Conquering Tender Young Girls

A few days ago we visited another park, the other "hill" in Santiago that has been turned into a public park. This one was called Cerro San Cristobal and included a funicular, cable car, zoo, chapel, sanctuary, and two public pools. The funicular was pretty cool (photo to the right), extremely steep and surprisingly smooth. You can't tell from the picture, but it goes up at about a 70 degree angle for about 2000 feet.

At the top of the hill, the view of the Andes was spectacular. The big deal at the top is the gigantic statue of the Virgin Mary. It's huge and you can see it from almost anywhere in the city with a view of the hill, kind of like the famous Christ the Redeemer in Rio. Apparently, it commemorates the immaculate conception, which according to Erin was the conception of Mary, not Jesus. If that's true it seems odd that the statue would be a fully-grown (actually a little more than fully-grown) Mary, as I would assume her conception must have taken place sometime before that. In any case, the statue was pretty impressive. The other cool thing was that a little below the statue, there was a prayer area, where hundreds of plaques had been placed thanking the Virgin for various things she had done or might do in the future, such as curing disease, encouraging fertility, and generally being an awesome gal. There was also a beautiful old church that was almost completely covered with ivy, minus a couple spaces for the bell tower and the front door. Overall it was an incredibly beautiful area.

After we got our fill of religious sites, we decided to glut ourselves on a local delicay called Mote con Huesillo. We'd been told about this stuff by an American in the hostel where we stayed the first night. He described it as a peach-flavored tea, and also said that it looked terrible but tasted delicious. He was right about only one of those things. It was incredibly sweet and thick like maple syrup and had two peach halves floating in it. The bottom of the drink was about half-filled with wheat. It looked terrible and tasted only slightly better than it looked. The pigeons and dogs, however, seemed to like the wheat part of it that we dumped out for them.

We spent the remainder of the day walking the seven or so miles back to our house, which was a lot more tiring than either of us had anticipated. We had decided at the beginning of the day to forgo the option of riding either the funicular or the cable car back down the mountain, and although the walk was all downhill, by the time we got home we were exhausted. We spent the rest of the night watching Chilean television, which was interesting. Married with Children (which you may remember with Al Bundy back in the 90s) is alive and well in Chile. In fact, they have a spanish-language version, called Casados con Hijos. The house is identical to the original, as is Peg's bizarre haircut. The neighbors are still around, and the Chilean version of Al still apparently dreads any kind of physical contact with his wife. He does not, however, stick his hands down his pants. I was a little disappointed there. The part we saw mostly involved him and his neighbor drooling over the attractive maintenance woman and subsequently getting caught by their wives. We also saw Quien Merece Ser un Millionario, which translates to "Who deserves to be a millionaire?" The biggest difference is that a million Chilean pesos doesn't exactly equal a million dollars, so they're kind of getting shafted down here.

Contrary to what we originally thought, we're always cold in Chile. The temperature here is much warmer than what we're used to for winter, but what that really means is that the Chileans don't necessarily have to have heaters (and we don't). As a result, the temperature inside is always at least as cold as the temperature outside, and that ends up meaning that in general we are much colder than we would have been in the United States. Fortunately, their winter only lasts two months, and it should begin to get warmer starting in September. Until then, we'll continue to wear most of the clothes we've brought all at the same time.

Last night we hit up "Conversation Night" at an English bookstore with our American housemante, KellyAnne. We were afraid it would be a bunch of gringos there, attempting to socialize and make friends, but there was a surprisingly large amount of Chilenos there to learn English. KellyAnne and I (now it's Erin writing...) ended up talking to this 50 year old dude who only wanted to know things like how to say "drug mule" and "sniffing cocaine" in English. He also kept saying things like, "what do I say when I want to paw a tender young girl?" And "How do you say I want to conquer a sweet girl?" I don't know where he got his questionable vocabulary, but I suspect someone was screwing around with him. The funny thing is, he wasn't creepy in the least. He was just a nice guy who had had a terrible time with his English/Spanish dictionary.

We've had a request for more talk about the food here and to show pictures of our housemates. About the food: nothing to report, really. It's pretty bland and usually includes a hot dog or two. Pictures of housemates will be posted soon...