Welcome to Santiago!

I’ve been in Chile for over a week and haven’t bothered to blog about it until now because my time here has been surprisingly normal and incredibly stable compared to the last year of my life.  I am living in one place, doing one job, and eating at home.  I haven’t even been out to a bar yet!

The one thing I’ve seen that others might find interesting was a dance performance done by a troupe of modern, interpretive dancers (la Compañía de Danza de Papel) who are friends of the guy who owns the hostel where I am staying.  The performance surveyed the adult life of Frida Kahlo and amazed us all.  The troupe is exceptionally talented; they worked well with the limited space the tiny venue offered and were blessed with a magnificent and unique choreographer.

In other touristy news, yesterday, for the first time since I arrived in Santiago, I took Batman out for a photoshoot.  I borrowed my sister’s boyfriend’s camera and my sister and I hiked up Cerro San Cristobal to see the gigantic statue of the Virgin Mary at the top.  San Cristobal is across the river from where my sister lives, so we hope to make climbing the hill our regular exercise activity.  In fact, we had plans to climb to The Virgin last week but only made it 1/6 of the way, then tried again another day and made it maybe 1/3 of the way.  A friend of ours gave us a hard time for not going to the top on the first attempt, but we’re comfortable enough in our out-of-shapedness to recognize when we’d better turn back.  Coming from a consumer culture, I dub our failures to reach the summit “exercises in delayed gratification”.

Since we actually remembered to bring Batman AND a camera this time, we figured we’d have to go all the way – which for us translates to “far enough to get Batman a picture with The Virgin” (considering we didn’t bother with the last 30-40 steps to actually touch the statue).

Aside from our recurring attempts to trek to The Virgin, life here is easy and uncomplicated – which surprised me entirely.  Santiago is a wonderful place to simply live.  The water is drinkable and plenty of good food (raw materials or restaurant fare) is available; the Metro trains run often and reliably and the buses are clean and on time; the drivers are calm, curteous and predictable and the people are incredibly patient with my ignorance of the language.  All in all it’s a pleasant place to be.

The most interesting aspect of living here is that interacting with a population without the advantage of fluency in their spoken language has forced me to become more proficient at reading body language.  The most immediate benefit of this is that I’m getting better at predicting which guys are interested in me.* However, it’s brought to light several other more controversial aspects of human nature which I hope to blog about at a later date.

I’ve been lucky enough to find an instructor for the martial art I study, and despite the language barrier, we seem to communicate within the art effectively enough.  (He shows me where to hit and I hit there.)  Now I just need to find a partner to practice in the park with!  And happily, the mother of one of the students is a former Spanish teacher, so I now have a private tutor to practice the language with, too!

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*This isn’t meant to be a vain statement.  My sister and I (who are both attractive but not exceptionally so) have learned through our travels in the Philippines that the easiest way to become traffic-stoppingly beautiful is to move into a homogenous population that you don’t match.  Filipino guys (who live amongst some of the most beautiful women I’ve seen in my life) are so used to petite, youthful women with perfect mocha skin and silky, straight, dark hair that when two tall & gangly, wavy-, blonde-haired, pale-skinned gringos arrive it stops them in their tracks, if only out of novelty.  It’s a similiar situation here in Chile, though not as pronounced.  But we still get more attention and more proposals then we would ever get Stateside.  So nowadays our tested advice to women is “If you don’t feel attractive, change your surroundings, not yourself.”