RatSoap

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Giant Pomelos

A classmate invited me to her family's "parcela" for a day. That is another word that I didn't know in English that is almost the same as in Spanish. According to the dictionary, a parcel is "a quantity or amount of something, in particular a piece of land..."

My friend's land is halfway between Santiago and Valparaíso, and it took almost an hour to drive there.

The town is called Curacaví, and it looks just like Lican Ray (where we stayed for a few weeks last December), with one main street at the bottom of a hill. It is very dry there, but my friend's dad keeps all the plants and trees watered well.

There were tons of flowers, and downhill from the patio that was shaded from the sun, there were long lines of fruit trees.

They have "palta" trees (avocado), HUGE lemons growing on trees, olives, oranges, pears, grapes, almonds, and apples!

But best of all, there was a small bush with the largest fruits on the whole parcela. They call them "pomelos" (grapefruits), and they were GIANT--larger than a softball.

Unfortunately, the pomelos were still green, so we couldn't have any. But they did give me some of their giant lemons to bring home. Just look how BIG they are:

There is a small cabin on the property, but it is more like a shed. It has one bed and no bathroom. My friend's dad is building a house that will have a bathroom, kitchen, living room, and small bedroom. He already has the concrete floor done:

The WHOLE thing is only a little bigger than our bedroom in Virginia.

My friend and I played soccer and tennis and even saw two giant, hairy tarantulas. One of them was dead, and the other was alive! I wish I had taken a photo of them, but I forgot. Their hair was yellow, and you could see their many eyes.

It became so hot, that we got hosed down in our clothes. And after that, we were freezing.

There's no Spring Break here in April because it is not spring. But they don't have a Fall Break either. Instead, we got Thursday and Friday off because it is "Semana Santa," or Holy Week.

Most people didn't work on Good Friday, and most stores were closed. It felt like a Sunday.

Many people went out of town during this long weekend (wikén!), but we stayed here (except that I went to the parcela for a day).

We've been using the extra time at home to catch up with "Anna Karenina" because we haven't even finished Part One of the eight parts of the book yet.

If we want to finish the book by the end of the year, we have to hurry up. So here are five more drawings to close Part One and start Part Two.

Anna Karenina #13

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