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Main | Journal: Santiago, CH | ||
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Santiago, Chile Friday, April 30 I can't seem to get out of this place. Although Santiago is a fine
city filled with your museums, parks, and millions of Chileans, the
city is also a sprawling, smog-contaminated, modern jungle, like many
cities in the U.S., lacking in character and enough activities to keep
me busy during the daytime. However, after spending a month in small
Patagonia towns and on relatively deserted trails, I missed the
nightlife of a big city and decided to spend two weekends here. This
decision has allowed me to catch up on some sleep, workout (I found a
gym nearby!), and spend too much time surfing the Internet. I'm
scraping the bottom of the bowl for stories here, but a few interesting
things have happened along the way...
Normally, I don't get into my dating life in these impersonal
communications, but for its amusing content, this story must be told.
Having learned enough Spanish in high school to meet girls in
bars--this was the watermark to pass so that I could avoid taking
college Spanish--I try to practice Spanish in noisy, crowded, smoky
bars. I figure that I'm ready for the advanced level. Anyway, my free
language lessons have led to a few dates where the chica speaks roughly
five words of English. Setting up the date on the phone is the real
challenge as trying to understand a Chilean is quite difficult anyway.
Chileans don't pronounce their 's' and twist a few other letters too.
(It's just as hard to understand them as it is for me to read Hebrew
without the vowels.)
So on my most recent endeavor, we are supposed to
meet at a bus stop on the corner of two streets. When I arrive, I
find there to be four bus stops--one on each corner. After running to
each stop for about twenty minutes, she finds me--I don't really
remember what she looked like--and rushes me off to a meeting where she
has to present something to at a meeting of some sort, or so I understand. (This is where being completely fluent in Spanish would have been useful.) So I sit outside in the waiting room
for an hour like an actor with a non-speaking part in a B-rate film and
think about how strange this night will become and how I could best
describe it to my friends. When she comes out of the meeting, she asks
where I would like to go. Naturally, I expect that we would be going to
the movies since she delayed our date until Wednesday so that we could
get half-price tickets. Unfortunately, she doesn't bring her glasses so
another plan was formed. Over dinner, she mentions that I should send
her my resume so that she could help find me a job in Santiago. (I had to tell a minor fib about staying in Santiago longer, otherwise dating would be impossible, as I learned previously.) She also mentions
that she has a friend way up in an airline company and that I could
import American products to Chile so that she could sell them. At the
end of the evening, she invites me to a Sunday dinner where I could
meet her entire family: strict, overbearing father, overprotective
cousins, etc.
Needless to say, I won't be here on Sunday. (But I am really a good
guy!)
Other happenings from the past week include a treacherous mountain
biking trail in Pucon, a man read my resume, invited me for an interview
and said that I had to be a Chilean national to work for him, a new
Columbian friend who has helped educate me about every aspect of his
country, a good Chinese dinner in Temuco and more, but this is already
too long. Besides, I have to get out of here for a long-awaited tour
of Chile's largest winery, Concha y Toro.
Next week: The Atacama Desert
Dan
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