I am the dancing queen!

Greetings all subscribers, thanks for your continued patronage.

Last Tuesday I went to the Estadio Nacional for the Copa Libertadores clash between "Universidad de Chile" and "The Strongest" a Bolivian team. The Copa Libertadores is the South American equivalent of the Champions League, and you know its important when the officials are escorted onto the pitch under the protection of riot police who shield them with their nice cosy Roman style riot shields. It was a somewhat bizarre yet enjoyable evening, I was supposed to go with a group of Australians who I'd met at Uni; the plan was to meet at the statue of the naked man outside the stadium. I rocked up to the crumbling monolith that is the Estadio Nacional and asked a friendly looking, machine gun wielding policeman on horseback if he knew where I could find a statue of a naked man. Suprisingly he was quite helpful and I found the naked man statue, however in typical Aussie style my new amigos didn't show up; I later found out when leaving the stadium that there are about 15 naked men statues all around the stadium, each one depicting a different ancient greek olympic sport. Anyway I watched the game which finished with Universidad de Chile winning 2-1 and in terms of excitement was perhaps only surpassed by the incident at half time when some drunk tried to steal my sandwich; I'd gone downstairs to get something to eat and on the way back to my seat this guy approached me asking for some of my sandwich/bit-of-bread-with-ham-in-it, when I refused he tried to snatch it from me. He was quite persistent and I had to revert to English telling him to "f#%K off" and giving him a good shove.

Anyway my week only got better from here, I attended my first Salsa and Merengue dance lesson on Saturday afternoon. Talk about dirty dancing; there was an old guy who seemed to take too much interest in the young girls and gradually as the class progressed and he got hotter, he would undo another button of his shirt- by the end of the class he only had one button done up! For my first class I thought I'd done quite well, I didn't fall over or tread on anyones toes- so a success as far as I am concerned.

Saturday night, the whole flat went to the birthday of one of Eduardo's friends. It was quite possibly the strangest party I've ever been to. It is typical in Chile as many other latin countries to not start partying until 12 or 1 O'clock, so we (Eduardo, Jonathan, Lenz the German guy and Verina the German guys girlfriend) arrived at about 12.30. We had bought between us quite a substantial amount of booze, but it didn't really seem to last long since almost everyone else there helped themselves also. Eduardo's dealer; Max was also there and Lenz bought a joint, however there seems to be some sort of clause within Chilean drug dealing whereby when you buy a joint you have to let the guy who sold it to you smoke half of it! Max is quite the role model- he's about 30 and has a wife and two children, however seems to spend most of his time dealing and since Eduardo is perhaps his biggest client he is also around the flat alot. Anyway, there seemed to be most of Santaigo's homosexual crowd at the fiesta and at about 4 O'clock in the morning we were treated to a Drag show, by Raimundo (going by the stage name of Bambi) who is another close friend of Eduardo's although he doesn't deal. Apparently Eduardo who is an Actor/writer and pot head by trade also dabbles in a bit of drag and has promised to one day give us his rendition of "it's raining men". Furthermore he has invited us all to go to his favourite Santiago Gay Bar some time in the future, so I'll keep you posted as to how all that goes.

This coming weekend I am going to Pucon in the South of Chile with Lenz and Verina. We are going to climb the Volcano and there are various other activities available such as rafting, horse riding etc. So I'll post again when I return or whilst down there.

Footnote: whilst in Pucon we are going to watch the Saturday night Chile vs Uruguay game in a pub (it's being played here in Santiago), will let you know the result, the consequences could be important for Australia later this year who have to play the fifth placed South American team to qualify for the World Cup. Have a good Easter all.