chile 7 [eng]

Hello dear friends

back in valpo i will tell you today from my first week on the farm in curacavi.

our first day on the farm started early at around 6:30. Yesterday Karina told us a lot about what we would expect today, so we made agnihotra for the first time. this is a ritual from india, which is once made sunrise and sunset.

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When you hear about it for the first time, it seems a bit strange, but it is exciting what effect it can develop after a few days.
So we came from the bed directly to the outside living room next to the pool. juan, who by the way was from Venezuela, was waiting here.
you need a cup of copper, which looks like an inverted blunt step pyramid, put in pieces of dried cow dung, which are previously coated with a little ghee. ghee is boisterous, unsalted biobutter, so like cow dung a real natural product.
in a small bowl you mix some brown rice with ghee, but before that the broken half rice grains are sorted out.
About four minutes before the sunrise, the cow dung pyramid is lit with a match, and just at the sunrise you begin to sing a mantra and add the portioned rice ghee mix to the fire in two places.
Now, the ritual is actually over, but we sit thoughtfully at the table until the fire goes out, about 10-15 min.
The idea behind the whole action is that fire cleans the atmosphere and clean air contributes to our health.

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As you may have a hard time imagining this, I can announce that I filmed every now and then on the farm, so you can watch a little movie about this special ritual and homa-farming practiced on the farm as well can be happy.
but only in the next or the next post.

then we pack everything together and we prepare the breakfast and heat the fireplace so that it gets warm.
close to the breakfast with homemade jam and home-baked bread, we start working with juan. it was cut to the wood and cut branches to produce firewood, with the chainsaw it was very easy. We chopped and stacked until midday.

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After the delicious lunch we had a break, which I used for a small lunch. for the afternoon, juan showed us a spot under a tree where many small new trees were growing, we loosened the earth and planted the exhumed trees in new holes in the forest.
we saw a big scary spider in the forest.

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then we dug up two hill compost and prepared for the sunsetting agnihotra. then there was dinner and a warm shower before sleeping.

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In this Saturday, I started watching the hummingbirds, who collected their nectar in the tree in front of our house. beautiful flowers entice these birds to their daring flights. after agnihotra and breakfast we got down to work, it was again chopping a lot of wood and I piled a beautiful wall from the chopped trunks, which then also served as a basket for the rest

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For lunch today there were juan cooked noodles and delicious hot lemonade. Karina had left for a small yogafestival in Curacavi at about 11am and would be traveling until the evening.
after a long afternoon nap, juan entrusted us with a new task, we needed new dung to be cut for the agnihotra. So dante and I started to cut with a saw the cow dung, like cutting bread, into slices. afterwards there was agnihotra and a great dinner, with martina and karina. Martina is a friend of Karina and will stay in the farm for the next few days. i prepared for the next post, before sleeping.

my sunday was free and i was banned to listening to podcasts and series-watching.
A podcast I would like to recommend to you is the so-called zwei männer, drei welten, with Kurt Krömer and Jacob Hein. every week they invite an person and have a sometimes interesting and sometimes funny conversation with them.

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https://itunes.apple.com/de/podcast/kr%C3%B6mer-and-friends-radioeins/id1330613579?mt=2

I also talked to the family on the phone and cracked walnuts on the side. a wonderfully relaxing day, which I have really brought after weeks in big noisy cities.

We started the new week extremely sleepy with the sunrise agnihotra. After the refreshing breakfast we worked again on the pile of tree trunks to process the logs into suitable logs. a sweaty job that is only made easier by the fact that we can alternate and cheer.

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A really delicious lunch, as well as a relaxed break later, we drove by car to a neighbor, who wanted to get rid of a lot of branches, so we stacked everything on the loading area of the pickup. then we drove back and sawed the branches to firewood. After the agnihotra and the dinner I fell exhausted in the pillows.

I woke up the next day by the ringing of the alarm clock. After morning ritual and food, a simple-sounding task awaited us, digging out a cable trench, about 6 inches deep. however, the earth is so dry and rocky that we spent most of the morning with it. when we finally finished, the next task was something, which was much more to my liking, it would rain soon and the pavilion in the garden needed a new provisional foil roof.
finally build again. So I climbed on the roof to eliminate some old nails and sharp edges.

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Then we spread the foil on the roof and aligned it with the edges, so that there was still some foil left over. then, from the roof, I fixed everything with wooden slats, which we rolled into the foil. in between there was noon and punctual to the sunsets agnihotra we were finished with the stocking. the looked looks a bit like it would have wrapped in fresh foil. After dinner, I devoted myself a bit to my Spanish knowledge, before I climbed on the high bed.

today we had planned a trip after agnihotra and breakfast, we would go to the main road and drive a little further away to a cow farm. There were about 50 cows here.

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These cows produce a lot of shit, that juan put freshly in buckets, while dante and I are busy shoveling the dry dung-crumb-earth mixture into bags with a shovel and a rake. at the farm we will use it for the compost.
completely dusty and laden with the "shit", we drove the car back to the farm, where we spread after a second breakfast, the dung (fresh) to dry on mats and piled the bags into a big pile.
then we dug up the remaining compost mountains and paused for lunch. Before the evening Agnihotra, we cut another sack of dry dung in pieces. before going to sleep there was only a small meal.

Thursday was another wood-dominated day, we hiked with Juan into the forest, to a dry tree, which he cut into portable pieces with the chainsaw, while Dante and I cut another tree of lianas with machetes. We then carried the pieces of wood to the wheelbarrow and to the place where we would split them.
After the lunch break, we shredded everything and I continued to stack on the wall. Since the wood was already so dry, it was very easy to split and it was a nice sunny afternoon. In some of the tree trunks, we found worms that rooted the wood.

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like all days here in satsang, today's day began with agnihotra and breakfast, then dante and i packed our backpacks together and prepared for a city weekend.
For a few days we went to Valparaiso, a coastal town nearby and the official cultural capital of Chile. Karina and Juan dropped us off at the highway and after an hour we stood in the middle of the city.
the morning is spent looking for a charger for my camera and stroll through the city. on avenida alemannia you can get a great overview and see many great panoramas.

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at noon we stopped in a café on the cerro alegre, a very tourist of the many hills of valparaíso. Here I wrote a little bit and in the afternoon Dante and I parted ways. he went to his hostel and i later to the market to buy vegetables and then to felipe, an architecture student and his brother franco, who live together in a small apartment and offered me their sofa for two nights to sleep.
from your window there is also a great view of the city and the harbor.

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later we looked at "wir kinder vom bahnhof zoo". A German drama from the 80s that tells the story of a heroin-dependent 14-year-old who is slipping further and further away. I was wondering how the mood of the film, which we watched in German with Spanish subtitles, can be transmitted. The movie lives on the hard language of West Berlin at this time, but I think it is still clear from the pictures.
In the evening I cooked delicious potato pancakes for us, which we beaked with avocados, tuna and jam.

Well rested, I woke up on Saturday morning on the sofa. After breakfast I drove through the city, to the sea museum and walked up the stairs to the top of the hill on which the museum was built. On the way I bought super tasty avocados and pan amasado, home-made bread in the form of bread rolls.

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Unfortunately, the museum was rather boring and focused more on the history of the navy, than on life in the oceans. Later in the day, I also visited an art museum that emerged from a private collection and was set up in the donator's impressive townhouse.
at the beginning of the exhibition, there was a lot of european and classical to see, with further hiking through the house, the works were noticeably more Chilean and more related to the city.
then I sat in a kind of stadium made of wood leftovers, in a house-free place of the avenida ecuador. this space is used as an art and theater space. Here I wrote something again and watched the sunset.
then I bought something to eat and I went to the workplace of martina. Here was delicious cake and agnihotra smell, which I recognized directly when I walked through the door.
Later, when we were on our way out of the door and halfway on the street, surprisingly Selina ran into my arms.
she is one of the volunteers who built the nomad festival in january and lives here in valpo.
we made an appointment for the next weekend before running to dante's hostel and running into a bar with him. later we walked 3 blocks to an absinthe bar to meet with felipe, franco and a friend of the two. I was quite exhausted from the long day and ran as dante wanted to the bus, which brought me to Felipe's apartment.

i woke up with the classic sunday cat and after i took a shower, i phoned the family. then I packed everything and went by bus to the feria on avenida argentinia, where i had an appointment with dante. it's a gigantic market and i bought a fancy new shirt, a new jeans and a leggings.
against the cold. we also bought a small plant for karina, together, to leave something behind.

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then I noticed that I had forgotten my bluetooth box with the guys in the apartment. So dante and I drove back and could even take a delicious lunch before we drove back to Curacavi by bus. Picked up from the street, then dinner and then sleep.

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