Friday, August 10, 2007: Pomaire!

Friday, August 10, 2007

Today CIEE took us on a day trip to Pomaire, a town about 1 hour to the southwest of Santiago. Pomaire is famous for its ceramics, called greda. We took a tour of a ceramics factory, ate lunch in the house of our tour guide, then went shopping. Its incredible to see this entire town functioning on ceramics. Our tour guide told us that basically everyone in the town works in someway on the ceramics. They have everything: place settings, cooking pots and skillets, candle holders, plant holders, HUGE pots for gardens, and more. They are super famous for their piggy banks, called chanchitas. The only way to get your coins out of the piggy bank is to break it. There is a saying “Romper la canchita” which means “to break the piggy bank” when you are really short on cash.
For lunch we ate home made empanadas (three types: pino (hamburger meat and onions), spinach, mushroom). They were incredible. For dessert we had pastel de choclo which means “corn cake” but it was actually a strange combination of layers pino, chicken, olives, and this crushed corn bread dough type thing with sugar on top. Definitely the strangest dessert I’ve ever head. After lunch I got to try making pottery on the wheel. I had to use the manual wheel and it was 100 times more difficult than it looks. I gave up and let someone else try once I’d turned my clay into what resembled an erupted volcano instead of a cup.
We went shopping and I bought a ton of awesome ceramics. Gifts for people at home (you’ll have to wait and see), and two coffee cups for Olga and I. She was absolutely thrilled and we only use them now!
Friday night I was tired and didn’t feel like going out, so after buying my plane ticket to Buenos Aires, Argentina for Tuesday to Saturday, I headed over to Calli’s house. We drank Chilean wine and watched B-Happy, a Chilean movie (with sub titles of course). Then we climbed in her bed and both read Harry Potter. She borrowed a copy from our friend Natalie. As Olga would say, I slept with Harry Potter! It’s been a while since my last slumber party, but sometimes Harry Potter is more fun when you can share him!