Puerto Montt, Chile a motley port 2/8/26 Day 36

Far from "Muerto Montt" " the slightly sarcastic nickname for Puerto Montt, Chile, which occasionally used to describe it as a sleepy or quiet town--it plays on the name of the city (named after President Manuel Montt) and the Spanish word for "dead" (muerto). I would call it a motley port referring to a diverse, heterogeneous, or mismatched collection of people or things, often implying a chaotic or clashing mixture.  We saw this mixture today on our shore excursion tour of Chile's Lake District where we visited gorgeous national parks of rapids and volcanoes, Petrohue Falls, encircled by towns of German heritage, Puerto Varas and Frutillar.

The national park forest bath at our first stop helped assuage the touristy look of Bavarian architecture in the midst of the Andes, not the Alps.  Strudel shops and beer taverns speckled the lakeside landscape of the towns originally settled by German colonists in the 1860s.  But assimilation has waged a flickering blow to the bicultural setting where the German flag flies alongside the Chilean, but only some of the old people speak German as their mother tongue and the German School, Colegio Alemán Puerto Varas, that formerly taught only students with German last names whose families spoke German in their homes, like our guide, Amelia Schaeffer, could attend, but now are open to anyone desiring a bilingual education and the necessary gelt to pay for it.  What's left of the German Club and cultural institutions is diluted as the rapids of modernity wash away decades of proud heritage--quite a parallel with the assimilation of North American Jewry where American Jews became Jewish Americans in just a couple of generations.  Reform and Conservative Judaism successfully helped integrate their constituents into mainstream society and now suffer the consequences with declining memberships and hapless mergers.  Intermarriage rates sky rocketed from a tiny percentage to the vast majority where non Jews are eager to marry Jewish spouses to embrace our rich heritage.  Will we end up with a spiritual Jerusalem in the goldena medina, Golden Land, or just another touristy caricature?  Time will tell, but Puerto Varas and Frutillar are ominous omens.