Fiestas Patrias

Tonight I write in blue, one of the colors of Chile´s flag, in honor of Fiestas Patrias. This past weekend we celebrated Chile´s Independence Day. Chile and the US are similar in that our independence days aren´t exactly when we had independence from our mother nations but rather when we declared our independence. And for Chile, that was September 18, 1810.

Photo Credit

I had been warned about Fiestas Patrias. I had been told to expect five days of non-stop asados (BBQs), meat and empanada eating, wine and chicha (kind of like homemade sweet wine) drinking, cueca dancing and staying up until 5am every night. Whoo! Thankfully I only had one day of this- so I got to experience everything but still get my precious sleep the other nights. 


I had my big day of celebrating on dieciocho itself, September 18th. Just so you know, I have been waiting two years for this. The past two dieciochos (18ths) I have heard about Andrés and his family and friends getting together and going out. I have wanted to be here for that so bad- and now I was! The 18th was Domingo, or Sunday, often referred to as "fomingo" or the equivalent of boring Sunday, so I thought that maybe Fiestas Patrias would be a little more low key this year. Maybe they were, but I didn´t notice. We started our dieciocho off with Mass at the parish where we also celebrated the priest´s ordination anniversary so the church was very full. After Mass there was cueca dancing in the courtyard and empanadas and wine! Can life get any better than that? Jesus, dancing and empanadas.

Empanadas- que rica!

After Mass we headed over to Andrés´grandma´s house in Villa Alemana which is about 45 minutes away. Pretty much Andrés´mom´s whole side of the family was there. They had already eaten their asado (BBQ) but thankfully saved us some and heated it up right when we got there. So we went around saying hi to everybody and getting reacquainted and then we sat down to eat. A very common activity to do for Fiestas Patrias is to fly kites so after eating we went to the field next to the abuela´s house to see the kites. Let me just tell you, they can go really high! Andrés´ little cousin got hers to go so high it was just a little speck in the sky, and then the line got cut so it flew away.


We left his grandma´s for a couple of hours to go visit his friend Carlos who also lives in Villa Alemana. Carlos´ family is very inviting and it was nice to be around such friendly people. We basically just sat around and drank chicha and ate empanadas while they talked. I´ve now become more comfortable with my spanish but it is still very hard to follow conversations when they´re talking so fast (at their normal rate)! After that we headed back to the abuela´s house and played a game that is very similar to bingo. I think my mom would be proud of me, I won the first game! Then we left to go home.


We got back to la casa at about 10pm, stopping for a Nescafé coffee for me and a Red Bull for him. We rested and watched tv for two hours and then headed out (at midnight!) to the ramadas.  The word ramada means branch in english and the ramadas are called such because they are usually places constructed totally out of branches where people go to dance and drink and celebrate. The ramada we went to in Concón was huge so it was a regular building and on the inside they had it decorated with branches. They had two different groups that switched playing about every half hour. First a half hour of cueca, then cumbia, then cueca, etc. I was really excited for the cueca because this would be my first time getting to dance it with Andrés outside of lessons and I had been waiting to do this with him for a long time. However, it didn´t go quite as expected. It was so packed that people kept bumping into me and the concrete floor didn´t make moving my feet very easy so that it was hard to concentrate on the music and the steps to the cueca. I ended up getting really frustrated, first with not being able to dance the cueca correctly and then my mind started blowing things out of proportion (I chalk it up to it being really late and I was tired). I was thinking that if I can´t do this, then I´m never going to be able to fit in or fully learn the language, etc, etc. I almost started crying on the dance floor. It was bad. This was my first breakdown here and I´ve heard from other expats that more will come- it can be hard adjusting to a new way of living and feeling out of place a lot of the time. Andrés saw that something was wrong and we stopped dancing but then I felt bad for having ruined things, but I couldn´t explain it to him over the music and my emotions. Thankfully, when cumbia came back on they played some fun songs and things turned around.


We ended dieciocho on a good note by stopping by the beach at 4:30am to watch the ocean and listen to the waves hit the shore. Thank God for an overall good first Fiestas Patrias.