Poke Holes in My Daughter

Due to an expanded social calendar this week, we've had a variety of opportunities to experience the metro and bus systems first-hand. Once again, we've found them to be smelly vestiges of their former selves, and the people who ride them seem more down-trodden and dejected. Also, the number of babies on board seems to have increased. This might be because when we first arrived in Chile it seemed like every woman you saw on the street was pregnant. They aren't big fans of maternity clothing around here. On the contrary, pregnancy seems to be a good opportunity to let your giant belly sway freely across the sidewalks like some kind of trophy. Anyway, all those women must have given birth over the summer, because the baby population on the metro has sky-rocketed, which leads me to an interesting observation: the Chilenos love to pierce baby girls' ears. I get the impression it must be a service offered at the hospital, because we've seen babies that couldn't be more than a couple weeks fresh with little fake diamond studs. This is a terrible afront to Erin's feminism and sense of practicality all at the same time, and whenever we see a little pierced baby she rants mercilessly. She has adopted the habit of talking about people in English in front of them, which to be fair the Chileans do to us all the time. I'm a little shier about it, since I am of the opinion that people can always tell when you're talking about them. Anyhoo, her arguement is that it's machismo crap that makes people incapable of accepting the idea that anyone would mistake their seemingly androgenous baby girl for a boy, and on top of that who wants to have one more part of a baby to take care of? I suppose I can see her point.

We've been doing lots of stuff this week with our friend Janine and her boyfriend, Gonzalo Dos. They convinced us to spend our Thursday night learning to dance salsa. I should really say they convinced Erin. No such convincing was done for me, but I was dragged along anyway, along with James. We represented the entirety of the bad-dancing Gringo population in the bar, although Janine was excellent. There seemed to be a regular crowd at the bar where the lessons were held, because after they ended all the Chileans got up and did choreographed line dances, a la the electric slide, and a dance that was fun to watch involving a middle school-type dance circle and lots of stealing of each others' partners.

On Saturday we went to another asado, this time at Gonzalo's house. We drank lots of wine and of course ate the required amounts of choripan and steak. Also lots of mayonaise-based salads and ice cream. This also gave us a good opportunity to practice our spanish, because we were two of only three english-speakers there. By the time we left I was feeling fluent enough to politely turn down another trip to dance salsa, but only by promising to go at some later date. In the course of the evening, I also got to talk about my new favorite topic of conversation, the Chilean system of taking leave from work. Since Chile is much more socialistic than say the USA there are a lot of social programs here that we don't have. My favorite is stress leave. At any point during the year, a person can take off a minimum of three weeks paid leave from work for stress. This completely baffled me initially, but it's apparently very common here, and recently I've heard about a lot of people doing it. I went to give an English evaluation the other day, and after spending a couple minutes on the phone, the supervisor informed me that my evaluee would not be available for at least three weeks due to stress. And that's it. No one questions it. The government takes care of paying you while you're stressed out. It's against the law to fire you, and you get your job right back when you feel better. I find myself wondering if it is encouraged during stress leave to go out and have a good time. Maybe on the doctor's note (which is required), he prescribes having drinks with friends and taking yourself to a nice restaurant.

We're just out of Holy Week, which is a pretty big deal here. For some reason, on several days it was celebrated near our house by people dressed like Native Americans and playing inspirational music. There was also one guy acting out a death scene, probably at the hands of some Spanish conquistador, although it was mostly mimed. Erin and I celebrated by visiting church. It's pretty easy to follow, since the rites are exactly the same, and we even managed to pick up some religious spanish. Finally, we had our Easter brunch at a Chinese restaurant, one of the only restaurants besides Burger King that was still open. So, that much at least is the same.