Hey hey friends!

Apparently we were on Chilean public TV last night! Unfortunately we didn’t actually get to see it because we couldn’t find a TV at the right time, BUT we’ve been led to believe – and I plan to assert as truth in the future- that we were right there on Chilean channel 11 at 10pm!

Anyway, here’s the story of our brief foray onto Chilean public television. Our Spanish teacher decided we should take a break from classroom learning and converse with some locals for practice, so he took us on an excursion to a local fruit market. Basically our teacher would start up a conversation with a local vendor and then leave us to discuss the intriguing world of Chilean fruit vending. Chileans are really friendly, and you can count on a brief Spanish lesson from a local if you strike up a conversation so it’s great practice. Anyway, one of these conversations was with this great guy who gave us (free of charge) some of the best fruit I’ve ever eaten (the avocados he was selling were so good you could eat them like apples). He looked kind of like a caricature of a typical salesman- his face was unusually animated when he talked and he had a cartoon style mustache; he would have looked completely at home in a rug commercial. So anyway we get accosted by this Chilean woman and a cameraman who herded us in between two fruit tables (there was no escape for your brave storyteller!) and started talking in quick Spanish and some broken English about filming us. She kept saying things like “muy sorprendido! very surprised!”- she didn’t have to tell to tell me to look surprised, I was thoroughly bewildered by the situation, but I gathered that it was some sort of ‘end of Today Tonight style’ fruit commercial in which Anna, Nick and I were customers surprised by the low low prices! So we pretty much stood there looking surprised while the fruit seller talked in Spanish about his fruit. Then the woman told us we were going to be on TV!

Even though we’re Chilean TV stars now (it’s not all splendor and womens as you might think) we decided to go back to our tourist roots and head to the zoo. It’s always a treat to see a zoo in a new continent because they tend to focus on the local animals. There were some cool weasely and catlike animals which I hadn’t seen before, and a bunch of Andean animals which I hope to see in the wild over the next few weeks- condors etc.

One thing which we all thought was pretty amusing (and this is going to totally tickle Louis) was that at the primate enclosure there were handprints of the largest ape species, set out so you could put your hand into them and remark at how small your hands were in comparison. The caption under the gorilla handprint read (translated to English) “They have big and broad hands with long fingers and thick nails. They are huge in comparison with other primates …”. My hand fit perfectly into the imprint…