Dia de los Muertos

You know how some holidays, like Thanksgiving some years, take on that surreal, never-ending quality with the holiday over and yet the day still going? That is how today feels. It is a national holiday in Chile. Dia de los Muertos. Where everyone goes to the family plot at the cemetary with flowers and has a picnic. In Mexico (and the Mission) it is a big party with a parade, and you pretend that you are living it up with your old amigos and family members. Here it is a bit more somber. Due to the holiday, no tours were heading to the national park. Instead we caught local buses to Dalcehue which is a small town north of here. Then we took a ferry for a 5 minute ride over to a smaller island ending in the tiny town of Achao. We mostly walked around, went to a market, bought some things made of wool and had lunch. A tsunami wiped out a good bit of this town and others in 1960 but some of the wooden churches survived or were restored. The alerce trees I mentioned earlier were used to build all of the famous structures - churches and houses in this area. Many of them are now national monuments.
Today started at 9am which wasn´t a problem for me because the owners of my (previous)hostel have a midnight curfew. I thought the woman said that curfew was at 2:00 (dos) but she apparently said 12:00 (dose). So my mistake, I´ve learned to ask for clarification in 5 different ways. But that meant a short Halloween of watching the children walk around getting candy and an even shorter time at the bar. Last night was apprently one of the few lively nights per year with a salsa band and everything but I had a curfew... My friends had other plans and stayed out until 5am.
Halloween here is mostly the same. Kids dressed up looking for candy. I saw some broken eggs on the street this morning... apparently that is universal. No devil´s night - solamente en Detroit.
Another weird thing about Chile is that you continuously run into people. A woman from Holland introduced me to a group of locals trying to speak English at dinner. I kept running into them last night and this morning. Then we saw one of them on our bus after the ferry ride in the tiny town of Achao. She lives there.
My new Italian friend, who my Seatle buddy met at his hostel, is a big whig Marine Ecologist in Italy. She is old, but very cool. I´m off to meet her for dinner and talk about science :)
If the weather is terrible tomorrow, I might skip the tour and hop a bus to Bariloche.