Festival Colectividades Extranjeras

This weekend was another festival.  Yesterday was a holiday (although not just Halloween - this was something else).  I'm not sure what exactly to be honest.  However, it has something to do with Antofagasta celebrating its cultural heritage, which includes honoring all the original settlers from all over the world (i.e., the name of the holiday is Foreign Communities Festival).  All week we have been watching the construction of facades and tents in one of the large parks on the boardwalk.  Today, Sadie, Isaac and I went and met some friends.  We got there at 12:30pm and it was pretty empty.  We left around 1pm for naptime, and it was finally getting crowded.  Basically, there were wooden facades for each country, each selling food and playing music with stages for traditional dancers. There was also a bunch of people selling artisanal crafts.  It was pretty interesting.

Here is Sadie, Isaac and I enjoying Colombia.

Below is an arepa, which Sadie loved.  It is basically a fried corn tortilla with an egg inside.  You can see it was very greasy and you can see the egg yolk (fully cooked don't worry!) in part of the arepa. 

Other countries included Greece (where we got a gyro!), Croatia (see the giant statues of people below - for whatever reason, that represented Croatia), Bolivia, China, an Arabic country (it was unclear which one, but it was obvious it was some middle eastern country and had Arabic lettering on the facade), and others.  Apparently, the US used to be represented, and when I asked what kind of food they had there, my friend told me, "It was just McDonalds".  Yup.