Dinner at 6am

My life has become totally adjusted to the schedule of a clubber. I wake up at 2pm, have breakfast, go to Spanish class, come home for lunch at about 7pm, have elevenses before going out, and head out to the clubs with Jason. I get home usually between 5 and 7am, have a light dinner, and go to sleep to start it all over again the next day. It's honestly pretty damn tiring, and even on the days I don't go out, I have to stick to something close to that schedule - it's just how my body operates now. Unfortunately this means I see little actual natural light (fortunately I'm only here for another week and hopefully won't get rickets). And somehow, I always feel pretty busy and am trying to cram stuff together, even though I do nothing. I've barely been cooking the last week or so because I haven't gotten around to shopping for food and then actually cooking it (I've been sticking to bachelor-style stuff - like lentils and rice and hot sauce. Man I'm a lazy sod).

Chileans take elevenses in mid-evening, around 7pm usually, unlike the Brits who have their elevenses at 11am as a late morning snack. It's basically a light dinner of stuff you don't really have to cook, like bread with jam or avocado and tea. I have no idea why they still call it elevenses when it happens at 7. Must be a mutated English import or something. But there are lots of strange sayings in Latin America, especially in Chile: your soul mate, for example, is your media naranja - literally your "half orange." Because I've been feeling the pain of missing the other half of my orange... I also like chupa mas que orilla la playa, or "he drinks more than the beach." Other good sayings in Chile: mas raro que un pez con hombros, or "stranger than a fish with shoulders;" there's also an equivalent of "when pigs fly" in English: cuando bomberos tengan sueldo or, "when the firemen get paid" (firemen are all volunteers in Chile).

It's been said that the insane number of modismos, or Chilean slang, has contributed to the large number of high-quality Chilean poets, like Pablo Neruda (there are thousands of modismos, many of which are regional). I don't know if it's true, but it does make them really, really hard to understand as they rapidly fire off truncated Spanish using a lot of words I've never heard and will never even be able to use outside the country, even if I were to learn them (although it does make you sound cool to be able to throw around a few). Spanish also has a lot of weird words, like there's a word just for the spot underneath your nose where a little Hitler mustache would be. We were going through some vocabulary in my Spanish class, and my English translation needed two lines, because there's nothing even close to that in English. I guess it's a popular piercing spot; maybe so much so that the piercing vocabulary has worked itself into the common lexicon (I bet if I asked a piercer in the US they would have a word for it too. Kerry, any idea? Ask a P-Towner with a shaved head and a colander tattooed on - which is going to be my actual kitchen-utensil tattoo, I decided). But likewise, they don't have words for some stuff that we do in English - like the word for fingers is the same as the word for toes.

Chileans also love to use diminutivos, which is a modifier that makes something a smaller version of the original, e.g. chica or girl, becomes chiquita, little girl (despite the fact that there is a perfectly serviceable word that just means "little girl"). In Jason's host family, his mom is Nancy, and so is his (adult) host sister, so when they're together the mom is Nancy and the sister is Nancita. Diminutivos used in sentences always manage to throw me, just because my Spanish sucks and by the time I recognize the diminutivo I've missed trying to listen to the rest of the sentence (which I probably wouldn't have understood anyways).

In an attempt to improve my Spanish in a novel way, I'm working through a book that Jason gave me that was written for 7 year olds (laugh as hard as you want at my pun, I know it's totally awesome). It's funny though, I've tried to ask different Latinos what would be good books for my Spanish level, and they always respond that no one reads much, and that books are expensive for people here (prices are comparative to prices back home). This is true across countries, and the respondent always looks away and says it like they're a little sad about it. Maybe that's because I mostly hang out with upper-income, educated people here. Seriously though, I meet so many people here my age that have super cool and impressive sounding degrees. Particularly women; I literally think that every girl I meet here is studying biochemical engineering or in some other sort of hardcore math/science field. It's particularly strange because I never meet people studying that stuff in the states, especially women. I guess though Chileans want to have a job when they get out of college, something I don't think American students consider until the last week of the grace period on their college loans. Except maybe nursing students, who had the actual foresight to see a job market with an insatiable demand and good pay, or at least were lucky enough to happen to like wiping people's butts at the same time the economy needs more butt-wiping.

It's been getting colder here, and is around freezing at night. There's also been quite a bit of rain, although somehow I've never actually seen it. I've seen evidence of it, like 4-inch puddles in the low spots of intersections, and I've heard it pounding on the corrugated tin roof of my balcony at night, but I've never actually seen it.

Other errata: I was waiting on an empty sidewalk corner to meet up with a friend, and I saw a guy of about 60, with a grey beard and curly handlebar mustache running by. He was wearing a short-brimmed nylon cap; stuck around the cap were what looked like welding goggles. He also had a long-sleeved polyester shirt of black, fuchsia, and gold; khaki cargo-pocket shorts pulled up past his navel, and knee-high black socks. With him was a sweater-wearing dog of mixed breed, but he must have had some corgi in him though because he was running sideways (Welsh corgis were bread to herd geese, of all strange things, and tend to run a little off-kilter). It was 11pm. He was my first Latino Eccentric Old Man. I longed for my camera.