Day 9: Hardware and Tomatoes and Cueca!

We had a super busy day today. First we went to visit Hela, a hardware company. We got a tour of the plant and the different stages to make paintbrushes and other equipment. I used to work at a hardware store and saw all of those items, although not Hela's, on a regular basis so it was cool to see them being produced. I hadn't realized that there are so many steps to produce one paintbrush. After Hela we drove to Centauro, a canned food company. We talked to the owner of Centauro and he discussed all of their products, and how they even change the name of their brand to seem more Italian to appeal to that business in the US. He let us taste their canned peaches and tomato paste. I thought the peaches were so good, and even better than the ones we have at home. The owner mentioned that their peaches are very popular and they don't have any preservatives or much additives so that may be why they tasted so good. Centauro just started production on squashes/pumpkins for the first time. The owner seemed very excited that they were venturing into this line. He let us have a taste of the pumpkin puree and it was actually really good. We stopped for a late lunch of empanadas and then had cueca lessons (we were very Chilean today with both). Cueca is Chile's national dance and our instructors came with the "costumes" for it. Cueca is much slower than the other dances we learned so that made it a bit difficult, although it was mostly walking around in circles while the men "wooed" the woman. It was cool to try the national dance because salsa and reggueton are both Latin American dances so we could have learned them anywhere. That was all for today. Its amazing how we've been ending early the past few days but still doing so much.