Pisco Damage Report

Hola hola hola everyone

So. It has been a few days since my last blog, and since then I have been busy checking out my neighbourhood are learning how to say where I live.

Over the last few days I have been bonding with the kiddies and family I am staying with, I am getting on with them really well which is an awesome blessing. All three children are gorgeous, and have very different personalities! Taking them out is a laugh, because Chileans seem to love kids, they all start chattering to me in spanish about how aborable they are, to which I reply, "no hablar espanol, no hablar espanol" and that basically shuts down the conversation.

Besides my daytime mother of three duties, I have been up to various other things as well. Last night I went to my first house party with some gap students from Belgium and NZ. I was also introduced to my first glass of ''pisco''. Pisco is a locally brewed Chilean speciality, no one can tell me what it is made of but they drink it as if it comes out of the kitchen tap. The closest relative drink I can compare it too is probably rum, similar tasting but is quite sweet and is very easy to drink. Which I did.

Everyone at the party were pretty nice to me, the chicks especially were really nice, saying that they will take me to the mall and go shopping or something (I was drifting in and out). The boys had a right old laugh at my poor spanish, they kept trying to make me say things and then laughed at "the funny gringo". Everyone was speaking spanish to me, which got really overwhelming at times and I had my first culture shocky feeling of not being able to joke and tease them, which is flippin frustrating! I am ashamed to say that due to my tiredness, inability to communicate and my pisco ridden self, I had a moment of weakness and a few tears started to make their long walk to freedom down my face. No sooner had I started my self pity session, then a bunch of eagar young chileans ran up crying "you miss your family?? you miss your family??" . Litte beknown to them that what I really miss is the English language spoken without a funny accent and with the set back of a hilarious misunderstanding every 3 and a half minutes, but at the risk of offending them I went ahead with the family reasoning. A kindly young lady by the name of Andrea even offered to take me to the bathroom and gave me some makeup, which I put on even though it was about 4 shades too dark. Still a gringo? Nah boi.

To remedy my feelings of depressed gringoness, Duncan (the other NZer) and I put on a bit of Black Seeds and tried to involve some of the locals in a dance sesh. I have to say that we failed rather spectaculary, not only did they think our dance moves were slack, they were unimpressed with our music.

The thing is, that although I had heard "Pisco = sick- Hola from Chile" I didn't get to fully appreciate that phrase until about 6 this morning, after crawling into bed only hours before. Needless to say, although the experience was some what of an interesting one, and everyone is really quite lovely minus the pisco effect (I hung out with a few this morning up at the football field) , I will not be reliving the experience any time soon.