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.