Dulce de Leche—just like Eskimos have lots of words for snow, Argentinians like their Dulce de Leche ice cream!

.

Carlos had done a unit of inquiry at his 2nd grade class in Beijing last year, and they talked about electricity in other ways—but somehow i think the Chilean Earthquake lesson on electricity was much more compelling?  I know he and his brother will remember the earthquake more for it’s lack of electricity than for its overpowering rattling forces and shattering windows.

Kids are now in school (day 2) and dealing with the crash course of being surrounded by spanish speakers all day long; not loving it so far but who could.  I do think they will adapt quickly, and we should be enjoying spanish only chit-chat in 6-8 weeks time.

Here’s some photos of our house and neighborhood with earthquake destruction (which I hadn’t been able to upload easily without, electricity…)

Here’s the living room window blown out by a collapsing bar.  This and our smashing TV set were the loudest of the glass breaking events in the house proper:

Many of the walls surrounding farms in our neighborhood were knocked over in long stretches, sometimes for several hundred yards at a time, like this one just down the street.  Good thing it didn’t fall into the street, as that would have cut off our access to get food/water!

And here’s the toxic cloud of muck created by a explosion at a nearby chemical plant.  The gray cloud is dark dark dark black in a properly exposed photo, and the clear white sky on the horizon was the otherwise clear sky that day.  i’ve been itching my skin ever since, wondering if we have real chemical/toxic exposure!

Bilz is sister of the other cat, Pap.  Bilz y Pap is a duo of “fantasy drinks” (aka sugar water with carbonation and lots of synthetic coloring) that are homegrown Chilean brands, just like Inka Cola in Peru (which has a coloring additive that is banned in the united kingdom from studies that show that it makes young kids *crazy*).  Here’s a picture of Bilz & Pap cartoon characters, that proudly rep the sugar water to young children and parents everywhere in Chile.  We liked them so much, and the kids the sugar water, that we named the kittens accordingly.

Ok, with that positive story off my chest (so that this blogroll doesn’t become all doom and gloom), i’ll update you that we are in the minority of Santiago residents that still don’t have electricity, ending day 5 and soon to be going on day 6 since the earthquake.  Thank god for our pool, which is providing lots of water for washing dishes and for the toilets, as well as a natural bath of sorts, albeit highly chlorinated.  We’ve burned through our candles, so I’m off to get some more for this evening.  The kids have been going to bed early with the sun, which is a plus as we get ready for the school year which starts monday (Was supposed to start today, but was moved out because of the quake, since our school, like many, was out of electricity for a while).  Otherwise, we continue to be safe and thankful!

The aftershocks are very frequent, surely we must have had 50 or more by now… they come with such frequency that sometimes we don’t even bother to mention them.  They are thankfully all smaller and decreasing further in intensity each time they appear.  Sunday morning there was a aftershock that was pretty long, and we jocked that “in a normal climate, that would have been a big one”… we later heard that it was a 6.0 and was nearby in Valparaiso, indeed, a big one by normal standards but for us that is now a baby-quake!

Our immediate family and friends all seem to be fine—we don’t have good phone access as our cell phones are dead.  Today i’m at a relative’s in Santiago so that I can call family in a few hours (when pacific coast wakes up), and reports are that by and large folks are ok, even our cousin and her 6 children from Curico, which is very very close to the epicenter.  Their town (Curico) got pretty flattened, but their house and the houses of their friends and colleagues from the farm were thankfully all ok.

Unfortunately some of our extended family were touched by this tragedy in the worst way possible–a cousin lost two young children to a tsunami wave, they were very close to the epicenter vacationing.  We will try to go to the mass this weekend with other family members.  Our thoughts and prayers are with the parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles.

Thank you to everyone that has emailed us with concern and well wishes—it has been very comforting to receive your notes.  Chile is generally well prepared for earthquakes because they are so common here, but even with great construction codes the devastation is palpable, even though I have seen almost nothing on the television or web (as we have been without electricity), so at this point you all know more than we do.

Forest, Cristina, the boys, and Tata Emilio who is with us.

Afterwards we gathered outside in the yard with Tata Emilio who is with us. We managed to get back to sleep eventually and rode out the aftershocks which were impressive unto themselves and super frequent, just had a biggish one again a good 9 hours later.

Our house suffered some damage including lots of blown out shelves, smashed tv, some shattered windows, 18 inches of the pool water level tossed out, etc etc but nothing important, we are thrilled to be safe and to learn that all of our immediate family is as well. However we got news of an immediate horrifying tragedy in our extended family involving loss of life of young children, a visceral reminder of the seriousness of the situation and i’m sure of similar news that will be affecting many folks here and where tsunami lands.

Thankyou to all ofour friends and family that have written with concern and well wishes, we will update more when can, for now we have no phoneor electric or water and cell phone battery is almost dead. Prayers to all those affected. Much love, forest and Cristina and the boys.

• Closed on Sundays.  Sure, that might be a day when car buyers might flock to showrooms in the USA, but apparently here neither buyers nor sellers want to be bothered on the day God told everyone to relax.  Too bad for me and my family, who drove into town in hopes of taking a look at some cars.
• Closed at lunch!  Yep, you heard right, at lunch time, the sales guys are all “out to lunch” so to speak, so my phone call to the Audi, Volkswagon, Subaru, and Mini dealers were all in vain.  At least the VW guys answered the phone and told me “sorry, we’re at lunch”, where as the other dealers the phone just rang, and rang, and rang… amazing!  They don’t even have their crap together enough to put a answering machine on the line so they can capture the lead!  When are car buyers supposed to go shopping if not at lunch during the work week, or Sunday on the weekend!  lol
• Not really interested in negotiating!  So i get a quote for $19m pesos for a Subaru Impreza WRX (about 35% more than the USA), which is fine, so i think “well, i’ll do some comparison shopping and see what the other dealers in town say?”  So i call another dealer, and he tells me he doesn’t have the car in stock, and that he can offer me the same price.  I say, hey, the other dealer has the car, i test drove, and that’s the price he’s giving me, to which he said “ok”.  The guy had zero interest in talking to me about making a deal… this flies in the face of every single ounce of capitalist/commerce instincts that are born into us in the USA.  He didn’t even try to tell me that he could (a) make a better price, (b) offer better service, (c) get me a color or features that I might want more, (d) offer to be friendlier or anything else he could make up.  Nothing… he just said, “ok”.  And that was it.  There’s no real competition here, there is basically a monopoly in every industry, so the Subaru dealer brings X cars to the country each year, and all are sold at good margin, so there’s no incentive to compete with eachother… nasty stuff!

No housewarming barbecues until Forest returns from his looong cold trip to Beijing at the end of the month.  Kids don’t start school until March, so it feels like an endless Summer for the Keys.  We are having a great time and have been enjoying the family visits from the States (Andy Casanueva family, Joaquin, Emilio who is staying with us for awhile), re-encountering semi-locals like Maria and Randy, and catching up with the Chilean family.

In case you are wondering how Carlos is taking this all in, here are some words from the little 8.5 year old man himself:

So how was it leaving pisco elqui?

Thumbs up. Well, thumbs to the side because in Pisco Elqui, you can walk to the ice cream store by yourself.  You can walk to school, and back, it’s peaceful and quiet.

Leaving was okay because now I don’t get to walk to the ice cream store, but it was a boring lifestyle.  i didn’t have a book to read (Carlos blew through all the books we brought down for him within our first month in Chile and has been on a steady comics diet).

After Elqui, you spent some time at the beach in Zapallar. How was that?

That was pretty good, we got some Christmas Legos which was our daily play for awhile. Seeing the family was good, fun.  The best part was the presents that they brought (and 100 lbs of Legos we’ve accumulated over the years).  The beach was pretty fun, but not fun to go there every day (we were there for about 2 weeks).  if i could play video games for 3 hours every day, then eventually i would get bored.  Anything if you do it too much it will make you bored.  At the beach i just sat there.  We had some water guns, played with Camila, but I spent 40% just lying there (doesn’t it sound like torture?).

The food?

The food in Chile is not really the best.  I miss Chinese food, dim sum.  The chinese rice.  (For the record, the rest of us like it pretty well).

How is the new house in Chicureo?

It’s pretty good.  It’s fun. We have a separate gaming room with lovely couches, two bean bags. My room is great, it has a nice desk, nice lamps. A big closet with room to store Legos.

How about your summer camp?

Summer camp stinks. i’d rather take up my day with other things, not necessarily video games.  Like jogging, or taking a bike around the neighborhood. Taking a bike around anywhere. Playing Legos, doing the geography book or math book. Other exercises.

But don’t you do some of those things in camp?

In camp, when we go to the pool, you can’t just go for 40 minutes.  you have to stay for an hour and a half, or get out, and sit there.The fact that I am trapped behind metal bars, forced to do activities, without the freedom to just jolly run off from camp when I’m tired, doesn’t work. There’s so many kids, it’s crazy.

I want to go to school. I’m bored of summer, it’s way too long.  I just hope it’s fun.  The small presentation I got, being there for half a day, didn’t give me the full picture.

I think it’s going to be okay.  As for the Spanish, I think in maybe 5 months I might be speaking fluently.  When I start actually going  to school, i might have the opportunity to learn  something.

How much Spanish have you picked up?

Since when I came to Chile i didn’t know anything, I think I have learnt 10% of what there is to know to start speaking fluently.

I miss WAB (Western Academy of Beijing). Back then I hated it, but now I think it was a stupid thing to hate it.  I got told off a lot (so it seemed to him at the time), but other then that it was pretty fun.  I miss my friends.

Will you make any friends here in chile?

Maybe. The kids don’t ask me more then what’s my name how old I am and what school i’m going to.  They don’t ask if I’ve been anywhere else.  I can’t learn spanish if no one talks to me.

They’re talking to you. You just don’t understand everything yet.

Everyone talks so fast.

They do. You’re doing great.