KIDDIE STILL IN CHILE

Yep, he certainly wrote some stuff from Chile.


¿Que honda weones?  Hace mucho tiempo.

So I’ve been teaching English at an “institute”, I swear here you can get two blokes that passed year 8 together in a room and call yourselves a University but it makes me feel important when they call me professor and I’m saving for my tweed jacket.  I am however slightly disappointed that it’s not like I had envisioned beforehand.  I was thinking that it would be all hilarious and poignant like Robin Williams in Good Morning Vietnam but considering how I have run directly into the fact that I really don’t know anything about the English language, I think that my performance in class might be more akin to Robin Williams in Mork and Mindy, complete with verbiage, silly pants and general lack of meaning.  The English teaching is also terrible for the Spanish but still it has evolved to the level where the mispronouncing that I held up as ability at the onset is becoming more of an embarrassing hindrance, although it is a constant source of amusement for the Chileans who think that I am mildly retarded.

The other day I rubbed the raw stinking fat of a pig on my boots in a bizarre almost-traditional ceremony to make them waterproof and apparently if I make it down to the wilds of Patagonia (unlikely) I have to slay a lobo (sea lion) with my bare hands and cake myself in its fat so that I can swim in the artic waters.  Sounds like a fair deal to me and it does fit nicely into my “if-you-want-to-eat-you-should-be-able-to-wring-the-life-out-of-it-with-your-own-hands” theory.  I figure it will probably taste somewhat like salty chicken….. The waterproofing was in preparation for some soul cleansing wandering through the silent splendour of the big big Andes.  Went on a trip for the weekend with the other cats in my house and hiked around volcanoes and up to glaciers by day and then warded off the biting, mountain night-time cold by slipping into the starlit thermal baths and rubbing hot mud over my naked flesh.  Not a bad gig.  Then when I was suitably refreshed and at ease, my good mate the Biz dropped in from Land of Oz for a week in which I was able to erase the last remnants of brain cells that were precariously clinging to life in my fuddled brain.  There was the usual eating drinking and being merry but the standout has to be that in the catalogue of available stories to regale mates with I now have one that begins thusly; “so we went on this f*cking huge bender, and I sh*t you not mate I still don’t really know how but we ended up in another country…” Hilarious from the distance of the future, not so funny when we sobered up and were waiting for two hours at the border.


Death threats:

I’ve taken up smoking and am busily sucking down 30 a day, or so the experts tell me.  Apparently spending an afternoon cruising leisurely through the streets of Santiago is the equivalent of a pack.  This is bad.  I get all the down side of lung cancer and emphysema without the accompanying looking cool and sexy – which obviously is what smoking is all about.  Added to this I get stinging eyes and am trapped in torturous purgatory with a sneeze constantly threatening to erupt from my nose but never, ever, ever arriving.  So we are desperate for rain here as well though not to fill the dwindling water reserves so the populace can stop bathing in their own faeces like in Melbourne town, but to clean the fetid air.  Apparently only the rain can do it though I was speaking to someone the other day who told me they didn’t understand why the government just don’t blow up one of the mountains to make a hole for the smog to escape.  This is the sort of brilliant environmental logic that typifies this joint.  “Hang on, we’ve planned the city poorly and stuffed 6 million people into a f*cking great big hole and plonked a bunch of smoke-belching industry in there as well just for good measure.  Sh*t.  Ok, um, ok, lets blow one of those mountains up then.”  The news reader (not Brian) told me that the situation is now critical and the city is on High Alert though I don’t really know what that means or what I should do aside from breath less, which would be equally fatal.  Speaking of futility the other day I was woken from my drunken slumber into confused consciousness in the dead of night.  After the mandatory system evaluation to gauge wakefulness I realised that Chicken Little was right and that the sky was falling.  It was a good ol' fashioned earthquake.  I sat there like an idiot thinking that there was probably something that I should be doing like running and screaming or at least knocking the top of it one more time so I could die happy as the roof buried me but the rumbling slowed and stopped and I passed out again.  It was a surreal and disconcerting experience and made me wish that I had paid more attention to the safety demonstration of the stewardess.  I still don’t know what to do, they tell me pray but I think my atheism may get in the way so I feel impotent to the threats of this place, at least back home I know that I can wrestle the croc and charm the snake (“Yes, I do know the Crocodile Hunter’s dead.  Yes, we do all have pet crocs and I do ride a roo to work”).  

My devil-may-care-roguish-step-out-in-front-of-cars-I-am-walking-here-and-you-shall-stop attitude has taken some pummelling by a Chilean driving populace who care very little to nothing for the lives of pedestrians.  In terms of wanting to stop their cars they are probably only slightly behind white South Africans (boo!) driving around Joburg, only since the death squads of Pinochet are no more they are largely without the excuse of a 38% chance that you are going to be carjacked and shot execution style that the Afrikaners can at least call on.  So there’s a kind of feeling about that if the smog don’t getcha a lunatic in a Dodge Ram is going to plough you down.


Chilean culture 101:

Chileans love an excuse to riot. To go marauding through the streets smashing things, taunting the police and generally bemoaning the state of affairs.  It’s good to see the communists and the anarchists throwing stones at each other while riot cops rush around in Mad Max-style armoured vehicles spewing out tear gas and drenching the combatants with water cannons.  Every other day there is a rampage of some description to quench my thirst for civil disobedience.  When they are not rioting it seems that, according to themselves, they are all either rooting or robbing each other.  The first two things that a Chilean will tell you about other Chileans is that they are all ladrones, the worst kind of robbers, (“no you can’t walk there”, “you can’t do that, it’s too dangerous”, “don’t take your camera”, “better to go naked that way they have nothing to steal”) and that infidelity is a national sport.  I’m starting to believe them.  A chick that I live with, slightly oxymoronic in that she is a tiny, sweet, little German, was mugged as she fumbled with the key in the lock of our door.  A Bad Man ripped her pack of her and told her that he was going to stick either a knife or a spoon in her (I always get confused with these two words in Spanish, they’re just so damn close).  Then I spent my Saturday afternoon running through the streets of the centre chasing some muggers who had jumped some old guy in broad daylight.  When I set off I had visions of a pose of concerned citizens hankering for a-lynchen but despite the crowds of rubber-neckers the Mob turned out to be mostly-to-completely comprised of one Aussie screaming in English and clearly not thinking about what he would do if he were to catch them.  Needless to say they gave me the slip and all I had to show for it was their jackets, which they ditched in a clever chameleon act of identity shifting.  That’s the thievery part confirmed, the infidelity bit is not quite as immediately noticeable as Chileans are not the most overtly sexualised bunch getting around.  At all.  It took until I was watching daytime TV the other day and stumbled upon Pasiónes.  A show where they dramatically recreate the affairs of their viewers who in bizarrely anonymous exhibitionism send in their sordid secrets to be aired and celebrated by all.  The bad acting makes me yearn for the quality that we skips are spoilt with on Home and Away and the titillation for the heady days of Jeremy Sims in Chances.  

There has been a little climbing adventure of late, the results of which have been smashed together with some Final Cut fiddling, which I am enjoying, and you can see them here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0g7tTsXWWg.  endulgently constructed for my own gratification.  A million thanks are shouted out from my incredible terraza (Biz now you know just how incredible that is -  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCS1zfGNS98 ) to Lisa who clung to the cliff in the freezing cold in order to get the footage.  It was also the second time that a condor has watched over me when I’ve been clambering and so I think if I were to take peyote and fall into the spirit world I’d find it to be my spirit guide.

Eso es toda, hasta la proxima.

Send powerful thoughts.

El Cabra.