Andrew's Birthday

We were sad to have to leave Conaripe and Villarrica.  We had such a great time there.  But, our adventure would take us even further south by about another 12 hours in the car.  On the way, we stopped in the town of Panguipulli.  Some of these Chilean cities have some fun names.  Many cities in southern Chile were settled or at least influenced by German settlers.

This church shows the European influence in the architecture.

In southern Chile we saw many of these old steam tractors.  Some were weathered like this one and others were restored and painted. 

Then we came across the find of the day.  Just outside of a very small farmer's market in Panguipulli was this man here selling raspberries (frambuesa) from his truck.  We noticed a couple of people buying some who looked like they worked at a restaurant.  Dave inquired as to the price of the raspberries and the man replied, " Dos Mil"  or two thousand pesos or about $4.  We were thinking that 2 mil per kilo is not too bad and that we should buy some.  But, it turned out that they were priced at 2 mil for the entire flat.  Each flat contains 4 kilos of raspberries.  That is 9 pounds people!  So we bought two flats.  That works out to about 45 cents per pound.  We could not believe it.  As you can imagine, for lunch that day we gorged ourselves on raspberries.  I think I ate a kilo myself in the car during the rest of our drive.  We had enough raspberries to eat freely for a entire week.

We finally made it to our desination Valdivia, Chile.  We parked down by the river at the fish market and had a good time watching the sea lions fight for prime spots on the dock.

 

We also found this submarine docked at the river.

All of this traveling we done on Andrew's 12th birthday.  He wasn't too excited about th long drive, but was a trooper about it.  His one request was to have a chocolate cake on his birthday.  This was a tricky task because cakes aren't high on the list of favorite deserts for Chileans.  After driving around town, we finally found one at an Unimarc grocery store.  It was one dry cake, but Andrew liked it.  Here he is blowing out his pretend candes.