Business in Front, Party in the Back

There is a blog written by a girl in Santiago, I love Chile, which has a list called "Sh*t Gringas Don't Say
 This inspired the title of this post, and the subject matter. On her list, along with 'I wish I ate more carbohydrates" (I had a meal yesterday of corn, potatoes, pasta and bread), and "I love how my boyfriend lives with his mother and wears a fannypack", is "Rat-tails on Men are just plain Sexy, business in front, party in the back." Although you will hear gringas say a lot of stupid things, this will never be one of them.

Chilean women are beautiful with perfect hair that waterfalls over their shoulders and make me, with hair that is now permanently wild and frizzy (as if it was well-behaved before) very jealous. They also somehow wear their waist length hair down in all weather, and as I sweat up the very steep hill to class every day in my thirty minute commute, I curse the girls who are wearing sweaters, jeans, a blanket of hair and seemed unperturbed by the 70/80 degree weather and the incline. Apparently there is a saying about Valpo/Viña women that they have the best legs because they are used to climbing these bloody hills with mounds of groceries for their husbands. Well, my always beefy calves are certainly growing.

But I digress, the girls are great. The men are nice (once you get past the constant whistling, beeping and professions of love) but aesthetically deceiving. As I walk down the street I may see an attractive man, but I know that once he pasts I will go from tranquil appreciation to horror as whatever atrocious hairstyle he has shown wipes clean any happy memory of his face. There is the basic Chilean style, two inch or so hair that is longer in the back, basically a baby mullet. This is the most attractive. Then we have simple rattail with hair on the head. This also, is comparatively sexy. It starts to go downhill when instead of a rattail, there are between one and three dreadlocks sticking out of the back of the head with the rest reasonably short. The nightmares begin when the head is shaved. Because it is seldom entirely shaved. There is the pony tail sticking out from one section of the head like a handle. There is the round lump of hair the size of an egg (possibly so the head has some padding when it lies down?) and there is the one dreadlock sticking out of the middle of the head which is truly awful. I am going to eventually take pictures, but I did do some internet research. As you can see the man to the right has the pony/mullet/shaved look which is obviously very desirable.

Enough about hair, I have been holding on to those feelings for a while. I have to go do homework, something that has very inconveniently followed me across the equator, and since I have the intellectual capacity of a five year old in Spanish it takes a while. I would love to teach some of the piropos (pick-up lines/cat-calls) I have encountered in the streets but it will have to wait.

FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL. Chucha

So a week and a half in and I am happy as a bee, except today is the first day of school, so the lazy beach days and bar evenings are now going to turn into class stress and night exhaustion. First, the chilean system for extranjeros registering for class is absolute lunacy. We all go into a big room at an unseasonable time in the morning (especially since one of the girls turned 21 the night before) and have to register for 15 courses, out of which we will take 5 or so. They do this because Chilean professors have an amusing habit of canceling a class a month in, or changing it's time, place etc so there is a perfect possibility I could go for a month and then not be able to take it anymore. I would probably have a sense of humor failure. So in this big room, we have to go around to each department's table and then a student monitor from each department has to shuffle through a stack of papers and write down our names on the piece of paper that corresponds to each class. Then our chilean student assigned to us, goes round to each table and reshuffles through each stack to check we are actually in the class. Absolute madness and takes three hours. It's also not as if I am in a primitive society. I was on the bus the other day and there was a family of three children between maybe 5 and 9 years old and EACH of the children had smartphones (and as you all know, it took me forever to figure out how to make a call on mine). I think it just amuses the Chileans to make Americans sit hungover in a stifling hot room early on a friday morning. 

My family here is wonderful, I live with a grandmother (adela), her daughter (roseanne), roseanne's two sons and the pregnant girlfriend of one of the sons, a friend of the family, and there are always at least three other people in the house. I also, really embarrassingly, found out yesterday at the baby shower for the girlfriend, this boy who has been in and out of the house constantly and i assumed was just another friend/cousin/uncle/etc, is actually another son of roseanne's. oops. 

The family says my spanish is better than most of the students they have had in the past, but apparently my program used to have low spanish requirements and was full of sorority girls, and now it has high requirements and is full of bilingual lib arts/ivy league students and me. Off now for my 30 minute walk to class, I will never again complain about going to OlinRice. Also, Rosey, the libraries here close at 6 in the afternoon. and the coffee is instant and tastes like mierda. I can't decide whether this will make me super productive in the mornings and afternoons, or mean I never do anything. Probably the latter since it takes me an hour to read ten pages in spanish. 

ciao gorditas

oh one last thing, we were warned about how politically incorrect the chileans are, oh god I have an example almost too appalling to post on this, it's about drinking like an african. However, on the plus side, I am well on my way to having a gay chilean bestfriend, which is surprising in this ubermacho society but delightful