Chilean Independence Day/Chilean Rodeo- Holiday/Sport

“Beeeeep! Beeep! Beeeeeep!” sounds a chorus of alarm clocks, ringing from all of our rooms at once, due to the fact we had set them all to the same time. We awoke early today, and for good reason too. Today was the Chilean National Independence Day! This day celebrates the break off from the Spanish rule, and the birth of Chile. The independence day is celebrated on September 18th, when the war for independence from Spain began. This is also the day when the first Government Junta was established. We decided to head out to see the celebrations going on. Outside, the streets of Santiago were filled with people, all boasting the red, white, and blue of the Chilean flag. The streets were beginning to fill, although they were not as crowded as it would be later that day. People were preparing, there is a parade today, and people were already reserving spots along the streets to watch. Being in Santiago, the capital of Chile, we were treated with a front-row view of this party. Everybody was super excited about being able to see the parade and have a good view of the different cultural aspects of Chile, things we had not seen much of so far.

By noon, the streets were in full- celebration mode. People were barbecue-ing on the sides of the streets. There were stands everywhere selling patriotic gear and giving out small Chilean flags. We were not quite sure what to do at first, considering that we had never experienced this type of event before. We decided that our best bet to see the most was to walk around the city. We took a left from our hotel, and looked around to see different people, all of which were dressed in their brightest national colors. We heard that there was going to be a plethora of different events today, ranging from the Chilean rodeo, to the different folk music performances, to the parade, which was what we were most excited for. The parade was going to have all sorts of thrilling things to see. From dances we had never seen before to different floats, all displaying national pride and the history of Chile. But the parade didn’t start until later, thus we had to find something to do until then. Granted, we wanted to see everything, but we became hungry, so we found a place to eat. We found a restaurant close to us named Uncle Fletch, which was a cozy cafe, that served a variety of different foods.

After eating lunch, we all decided to go back out to the streets. It was about one o’clock now, and the streets were packed. We decided to try and catch a show by Los Jaivas, a Chilean folk music artist. Not knowing where the performance was, we wandered the city for a while before finding a pamphlet with a map of the festivities on it for the Independence day celebrations. We were lucky, because the performance was only a couple blocks away. Running to make up for lost time, our group arrived just as the first song was finishing. The next song was Todos Juntos, a folk song about coming together. The rest of the performance was pretty good. The songs were all in Spanish, so it was a bit hard to dissect what they were singing about, but the beat was fun to dance to. Soon, after we had listened to a couple more songs, we decided that we had enough of the concert. We walked back out to the street, and went over to a group of vendors. The stands were handing out small Chilean flags for free, so we all grabbed one. Another stand was selling knick knacks for cheap. We found a cool compass that looked as if it was one hundred years old. In the back of our heads we all knew it was not rare or unique, and the compasses were probably shipped in from another country by bulk, but it was something to keep the memory of spending the day celebrating the independence of a country that wasn’t ours.

After we stopped by the vendors, we decided we wanted to see the famous Chilean Rodeo. It was a short walk to the medialuna, which was a crescent-shaped arena where the rodeo is held, and we paid our fee of forty dollars each and entered the medialuna. It was very crowded, but we were lucky because we found an almost empty row towards the back, where all of us could sit together. The huasos, which is kind equal to the American cowboy, rode on their horses, constantly trying to pin a calf against a padded wall. It was a strange sight, to see people instead of "bull fighting," it was more of "calf pushing." There were probably about fifteen to twenty huasos in the arena. There was one in particular that seemed to be the crowd's favorite. This huaso was dressed in a blue poncho and a straw hat, which we realized, all the huasos were wearing straw hats. Most of the people around us were speaking Spanish, but we leaned over to a man speaking Spanish that was wearing a disney world shirt and asked him. Luckily, the man must have been bilingual. We asked him about how the score was kept in this strange game of competition. The man told us that the huasos worked in a team of two, called a collera, to push the calf into the wall at specific points of it's body. We learned that the more points were rewarded if the calf wasn't pushed on it's head. The collera would be given up to four points if the calf was pinned by it's rear to the wall. We watched different huasos pin the bull for about fourty-five more minutes before the event ended. We left then, because it was getting late and we all were very fatigued from walking around Santiago all day.

We were already exhausted pretty early into the day from walking around Santiago all day long eating amazing chilean delicacies and celebrating, but we were determined to stay out longer. Some celebrations were still in full swing with excitement high and people still out we decided we’d find a good place to eat some dinner. We went to the food trucks and the stands to get all the variety of food we could ever want, meats and desserts filled our bellies but emptied the small amount of cash we had left in our wallets we budgeted out for the day. After that dinner we decided we would finally head back to the hotel and and get some sleep. Getting back to the hotel felt like years with how tired we were but we crashed in the hotel in an instant.