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Day 10: 19 June 2002 - "Captain Booger"

Chileans eat a lot of beef. I can't remember now exactly what caused me to write it down in my wee notebook. I carry the notebook around to jot down notes about experiences and things I see in Chile so that I can remember to blog about them, and I have written down "lots of beef". Which is true. For a while, it seemed like we were eating beef at every single meal. Now it's not quite so much, but it's certainly more than I've been used to in the US or France. Must be the bad Argentinian economy - meat and leather and things are cheap, I suppose.

It was a warm sunny day. I can't tell you how warm, because then I'd have to kill you. No, sorry, I can't tell you how warm because even if someone told me, it would be in Celsius and I would be confused. But it was warm. Light jacket warm, two days before the beginning of winter.

We went to visit Pato's friend Rodrigo. Pato compared Rodrigo to pizza, because you can only be around him a couple times a week and then you get sick of him, apparently. He is going to college in Canada next year to study media arts, and thus a) speaks English and b) was able to furnish us with videos they made in high school, with a long-haired Pato playing the wise sage Yoga in their version of Star Wars and levitating very convincingly.

After it got dark, we went to the mineralogical museum, which is connected with the Universidad de Atacama. Through his dad, everyone there knew Pato and even though the lights had been turned out for the evening, they turned everything back on and let us go through the museum. It was interesting to see all of the minerals and photographs of Chilean mining operations and try to remember things from Intro to Earth History so that I could translate the Spanish names of the minerals into something I recognized.

In the evening, Pato's cousin Andrés came to pick us up and take us out to dinner. We went to his house and saw tía Myriam again, then he went and picked up a few friends of his. One of them was Grace, a high school exchange student from Ohio, somewhere near the border with Pennsylvania. Andrés asked Grace if I had an accent to her and I said "I don't have a heavy Michigan accent," to which she replied, "Oh yes you do!". Grrrrr. I pride myself on not having a midwestern accent, but apparently it's all relative.

We went to the Chinese restaurant and got a meal for 5, so we all shared several dishes. It was a big complicated mess of languages with Andrés, who doesn't speak English, Grace's Chilean best friend, who spoke quite a bit, Grace and Pato who were pretty bilingual, and me at the other end of the scale with my very little bit of castellano. But we all got by and switched from one language to another through the evening.

My Chilensis vocabulary word of the day, taught to me by the rest of the table, was fome, meaning boring. It was one of Grace's favorite words to learn in Chile.

After Andrés dropped us off, Pato and I got to talking about La Gringa (I had temporarily given up my title) and decided that we liked her. Although she could be loud and blatantly American, she was really making an effort with the language and wanted to learn about Chile and make the best of her stay. So we, the Culture Police, gave her our stamp of approval.

srah - Wednesday, 19 June 2002 - 10:11 PM
Tags: chile, travel

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