Back in Chile

 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 11^th 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!