The Latest Blog Entry

Well, not much is really going on lately. Erin, as many of you may be aware, has begun working four days a week with a Korean girl whose father believes she needs to learn English by December. I've spent the majority of my time sitting around the house, venturing out to buy groceries, imagining furniture I might build (see picture below) and generally waiting for work to begin. Despite having been hired a week and a half ago, work hasn't come in as fast as expected and I've got relatively little to do but twiddle my thumbs. Thankfully, I've picked up a full-fledged class beginning next week, and unless things really go to shit, I should get some other work starting in a day or two. Other than that, we've been traveling a little bit. This weekend we went to Vina del Mar for a cloudy, uneventful day at the beach. We ate crunchy peanut butter right from the jar, read some books, visited a casino just to look around, and then headed back to Santiago. Unfortunately for you, there really isn't anything else worth reporting, but since I do have so much free time, I'm going to bore you with mundane observations...about sexual harrassment and strip club cafes.

Chile is kind of a bizarre country in that it's simultaneously very conservative and very liberal. The people are super-formal. They don't go out unless they're dressed up. Leaving the house in a shirt without a collar is completely out of the question, and wearing sandals when you're not at the beach gets you looked at like you're a weirdo. I'm constantly being asked if my feet are cold. At the same time, however, there are these cafes all over the city where the waitresses all wear bikinis or lingerie. There's really nothing strange or weird about them, no secret sex services going on or anything like that. They sell coffee and pastries and aren't any more expensive, but the waitresses dress skimpy and sit and talk to you while you eat. They're just like regular cafes, only sexier. Apparently it's quite pleasant. We met an American who used to go to them on a daily basis because it helped him learn Spanish. He also dated one of them.

One related and not-so-pleasant aspect of Chile is that it's the sexual harassment capital of the world. I've heard other latin american countries are like this to a lesser extent, but in Chile if a girl walks around in anything less than a full-body parka it's an invitation to all the men in the area to whistle and yell and make this particularly annoying clicking/sucking sound with their tongue and teeth or just stare blatantly as they walk past. What's more, they'll do it at Erin even when we're walking down the street holding hands. It's just kind of creepy, and it happens enough that we noticed it when it wasn't happening in Mendoza. I always find myself wondering what they're getting out of the exchange, whether it's disappointment that the approach didn't work for the millionth time like the older kids told them it would or if it's a sense of satisfaction that some woman's day was just a little more sketchy. Coming from a country where sexual harrassment is generally done as discretely as possible and then punished, it seems strange to me that here it's such an open, accepted part of life. This extends to Chilean business, where if a boss harrasses his secretary, he gets a slap on the wrist and a high five from his coworkers.

I apologize to anyone offended by my horrendous spelling. I did the best I could (not really, I could have used a dictionary) but spell checker has left me a pathetic wretch when it comes to correct spelling, and Erin was not here today to correct my mistakes. Also, a very happy birthday to Lisa Fay.