It has been a strange day, started by me waking up at 6.30 this morning during an earthquake of 5 on the Richter scale, with it's source about 60 kilometers from here. It's commonplace in Chile (I mean, how did you think the Andes got here? They sure aren't pennies from heaven), and every guesthouse and public building has got a "what to do in case of an earthquake" poster in the lobby. I soon fell asleep again, knowing that it was nothing newsworthy since the building wasn't evacuated and didn't wake up until the sun had half finished her day's work.
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For the first time I wished I had a special section on my blog secured with a password for a selected few, I've gotten so many indecent proposals today that I just... I... I'm lost for words. Would be fun to share the gory details with you, but I'm afraid my parents might read this ;) Now, after more than a month in the sun I could pass for a light-skinned Chilena, my hair is very dark (because I dyed it last week) and I'm wearing what seems to be the uniform for young women in Santiago, jeans and a spaghetti strap top. With sunglasses on ('cause "reading in the sun can damage your eyes", sure, then I would be blind by now) nobody sees the colour of my undefined-coloured eyes (blue/green/gray with yellow rings in the irises, around the pupils) so they don't shout out my outlandishness and yet, as I sat on a bench in a very family oriented park, I could not read my book for longer than 10 minutes at a time without being disturbed. I think there is an unwritten rule that single Chilenos can harass foreign women between 13 and 18 pm on Saturdays. And this is not flattering, flattering is when somebody turns around when you walk down the street wearing a skirt - and is still gentleman enough to skip the catcalls (or a raised eyebrow. Subtle is the key, my friends, subtle). This is just flat out annoying. Hrumpf. To quote Isabel Allende she once said when talking about her fellow countrymen that "Color prejudice is so strong that if a woman has yellow hair, even if she has the face of an iguana, men turn to look at her in the street". Well, I'm not even blond, so leave me alone.
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When I checked out I acted as a translator for a guy at the reception and a woman who shared the room with me, a white South African with a somewhat unpleasant aura about her (and I generally get on with all kinds of people without much difficulty) . She thanked me, all right, but then started to complain about the language barrier (then just travel somewhere else!) and ended by saying "they don't teach us languages in South Africa, only black languages". I (barely) managed to bite my tounge and not bark back that "black languages" were also languages, and very useful as that, if you live in South Africa. By "languages" I assume she meant european languages, well, she spoke OK English, which is, the last time I knew, a language. And she speaks Afrikaans too, which is also a "language" (although it sounds like children's Dutch with an extremely thick accent). Sometimes it's better just to keep your mouth shut and bitch about it later. All a bit weird after laughing at the politically correct stories yesterday.