 |
| O'Higgins Park Santiago - One of the City's Biggest Parks Close to Downtown |
After I had spent more than three great months
in Austria I finally came back to Chile on August fourth. The flight was
without any complications and delays. Only leaving Santiago airport this time
took two hours because now they are x-raying all the luggage of incoming
passengers (!) and most of the international flights are landing early morning
as did mine. This caused a long queue at the x-raying machines. Well, finally I
could Inés who was waiting in the arrival hall take in my arms again. As you
can imagine the reunion was happy and intense. We spent a few days in
Santiago, celebrating ourselves together again, enjoying the best of Chilean
kitchen like seafood, beef and huge homemade burgers, Fantasilandia, a big
amusement park in Santiago and watching Ice Age 4 in cinema which was quite a
good training for me to get used to Spanish again.
Three days later we took the overnight bus to
Pucón, where we arrived early morning. The reunion with the kids was
quite emotional as well. Seems like they really missed me. My original plan to
take some days to stay with the family in the beginning worked out perfectly
due to an influenza virus brought by Mati, Inés’ grand son, that let stay in bed half of the kids as well as myself for almost a whole week. So I had a lot
of time to enjoy big family life again, in which fell Adriano’s 11th
birthday which for I made a typical Austrian Sacher Cake. These days also my
Indian carom board which I had sent from Austria to use it as a new attraction
in the cafeteria arrived. It is the Indian national game comparable to pool
billiard played on a wooden board of about 1 per 1 meter which weighs 12
kilograms. The Chilean customs obviously did not know what it is and asked
me for an official bill or a proof of any bank transaction thinking I would use
it for commercial purpose. Only after I had sent them an explaining
e-mail that this is all just private stuff they delivered the package. Now I am
training my carom skills (which degreased a little bit over the last years)
again together with the kids who are really fascinated by the game that can
really be addictive.
Apart from that I started to prepare the
sauna/cafeteria for the coming season. Inés really had done great work while I
had been to Austria and made the place a comfortable and cosy one where someone
would like to stay. Now it is up to me to make some last manual adaptations
and improvements so that we can bear a lot of customers. So far once in a while people are coming and I already served my first customers which
had been to a sauna the first time and had been quite pleased. So it
seems people like it and now our place just has to get known. In September when
is the Chilean national holiday and Pucón gets crowded the first time after the
winter we will know more about the success of our business. Let’s keep our fingers crossed for it!
