The Art of Relaxing



Miniature Golf Course

The last weeks have been quite turbulent and relaxation from our Santiago trip did not last too long. After a lovely springlike period weather turned rainy and cold again. The children were quite uneasy and so Inés and I got stressed again for a while. For being stressed is not exactly the best thing to do living in an extended family we decided that this has to be changed and each of us needs his time to relax - either for himself or the two of us together. After some weeks of recurring discussions we managed to do it and now the whole system seems to be stable and calm again. One of the reasons for it may be that Inés found work as administrator of a restaurant a friend of her is going to open. That gives her the chance to earn some money herself and we now can be quite tranquilized about our shop and how it will work. At least for the season we will have a proper income. Our plan now is to shift the shop down to Pucón and run it beside the restaurant, which will bring it closer to the customers.

Nevertheless the opening of the shop, we celebrated on 26th of October, the Austrian national holiday, still took place at our house. We invited some friends and made an Austro-Chilean Barbecue. Lots of meet with lots of salads. It was quite a success and funny evening that lasted until after midnight.

I myself will have to work as well quite a lot this season because I started guiding canyoning  too. Because I have a waterproof camera I serve as a photographer in the canyon as well. So I already had my first canyoning trips. It is, as meanwhile I was not that surprised anymore about it, quite different of what we understand under canyoning in the Alps. You follow down an amazing gorge at the foot of the volcano and in four hours of activity you have three waterfalls to transcend. The rest of it I would call ´jungle hiking´. It is a tramp through dense thicket of ferns, spiny bushes and trees. The most important tool is a big machete we have to take with us and the faces of the customers when they see it the first time is one of the most amusing things. But that for you are rewarded with four hours of pure, awe-inspiring nature. Sometimes the gorge is just one metre wide but thirty metres deep just to abruptly open up into a broad valley with rainforest-like vegetation. A tremendous scenery!

If I do not relax working Inés and I do regular ´relaxation-exercises´ now, to stay calm in between our small turbulent world. So one day we went to the sauna which is just a small wooden hut in a private lot. We had the whole thing just for ourselves and so it really was convenient walking out into the rainy night in between, breathing the weeping air. Another day we went playing miniature golf on one of Pucón's courses. Or we just have a romantic dinner in a restaurant with a good bottle of wine and an amazing view of the volcano or the lake.

What really mainly affected anyone here in Chile these days was the drama of the 33 buried miners and their rescue. For weeks the media hardly did report on anything else. ´33´ was the new ´word of the year´ ,the number most frequently marked in the national lottery, printed on t-shirts and being used for far-fetched comparisons. When the last miner was rescued (which for sure was broadcasted live in all major TV and radio stations) sirens sounded all over the country and immediately people started to sound the horns of their cars and wave their Chilean flags which they seemed to have prepared already. The miners itself  now have to undergo their next martyrdorn being handed from one talk show and interview to the next undergoing a real running the gauntlet. While scenes during the rescue have been really touching and you just could not be not affected what is going on now is partly far away from quality journalism. Hopefully for these traumatized people there will soon happen anything that takes them out of floodlight.