Chilean lunch

As I noted in an earlier post, lunch is an important time in the Chilean workday. Because I didn’t really understand that my first week here, I missed out on an essential aspect of getting to know my colleagues. I could see that they all disappeared from their offices around 1pm and didn’t return until 2:30 or so, but I wasn’t sure where they went.

Then a couple colleagues invited me to join them instead of eating alone. It turns out that the department office building has a small room specifically dedicated to lunchtime. Professors who don’t have errands to run (banks are only open until 2pm, and not at all on weekends, so you have to use lunchtime to go to the bank, for example) will gather in the lunchroom at 1 and stay until 2:30 if they don’t have to teach at 2. There’s a microwave oven in the lunchroom, so many of my colleagues bring their own lunches to reheat there.

Because I didn’t have much lunch-appropriate food in my apartment at first, I was eating in the canteen where the students tend to gather at lunchtime. Morning classes end at 1, so there’s always a long line at that time. Someone had advised me to go earlier, but when I went at 12:30 one day, the food wasn’t ready. Then a colleague walked me through the process of preordering. If you go in sometime between 11 and 12, you can pay for your lunch and then pass the receipt on to the ladies in the kitchen. They will have your meal ready to go at 1, packed in to-go containers so you can bypass the lines and grab your food. The takeout containers cost an extra 100 pesos (about 15 US cents), but it allows people who don’t prepare food at home to join colleagues in the lunchroom.

Chilean lunch is the largest meal of the day. At a minimum, there is a hot dish of some sort and bread. The canteen meals include a glass of some kind of sweetened drink (I’ve noticed that similar to Costa Rica, there’s a lot of powdered fruit-flavored drinks here). For an extra 350 pesos, you can add on a salad or soup, and with another 150, you get a dessert as well. Watching the students eating in the canteen, it seems that a lot of them go for the whole package.

I have’t taken any photos of our lunches at work, so here’s one titled ‘Chilean Cazuela’  (By G. Küppers (JordiCubero) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, from Wikimedia Commons)

In the lunchroom, I get to observe what my colleagues bring from home. Some have simple salads (but with homemade dressing–English teachers who have spent time in other countries have picked up a taste for salad dressing flavors that aren’t available in stores here), others have pasta with sauce and meat, and others have more elaborate meals that may be leftovers from an earlier meal. It is inspiring me to figure out how to cook other dishes that can be brought from home and reheated in the microwave.

Lunchtime has also become a good opportunity for me to learn more about Chilean culture. In general, my colleagues are able to compartmentalize and put teaching and university issues aside while we eat. They talk about family and travel and cultural experiences.

This week, a main topic is what people plan to do for Fiestas Patrias, the national holiday week that centers around September 18, Independence Day, which falls on a Tuesday this year. We will have Monday Sept. 17 off, plus Sept. 19 is another national holiday, so essentially we get a 5-day weekend that will be full of partying. Unlike Christmas and New Years Eve, both of which are considered evening events, Fiestas Patrias is all about daytime eating–meaning asados (barbecues) that last all day and into the night. (On a related note, the university just sent out an email including 5 attachments warning people to be careful over the holiday and not to drink and drive, as road accidents are the number one cause of death and injury during the holiday week).

Lunch on weekends tends to happen a bit later, run much longer, and include wine. Familes gather to catch up on the week and tell stories. Kids come and go, but adults stay put and keep talking.