Pisco with my girls: March 4, 2012 -- Family Visit/dinner with the host family

Granted this post is a month late, I still think its worth of posting. A month ago, well actually a month and a half ago, my parents arrived in Chile for a vacation/trip through this country. I say vacation, but really travelling with my mom is more or less travelling, in the sense that it involves work and effort to survive. That being said, this post relates to a dinner we had with my host parents and the host family of a friend of mine, Sophie, who lives close by and is also on my program (and who, by the graciousness of her heart and the public nature of facebook, is letting me use her pictures for this post).

The dinner would have been just like any normal dinner among friends except for a few important aspects. First, and most obviously, language. My parents, for their part and to their credit, speak and understand significantly more Spanish than my host parents do English. Now, you might notice that that statement is entirely relative. Alba and Jorge, my chilean host parents, are hard pressed to understand very much English at all. So, what my biological parents understood and spoke in Spanish was celebrated at the table by the chileans. I get ahead of myself. The language barrier came into play in a very big way even before the dinner party began. Set to start at 8:00pm, my parents made their entrance to the evening's activity at roughly 9:30pm. Why? Because sans Spanish and sans telephone, it becomes exponentially harder to arrive at your destination in Santiago via a taxi. Also, the street I happen to live on is only accessible through a city planner's nightmare of a maze of one way streets and no-left-turns. BUT, they arrived, finally. And after much food and a many bottles of wine later (approximately 7 bottles between 8 people, only 6 drank...) the dinner was a success!

Here are some pictures! Courtesy of Sophie!