Chile, Days 6 & 7: a quiet weekend

If you're looking for something interesting you can skip this post: I spent a very quiet and uneventful weekend. According to my itinerary, I was supposed to go on some sort of sightseeing trip yesterday but it didn't happen. So for the past two days I have been walking around Copiapo, practicing my Spanish a bit more, and doing a little curriculum work.

One of my goals while walking around was to spend a little money. Have I mentioned anything about the Chilean money system? It is really quite sensible from a Canadian's point of view. It is not based on the illogical sterling system, as it is in Kenya or Britain, nor is it almost mathematically impossible to convert as it is with the Swedish crowns. There are almost exactly (at the time of this writing) 500 Chilean pesos to the Canadian dollar so monetary calculations are quite simple. To make it even easier, the Chileans write large numbers in the European way (using a period where we would use a comma) so to translate the cost of something into Canadian funds you only have to double it. So, for example, a price of 1.998 Chilean pesos rounds very quickly to about $4 CAN.

Note that I said only that Chilean prices were easy to get a handle on. They are not so easy to pay. You have to imagine the scenario: you are in a supermarket which is very busy, you are in a cashier's lineup which is moving quickly. Before you know it, your purchases have been totalled and the cashier is saying something to you. You guess that she's telling you the total price but of course you can't understand a word she is saying because Chilean Spanish is incomprehensible. It's not just because of my ignorance of the language but also because of the unique qualities of the Chilean accent: "fast and fluid" is what I believe the travel guides will tell you. So you sneak a peek at the cash register and fumble for your money. You pull out a wad of bills and a handful of coins, all unfamiliar, the cashier is waiting and the lineup behind you is restless. So you select a bill which is sure to more than cover the cost. She stares at your handful of coins and says something else and you guess that she's asking something like: "don't you have 287 pesos to round it up?" But she could be saying 28 or even 913 for all you know. So you mumble (as always) "Lo siento; no hablo espanol" and she goodnaturedly hands you the change. ANOTHER handful of change.

So I really needed to spend some change and lighten my purse. I bought an electrical plug converter for 628 pesos and an ice cream cone for 725 pesos and I gave some pesos to some very worthy-looking beggars. The ice cream, by the way, was delicious. It's hard to imagine but Chileans seem to love ice cream even more than we do. I got a big scoop of blackberry flavour and I donated the remains of the cone to (you guessed it) a dog.