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Day 8: 17 June 2002 - "Better than Double-Soup Tuesday"
We woke up and met Pato's nanny, Rubet, who made us breakfast. We took showers, got dressed, and left the house. Pato hailed a collectivo which is an interesting system of taxis. They're more like a bus, in that they have a fixed rate for all rides (about 35 cents) and a route to follow. But you can hail them as they drive by, like you would a taxi, and they are just regular cars with a sign on top showing which line they belong to. We took the collectivo downtown where we tried to find Pato's friend Rodrigo. It turned out he had gone to Santiago to get his visa for next year, when he would be studying media arts in a Canadian university.
We went to mail the postcards I had bought in Chicago at the post office. Our efforts to find postcards in Chile had, thus far, been fruitless, but it turned out that they sold them in the post office. I picked out a million of them, with various places I had seen or that Pato told me I would see. I took a picture of him in the central plaza, against his will. So far, I don't have many pictures, because it seems like Pato's always telling me that it's not a good place to take pictures. Sigh.
We went across the way to the bank where Pato's cousin Andrés (Ismael and Myriam's son, if you're keeping track) works and talked to him there. He invited us out to dinner for a few days later.
We went back to the house for lunch, where tío Alex and tía Amada coached me on Chilensis. My phrase of the day was sacar la chucha, meaning to punch. Hee hee hee.
Pato took me on a tour of the campus of the Universidad de Atacama, where his father is the director of the Institute of Technology. I took many pictures of the campus and the surrounding mountains. I love mountains. Even though they don't look anything like the Alps, they remind me of Grenoble.
In the evening, we went on another trip to a supermarket. We tried to come up with English translations for all of the fruits and vegetables and ice cream flavors, but I couldn't quite identify quince, custard apple, or prickly pear. We had to come home and consult the Spanish-English dictionary to finally figure those three out.
My Engrish discoveries of the day were the toilet bowl cleaners Lord and Poett (buy one or the other depending on which you identify with, I suppose) and the fact that the Spanish word for thong is colaless, which is pretty amusing because cola is tail and less is completely stolen from English. The other toilet bowl cleaner available was Pato Purific, or Toilet Duck. I had never connected Toilet Duck with my boyfriend before, but I spent the rest of the evening calling him Pato Purific.
I was amused to find that there was also a television broadcasting soccer games in the supermarket. You can't escape it, I suppose.
On the way home, we drove by the esquina católica, Copiapó's corner for transvestite prostitutes. Why Pato knows its exact location, I'm not sure, but I was quite amused to hear about it and the fact that it's located right next to the Catholic high school.
We dropped off some groceries at Pato's grandma's house, so I got to see pictures of tía Amada and tío Ismael as kids and baby pictures of Pato. His grandma also gave me a homemade neck-warmer collar-thing. I'm sure there's a better name for that, but it's not springing to mind.
We also stopped, ice cream melting, at the home of a family friend. Pato made a beeline for his video cabinet, since Jorge records almost every movie available on the cable movie channels and saves it for later. We came home, piled down with groceries and videos, unpacked everything, and had a splendid, overwhelming (because of all of the stuff we'd bought) evening tea.
