Self-consciousness. Or lack thereof.
Sometimes when I’m standing on a corner or at the appointed location outside the national symphony at Plaza Italia, waiting, waiting, waiting for my person to show up, I start thinking to myself that if my person doesn’t show up, and that person over there’s person...
A Solution for Every Problem
aka: the great shoelace dilemma, with a shout-out to La Cumbre in Las Condes.This past (southern) summer I spent a couple of months in and around Patagonia, hitting some great hotspots, including the park at the end of the world (Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego)...
Bah
Bah. This is what a Chilean says when he misspeaks. It's not an oops, or an ooof, or even a whoa. It's just bah. Not baaahh, like a sheep, more like you started to say the English word but and it got confused with the sheep sound. A sharper b, a shorter a. So you're...
The Fonda Report
This was the neon sign that greeted us at the entrance of Parque Iñes de Suarez in Providencia (not exactly the cheap seats) at the fonda. The neon sign depicts a man and woman dancing the cueca, which is the national dance. The whole dieciocho holiday is steeped in...
El dieciocho
This morning when I clicked on Google.cl, as one is wont to do here in this stringbean of a country, I noticed that the L in google had transformed itself into the Chilean flag. The Chilean flag bears a striking resemblance to the state flag of Texas, but be ye not...
The thing is…
If I start a sentence when I'm talking to you with "the thing is..." in English, you already know. You already know that I'm about to give you an excuse for why I can't, or it couldn't, or I won't, or you shouldn't. It's probably even not necessarily 100% true. The...
What’s that big loud sound?
The thing that was so strange about the sound of plywood tumbling down an elevator shaft is that I was outside when it happened. Strange, I thought. And I kept pedalling. Through Barrio Yungay and beyond, through a quirky old part of Santiago that I love in a strange...
Tell me about your potato chips
Today at the supermarket I noticed that the geniuses in Lay's potato chips marketing department were at it again. Of course they've noticed Chilean tastes. Chile's not so tiny, after all, with 16 million inhabitants, most of them (us) with a hearty addiction to...
Trapped on the fourth-and-a-half floor
Recently I promised readers big and small a story about getting trapped in the elevator in my building. As the elevator is just barely automatic, the outer door must be shut and the inner gate must be closed in order for the elevator to move. There's a system of hooks...
Pointing things out
Every finger has a name in English. There's the thumb, the pointer, middle finger, ring finger, and little finger or (my favorite) pinky. As chidren, though we are encouraged not to point directly at people, we are taught to point at things (for example, a word in a...
