Sopaipillas! Acrobats! Palooza!

Because time is passing faster than I can comprehend, last night we held our traditional celebratory event, VEPalooza. It was a more intimate Palooza this time around, with just four despedidas, or good-bye speeches for those volunteers leaving in the following months. As with Jornada, however, we all agreed that the smaller group made for a more relaxed and silly evening. I felt more relaxed as host and made sure to take note of feeling content to be in a room with some of my favorite people, all of whom have all been doing the work of multiple people in the past few months due to our small numbers. We forgot to take a group picture before people started leaving, but this is most of us:

In other VE news, last weekend, thanks to a donation from a local company, we took thirty-five or so VE kids to the circus! The circus was, as my friend Matt so eloquently stated, "a mixed bag." The show began with all twelve circus performers muddling through a hip-hop style dance to a reggaeton song, the vernacular of Latin American music. I cringed as the performers each danced to their own rhythms at their own times, knowing the Entre Todas girls were all thinking (rightfully) how they themselves could do a better job. Things looked up, though, upon the entrance of various trapeze artists and magicians, some more impressive than others. We volunteers squirmed through the trained-dog portion, exchanging winces when a tiny poodle wearing a superman cape galloped to the top of a 15-20 foot ladder, jumping into the arms of the trainer below without hesitation. The tent full of hooting Chileans demonstrated a slightly different attitude. Overall, the kids had a fantastic time, so the outing was a clear success. It was the eleventh birthay of one of the Entre Todas girls, so I was thrilled she got to do something special. Note the mountains behind the tent in this photo:

On a different theme entirely, any of my fellow volunteers will tell you that street food is one of Santiago's highlights. To name a few classics, there's the completo, which means a hot dog with all the fixings, the sandwich called as (pronounced ass) that allows for endless jokes among English speakers, mote con huesillo, a juice-like drink filled with large grains of husked wheat and a re-hydrated peach, and sopaipillas, disks of fried dough made from flour and pumpkin. Unfortunately, all street food has one of the following defining characteristics: wheat or meat. Until a few weeks ago, I had never had the joy of a greasy sopaipilla drenched in mustard. Luckily, my culinarily adventurous friend Suemedha decided this should change, and we conquered the gluten-free sopaipilla. They were incredible. So incredible, in fact, that I made them again by myself last weekend and took pictures:

Rolling out any type of gluten-free dough is usually about 12% as successful as you'd hope for, but a few of the sopaipillas actually behaved.

Deep-fried goodness.

And finally, on the apartment front, we have a third roommate once again! Emily, a VE volunteer since September 2008, returned from a month or so in the States and is now living in the glorious 1505. Not only is it great to have someone in the little bedroom off the kitchen to chat with while cooking, etc, it's great fun to have another girl around. Plus, now the apartment is completely meat-free! Three vegetarians in one apartment--that must be against some sort of Chilean law.