Chile

Chile has the perfect book to read while sheltering in place during a pandemic along with great food, art, movies, music, and poetry. I’ll save the big reveal of the perfect book until the end and start with the others.

When I ate at Rincon Chileno in Los Angeles in March 2020, they had the biggest empanadas I've ever seen with a chewy wheat crust, almost like a soft pretzel (baked, not fried). Empanadas of various kinds (the pear empanadas look interesting) can be found among the hundreds of Chilean recipes at this site: https://www.chileanfoodandgarden.com/category/chilean-recipes/

There are a couple of Chilean artists whose work caught my attention:

· Roberto Matto, painter of abstract expressionist and surrealist art can be found at https://www.artsy.net/artist/roberto-matta

· Ivan Navarro produces more contemporary art which can be seen at http://www.artnet.com/artists/iv%C3%A1n-navarro/

While researching this blog, I found a new story related to the coup that overthrew Salvador Allende and placed Augusto Pinochet in power. The Black Pimpernel is an inspiring movie of how the Swedish ambassador to Chile, Harald Edelstam, protected more than 1300 people from the surrounding violence. It’s available to rent on Amazon for $1.99 or free with Amazon Prime.

Victor Jara, Chilean folk singer and activist from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s has several albums, some of which are available on YouTube. Here is one of them. YouTube will line up several others right behind it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nhak9bEyjwA

One of the most famous Chileans is the poet Pablo Neruda. English translations of Neruda’s poems can be found at https://www.poemhunter.com/pablo-neruda/. In addition, The Dreamer by Pam Munoz Ryan and Peter Sis tells the story of Neruda childhood and The Postman by Antonio Skármeta catches him in old age. Both are available through your favorite bookstore. If you are looking for them online, the first is at https://marshallcevyphotographyphoto.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/the-dreamer.pdf and the second at https://openlibrary.org/books/OL1273108M/The_postman. If you want to watch the movie version, it’s called Il Postino and can be rented through iTunes.

And now for the big reveal, the best book ever for reading in quarantine is Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine and the Miracle that Set Them Free by Hector Tobar. The miners’ experience of being trapped underground for more than two months and then dealing with the resulting PTSD certainly gave me perspective about living in constrained circumstances as I listened to it in April of 2020. I found it on CD at the library, but it’s available in all the usual book formats, Overdrive both in text and audiobook, and in the 3M Cloud Library.

After all this reading, eating, movie watching, and art viewing, check out the options for an actual trip to Chile at https://www.thecrazytourist.com/15-best-places-visit-chile/. When this pandemic is over, your local travel advisor could help you plan a great trip to Chile. Shout out to my favorite travel advisor, Kaitlin Darnell at Laura's Travel in Redlands. May the travel industry survive and thrive - may we all survive, thrive, recognize our mutual humanity, learn to deal with our conflicts, and allow peace and health to flourish in Chile and throughout the world.

Photo Credit: Olga Stalska https://unsplash.com/photos/QaWRyEdlffY