....More Pics

Meet Mauricio. He's our favorite. He has great social presence, and whereas most of our patrons patiently wait for us to come to them, whenever Mauricio spots us, he comes jogging over and orders dos burritos por favor.

I think that Alex's smile, the gentleman on the left, tells our entire story with one look.

Our amiga Rosa and her pololo (boyfriend). Rosa would not let us move on to any of her friends until she kissed us on the cheeks. I think her boyfriend might have been a little jealous, because he tried to get a little more than a kiss from our compadre Amanda (featured back right).

Rosa the sweetheart.

This is one of our regulars who told us, "I wait in the park all day for you guys. You need to start coming on the same time, so I don't have to be bothered by these crazy birds while I'm waiting."

Valpo street art. Chomp, chomp, chomp.

The Adrenaline Award goes to the public transit experience. The drivers of the micros (short public buses) evidently play copious amounts of Mario Kart and are under the impression that their skills are readily tranferrable to the bumpy, windy roads of the cities.

There's a few hobbits who live in Valpo. After weeks of searching, we finally found their abode.

Pics from Comida del Corazon

I know what you're thinking... and yes, that is a wee bit of a burrito. That's what happens when the tienda is out of burrito tortillas and only has taco tortillas. Good thing we made a thousand of them.

Honestly, when it comes down to it... It's all about the smiles

Thumbs up for burritos!!

Utilizing all the available space in our spacious and comfy 5-star kitchen.

Rockin the kitchen!

Our weapons against hunger

Walking the streets of Valparaiso looking for the needy

A classic Valparaisian cerro

The graffiti in Valpo can hardly be called that. Many of them are stunning ornately detailed pieces of art

I'm glad I was wearing my sunglasses when I was talking to this man. After saying thanks a dozen different ways, he bowed his head to place it in my hands in one final expression of gratitude. My glasses hid my misty eyes.

There is a subtle juxtaposition hard to see in the picture. On my wrist is my omnipresent Duke Basketball bracelet. Ironically, he was wearing a Purdue basketball jacket.
Last Week Duke 76 - Purdue 60

Burritos!!!

Our burritos are not the hardiest of meals. Knowing this, we give 2 to each person. Immediately after handing the man in the red coat two burritos, he ran over to his friend sitting on the other side of the block to give him one.

Following his kind example, we followed him and gave them another two.

Right after we gave burritos to this man, port security showed up and chased him away. It really highlighted how varied and different human actions can be.

This was the most heart-wrenching moment of the whole experience so far. When this man reached his hands out of the garbage can to take the burritos, he only had 2 fingers out of 10. Too often we judge before we know. "Get a job you bum!" Could you imagine how you would feel in hindsight if you said that to this man in ignorance?

We had seen this man walking around earlier but had missed a chance to give him a burrito. I was excited to have a second chance, and so I excitedly approached him.

What I didn't realize, is at some point between our meetings, he had decided that today was a good day to sit without pants or underwear on. A little awkward.... for both of us....

Doing good in the neighborhood

Our new buddy

Alex finding 2 new friends

Chilean Spanish is still like deciphering hieroglyphics for me, but it doesn't take words to express gratitude as this man proves

Loving life in Chile

Comida del Corazon

"Food from the Heart"

If there is one specific thing the entire Chilean odyssey has taught me it would be that nothing goes according to plan. No matter how thorough the planning, no matter how concrete the agenda, no matter how certain you are, curveballs down here are inevitable.

So, it should have come as no surprise to me when I found out the school that I was supposed to be volunteering for decided to cut their volunteer program. 5 months of planning and expectation washed away in one catastrophic meeting with the school's faculty, with the backup singing group the bad news bears in accompaniment.

Since that time, the organization I work for has tried, so far in vain, to find another volunteer placement for me. One might think, that being a resident of an extremely impoverished city, where half the population lives in homes haphazardly constructed with 4 pieces of sheet metal held together by a piece of rope, would provide ample volunteer opportunities. In principle that seems to be the case. The unaccounted for lurking variable in all my calculations was the rigidness of the bureaucratic quagmire one must wade through to actually lend a helping hand. Organizations want and need workers. Unfortunately for all, they take weeks, doing who knows what, trying to determine if you're a good fit for their organization.

Enough is enough. Earlier this week, Alex and I decided that we were wasting too much of our preciously finite amount of time down here waiting for decisions to be made. Why wait around for an organization to spend weeks analyzing where to place you, when you can just start a new charity yourself?

Enter, Comida del Corazon. To expedite the process of this blogging, I'm simply going to copy and paste our charity's info from our website.

Vision Statement: We fight hunger with food from the heart (comida del corazon).

Mission: To create a perpetual grassroots effort to feed the hungry of Vina Del Mar and Valpairaso by making charity simple.

Description: Charity should be simple. We make burritos and feed them to the people who need them most. Simple.

The Founders: Ganes McCulloch and Alex LaCroix

Hi everyone! Thanks for taking the time to learn about our cause. We are recent graduates of the University of Arizona and are currently living in Vina del Mar, Chile doing volunteer work with impoverished children. Unfortunately, we feel that our efforts have been limited by bureaucratic inefficiencies within the very organizations that seek to help them.

We decided to make things simple. Hunger surrounds us on a daily basis; we need only look around the corner of our house to find those suffering from it. So we are going to put on our chef's hats and feed them--burritos. Simple.

Still, the problem is bigger than the two of us, especially given our lack of culinary expertise and manual dexterity. If you have a heart, or love burritos, or have a heart that loves burritos, please don't hesitate to help us with this cause! Either facebook us, or email us at comidadelcorazon@gmail.com

Argentinian Adventuredome

So after spending the entirety of my first 10 days in Chile, I decided it was time to go abroad. My friend Alex and a new found friend from school decided to border hop to Argentina for the weekend. Vina del Mar, Chile to Mendoza, Argentina is essentially a flat, straight drive. There's really only 1 obstacle that mars the path.... the Andes Mountains- 22,000+ ft. at their highest point. Prior to departure, friends and fellow travelers hyped the bus ride over the range as breathtaking, magnificent, and inspiring. All turned out to be drastic understatements!


We purchased our tickets early in the week, giving us complete agency to pick the perfect seats. Obviously, we chose seats 1, 2, and 3 on the upper level of the double-decker bus. I read later in a travel blog that these seats are affectionately referred to as murder seats because a glass wall is all that separates you from safety and a precarious balance over the edge of the 35 switchbacks you have to traverse to climb the mountain slopes.

Night had fallen when we reached the mountain pass. Luckily, the moon shone bright, illuminating gargantuan mountain profiles all around us as we rambled up the Chilean cliff side. The road was a roughshod, 2-laner that was nearly wide enough for two buses to pass each other abreast. When buses would pass each other, the more senior of the drivers would haphazardly drive with half the bus bouncing along the dirt shoulder. Switchback after switchback the front of the bus would swing towards the edge of the road, revealing a 60% grade descent below us- the cars' lights below shining like little bugs waiting to be smashed by a careening bus falling off the edge. Tunnels along the way seemed cut to just the exact dimensions of our 64-passenger superwagon. It was like the driver was a 3-year old, sticking cubical blocks through the corresponding cubic cutouts.

Hours after our arrival in Mendoza I found myself in the back of a WWII troop transport being hauled to the top of a 2,000m mountaintop. Paragliding time!! This was my first time to paraglide, and I figured the Andes would make the perfect initiatory backdrop. At the top of the hill, we harnessed to the front of our "fliers". They arrayed their kite-like parachutes on the ground behind them, scores of thin ropes connecting us to our vinyl hope of salvation. They barked quick instructions to us, "When I say run, you run as fast as you can, don't sit down, and don't look back. You're speed is what will make or break our takeoff. If you sit down, you'll drag us both down, and we'll fall off the cliff." Simple enough I guess.

Apparently, you need a decent amount of wind to get airborne safely. On our special day, there was none! We stood and waited... and waited... and waited.... Finally, there was enough of a breeze, determined by the flier kicking dust up with his feet and watching how far it carried before descending. The first duo ran down the slope, took off, and then came back down in defeat. The tourist and the flier narrowly avoiding the cliff's edge. However, one by one the tandems of fliers and tourists lifted-off and soared through the air.

I was lucky to be a part of the rearmost tandem. We observed the last of our compatriots take the plunge and were anxious for our turn, when the wind again betrayed us. We waited for another freezing 15 minutes and still nothing. When the dust kicking provided insignificant results, our driver lit a cigarette to determine wind speed and direction. At this point I'm hoping my flier cherishes his life as much I do mine. My introspection was shattered abruptly when my flier started screaming "Corre! Corre! Corre! (run! run! run!). I start sprinting down the hill as fast as I could., urged on by another salvo of "Corre! Corre! Corre!". Halfway to cliff's edge we got airborne for a few meters before returning to the earth. Our momentum had taken us within 10m of the edge and we were still barelling foward. "Mierda! Mierda! CORRE! CORRE! (Sh$t. Sh$it. RUN! RUN!)" my flier yells. By now we're on a 55% grade, sloping straight to our doom. Adrenaline pumping, legs straining, mind questioning I raced as fast as I could in true lemming fashion. Suddenly, two steps from the edge, our chute catches enough of a draft to suspend us above the precipitous drop below.

My hearts pounding subdued as I took in the scene before me.... terraced hillsides, the city of Mendoza, the Andes mountains, and life itself. River rafting the next day will be a breeze....

Siren Penguins

I'm lucky to have a lot of forward thinking roommates down here in Chile. Most of them have been here for a couple of months, and their remaining time is quickly dwindling, as they will all be leaving soon to be home for the holidays. The good fortune for me is their short time has instilled a sense of urgency in them to see as much of the country as possible. Thus, my first weekend in Chile found me tagging along on a trip to Cachagua (2 hours up the coast from Vina) and Zapallar to find an elusive penguin colony.....

We caught a micro (city bus) from Plaza Vina up the coast to the beachtown of Zapallar. It's a quaint, gorgeous little town where a lot of the Santiago millionaires build their vacation homes on rolling beachside hills. The scenery was gorgeous, and we were the benefactors of beautiful Chilean Springtime day, full of sunshine and perfectly warm weather. We had lunch--empanadas, a chilean staple-- at a small restaurant made entirely of wood... the stools were hundred-pound tree stumps. Even the ashtrays were made of wood, which I found to be a strange choice for a tender-box building.


After a quick bite, we were off to see the Penguins. After waiting 2 hours for a bus that was supposed to run every 30-min, we reached our destination. We walked north on the beach for 1/4 of a mile to reach a rocky outcropping that overlooked the island where the 1,500 Humboldt penguins live. The island was about 300-ft away from the coast, separated by a narrow channel. Waves entered the channel from both sides, turning the stretch of water into a tumultuous, frothing, foaming wave pool of grand proportions. Originally we had planned on trying to swim over to the island, but one look at the scene in front of us discouraged any thought of going into the water at all.

We thus contented ourselves with relaxing on the rocks, watching the penguins joll around on the near-distant island, acknowledging our good fortune-- beautiful scenery, perfect weather, and a cooling ocean spray misting us as we sat on the rocks. As many of you know, I love penguins, and I love the ocean. So needless to say, I felt it my self-imposed duty to myself and to the penguins to get a closer look. I nimbly descended (in true penguin-waddling form) down the rocks to the cliff's edge, directly above the wave-rock frontier. From there, I could see the penguins partying in the distance and the sets of waves rolling in, accelerating as they drew near to meet their fate with the rocks. I stood there for the better part of 15 minutes, hypnotically entranced by the whole vision before me.

Suddenly, an internal alarm went off, and I looked up to see a rogue, pseudo-tidal wave barrelling towards the rocks and myself. I knew I was in trouble. I instinctively looked down at my footing, all slick rocks with a 30% grade leading 5-ft straight to rock's edge. Just beneath my feet I saw a crack-line fissure running between the granite. Looking up, I saw the wall of water bearing down on me. The force of the water crushed against me, sending me spiraling like a rubber ducky in a whirlpool. I frantically fumbled for salvation, and with a lucky strike stuck both hands in the fissure. The water, froth, and foam quickly drained off sans me.

Did I mention I'm lucky to have forward thinking roommates? Well I do... and they were forward thinking enough to catch action shots of the whole ordeal... which in the end is apparently better than raising a warning call!
(pre-wave)

(post-wave... and yes, for those of you wondering, my camera is in my pants pocket)

Abe Lincoln's Log Cabin

So I have settled into my new abode, an open-air 5 bedroom casa blanca near to the beach. It's a heterogeneous mix of modernism (internet, cable, refrigeration) and anachronisms (propane heat lamps, mold, and my antebellum floorboards, cerca 1842) I think my room was once host to a small petting zoo, as it smells distinctly of urine and burnt hair. That plus the wooden flooring as affectionately earned it the title, Abe Lincoln's Cabin. Bienvenidos a mi casa!!