Meeting the Locals

Relax, this entry isn't as epic as the last.

Many years ago, one of John Harding's, ( Rich's great, great grandfather) sons, Josiah, left New Zealnd for good and emigrated to Chile. He was our first, New Zealand born Civil engineer, although he trained in England. By all accounts he was an interesting character and achieved some great things in his adopted country. We suspect he may have had some sort of clash with his father, which was why he moved, but that is only speculation. We knew that he was a widower and married again later in life, but what we didn't know was that in between times he had another family. A few years ago, one of the descendants of that family made contact with us. ( Oh the magic of Facebook). He and a few members of his family left Chile in the 1970s, ( that Pinochet thing??), and moved to Europe. Carlos, in Paris, and his cousin, Arturo, in Germany, have been in regular contact with us since.

When we mentioned to them we were heading over to Chile and were interested in meeting some of the family, they did their best to find us some contacts. I'm pretty sure they no longer have a close relationship with those family members who remained here, but Carlos did give us some contact details of some of his dear friends. After exchanging several emails, we finally set a date to meet up with Mimi and Carlos ( her husband, not our Carlos). They very kindly invited us for lunch and arranged Don Pedro, the taxi driver to come and pick us up.

We were delivered all the way across town, to a large apartment ( or department, as it is called here) building, in an area called Vitacura. The very beautiful Mimi greeted us at the front and took us to their elegant department on the second floor. Despite our language differences, we really enjoyed their company and felt very comfortable with them. Carlos was a little more confident with his English, but Mimi and I were able to bond exchanging grandy photos and wedding photos.

Mimi's brother (Willy??, I didn't quite catch it and really should have asked them to write it down for me as she did a few other things), arrived a few minutes later. His English was quite good, as he had worked for a New Zealand company in Chile , Carter Holt Harvey.

We were served a variety of little nibbley things including avellanas, a sweet little nut, and fugaza, a pizza type thing.

For lunch it was steamed reineta, a firm white fish (very popular and we had wondered what it was when we saw it on a menu somewhere), a simple salad and quinoa.

"You know this?"

" Yeah, yeah. Only healthy people eat it."

Apparently it's quite a staple food here ( it did, after all, originate in South America) and it was as nice as I have ever tried.

After lunch, Carlos offered to take us for a drive around the district, so we all bundled into his car, and toured the more up market residential area as well as some of the modern up town business district with its new, gleaming glass towers. Santiago is home to the tallest building in Latin America, the Gran Torre Costamera Centre Santiago, which we'd had pointed out to us previously and did a drive by today. At 64 storeys it certainly loomed large on the landscape, but dwarfed by the magnificent Andes.

Us and Mimi and Willy 

With Carlos

We stopped for afternoon tea ( actually our tea tea, as it turned out) at Carlos and Mimi's German Club. This was a large complex composed of football fields, tennis courts, swimming pools, sports stadiums, cafe, bar, gymnasium, spa and goodness knows what else, set in beautifully laid out grounds. It was exclusive in that you had to be of German extraction ( Carlos was fifth generation German) and I'm guessing a little bit well off, as there were only 600 members. After going to the gym, Mimi said her and her friends often sat in one of the large lounges and knitted. ( Ahh, another thing we have in common - not the exclusive club thing, obviously.)

Mimi ordered for us an enormous apple strudel, while she and Willy had the ubiquitous toasted sandwich and fries. It wasn't that long since we had finished lunch, and honestly, we struggled a little to finish but we didn't want to be rude. After a little wander around the grounds we once again boarded our carriage and were delivered right back to our door. We couldn't invite  them in as there was simply not enough room to fit 5 people, and honestly, I think we were all a little relieved that we couldn't. They kindly reiterated their invitation to stay with them when we returned before accelerating off into the sunset.