Soy un fenomeno

Having shaken the dust of Valparaiso from our metaphorical sandals, I was a little perturbed to find out that it had made me sick. I woke up our first morning back in Santiago with a nasty head cold, which has persisted stubbornly through the past couple of days. As a result, the past two days have been somewhat low-key, which drives Erin nuts. After all, "We didn't come half way around the world to sit around and do nothing" and "I'm booooored." Thankfully, we finally saw some activity yesterday when we visited FANTASILANDIA!!!

As you might imagine, Fantasilandia (Fantasy Land) is Chile's version of an amusement park. It's basically the same sort of thing, but a lot smaller and a whole lot cheaper. Erin and I were persuaded into going by the son of our landlord, Javier. He's about ten years old and probably the friendliest, most enthusiastic person I've ever met. And, although we were both a little skeptical about the Latin American amusement park experience, Javier had a pretty easy time convincing us to go along. After a short metro ride and the entry fee of a little less than 6 US dollars a piece, we were participating in the universal amusement park activity...standing in line for hours. I should mention that since we got to Chile I've received substantially more attention from the Chilenos than Erin has. This is most likely due to the fact that I am easily a head taller than about 90 percent of them and I am the only person in the country with blond hair. Walking around, I regularly get people yelling things at me in broken English. It would be like me walking around in the US yelling, "Hola, buenos dias, me gusta tacos," at anyone who appeared to be latin american. This became particularly tiresome in the amusement park lines, which snake back and forth so that you end up passing the same people again and again, and even though I got tired of it, the Chilenos didn't seem to. Essentially, I'm a freak here.

Another thing we learned standing in line was that, in Chile, waiting your turn is for suckers. If you allowed even the smallest gap to develop between you and the person in front of you, there were always about ten high school students waiting to jump the dividers and get in front of you. This is a practice that would be considered outrageous in the United States, but the Chilenos seemed to be okay with it. Even when we were careful to keep moving with the line, we still regularly had people crawling over us to go meet their friends somewhere at the front of the line. At one point, a guard opened a door somewhere ahead of us for a second or two and about a hundred kids took the opportunity to follow him in and get at the front of the line.

Aside from line troubles, Fantasilandia turned out to be a pretty good time. It had two rollercoasters, one that was up to par with what we have in the US and one that looked like it was meant to be taken down and reassembled at various county fairs across the country. Both were fun. There were also the usual slew of secondary amusement park rides: the things that spin you around real fast, the things that flip you upside down, and the things that do the both at the same time. There was even a log flume, and although it's basically the middle of winter, there were still Chilenos riding it and getting completely soaked. The last thing we rode were the bumper cars. If you know anything about bumper cars, they're generally powered by electricity that comes down from the ceiling through poles to the cars. These were different. The entire floor of the bumper car arena was electrified and the cars picked up their power from there. Thus, there were several signs around explaining that you should not ride the bumper cars with wet feet or clothes. Also, in a dramatic improvement over US bumper cars, there was no track at all. Nobody tried to make you go around in a circle or anything, and we were pretty much free to run headlong into each other at top speed. At one point, Erin managed to clip the back of Javier's car at the same time I got him from the front on the opposite side. It spun him like a corkscrew for half a second and came close to giving him whiplash. So in general, a good time was had by all.

PS Javier promised to send us some pictures of the amusement park, so when we get them we'll definitely pass them along!

PPS Fenomeno = Freak