Events since last night

Hey guys,

I know its only been a few hours since the last post, but since my folks asked me to write and stretta´s mom called me out as a ¨slack ass,¨ I decided to weigh in with a few stories and impressions of my own.

So while Stretta was busily blogging last night, I and a few others went out in downtown La Serena to get a few drinks. As we are arbitrarily walking into the first bar we see, these two girls are walking out. They say hello and we invite them in to hang out with us. One speaks decent english, and so we start to chat. Something that continually amazes me is the pervasiveness of American culture. This girl´s favorite music was stuff like Allman Brothers, Pearl Jam, Joe Cocker, people and groups I wasn´t even that familiar with. It´s so crazy that they listen to our music to this degree.

Anyways, these girls cause more people to magically materialize, and we had a really interesting night talking (or, in my, case, gesticulating and attempting to make myself understood via a series of grunts, pantomimes, and cerveza por favors) to people from a variety of places in latin america. Spoke to a Columbian guy who I instantly offended because i thought he was trying to sell me drugs. Apparently not every Columbian citizen is Pablo Escobar. In my defense though he said a word that started with ¨d¨and was in Spanish so how was I to know. However, after that initial road block we found the people to be overwhelmingly friendly and curious about us. At the end of the night one asks us for a cigarette, and we don´t have any, but one of my buddies has chewing tobacco. He offers it to us by saying repeatedly in Spanish, ¨don´t swallow.¨ She grinningly accepts a golf ball-sized hunk of the stuff and starts chewing voraciously as if she´s trying to get down a big ole slab of beef jerky. We get the hell out of there before, I assume, she starts vomiting thirty seconds later. Another interesting tidbit is that, towards the end of the night, we find out those two girls we initially met up with are both in high school and are around 16 or 17. They were out with us until around 3 or 4 in the morning. What a different culture. Luckily the evening stayed pg, and the mixup in perceived age didn´t come back to haunt anybody.

This morning we wake up and have a chat with a man who survived the Pinochet years. It was completely fascinating. I don´t know about you readers, but I knew next to nothing about Pinochet´s takeover. Apparently the military hid food prior to the takeover so that the population was nearly starving when the military swept in, burned the communist president´s mansion, and gave back the food they had hidden. Of course they blamed the shortages on the communists, and initially people loved Pinochet. However, the next seventeen years proved them very wrong. Pinochet´s secret police would make you disappear if it was so much as rumored that you had ties to the left. It all finally ended when people from other countries came in to control the elections. When the people were actually free to vote as they wanted they swiftly voted Pinochet out of power. Anyways, I would right more but my time on the internet is almost out. Hope everyone is doing well.

Matt Bailey