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Day 7: 16 June 2002 - "Shower make srah happy."

Some time during the night, I woke up and had to go to the bathroom. I crawled over the sleeping Pato and made my way to the back of the bus. I couldn't get the door open and assumed someone was in there, so I came back to my seat and woke Pato up in the process. I told him and he came back with me and opened the door easily. Brat. It was rather scary and I had to go get a pack of tissues because there was no toilet paper. But... I've seen worse.

I went back to sleep and when I woke up, there was desert out the window. I'd never seen the desert before and was mystified. I was even more impressed as we got closer to Copiapó, as there was both desert and mountains. Pato seemed bored by it (a la Luc in French Kiss - "Bah, I was born here."), but it was all very interesting for a first-timer like me.

We were picked up by tío Ismael (they have a house in Copiapó as well as the apartment in Santiago) and dropped off at home. There were more welcoming signs and pictures of me that Pato had sent to his parents. There were also millions of pictures of The Only Child Himself. Sitting here at the computer, I can immediately spot 29 of them. This is one of their biggest Pato-shrines.

We moved our stuff in and I got to have a much-needed shower, after a lesson on the hot-water heater. It has to be lit before a shower, to heat the shower-water. It involves much turning of knobs and lighting of pilot lights and turning on of showers and I'm not sure I'm ever going to get it right. Sigh. But someone did it for me on the first day, and it was looooovely.

After I was clean and dressed, I watched TV with tía Amada while the Alexes moved furniture around. There was some incredibly fascinating Sigourney Weaver movie on, where she was a school nurse wrongly imprisoned for child molestation. I got to practice my greatest skill, Pointing Out Things In Pictures. Eliza Doolittle's remarks were restricted to The Weather and Everybody's Health. My speech is restricted to What I Know How To Say. Pointing out things in pictures usually fits into this domain, so I do okay. It goes the same for understanding. When Pato is telling people what he's doing in school these days I can understand, but when he starts talking about Big Issues In Mineralogy or That Thing We Did Five Years Ago, I get lost and my eyes glaze over. So anyway, tía Amada and I looked through Pato's pictures and I pointed things out.

Later, Pato and I watched The Empire Strikes Back dubbed into castellano (which is what Chileans call Spanish, rather than español), which was rather amusing. It's always interesting to see how characters' voices change from one language to another. Yoda was cute as usual.

srah - Sunday, 16 June 2002 - 8:49 PM
Tags: chile, travel

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