This one's for you Tez.

Chile is one of the more expensive South American countries but if you shop like a local you can save yourself a fortune.  We’ve been buying sliced bread (pan de molde) at the shops and it is about CHP$1.100 a loaf and weighs around 300-400 grams.  We’ve found a great bakery (panaderia) up the road from us and they sell the best bread by the kilogram.

There are two main types: amasado which is slightly more expensive at CHP$1.000/kg.  It is left to rise for longer than the second type: allullas which is sold for CHP$850/kg.  This works out to about CHP$50 per roll.

amasado

allullas

They bake all day and invariably the bread is warm when you buy it regardless of the time of day.  I told the shopkeeper how it’s the best bread around and asked if I could take some photos.   She walked me outside and told me to take a picture of the sign first.  Everybody likes a bit of free advertising. 

I must have made a bit of an impression because I was shown the oven.  Perhaps she was suffering from Hansel and Gretel syndrome?  We chatted for a bit and I told her I hadn’t bought any of the amasado so she gave me one to try – it was warm and perfect.

If you want to meet most of the population of Valparaiso, go to Jumbo on a Sunday.  It would appear that Sunday is the day for hitting the supermarkets.  We won’t make that mistake again.  The main reason we went out shopping was just to buy a needle and thread.

Karen has managed to source just about all of the uniforms that we need and on Saturday while I organised the rent and beds for the new apartment, Talluah, Karen and los niñas went shopping for the remainder of the items needed for school.  One of the dresses that Karen found for us needs a little bit of needlework on it. You’d think in a city this size it’d be easy to find needle and thread.  You would think...

Sunday is flea market day and we split up to search for needle and thread.  Talluah found what she needed.

There was one last preparation for school tomorrow.  It’s an all girls, Catholic school, complete with nuns who live upstairs.  I asked Truce if she knew how to make the sign of the cross.

She said yes and put her two index fingers as an X.  “It looks a bit like a T,” she said.

We’ll do some practice on the way to school manaña.