Everyone on facebook seems to be doing "25 Things About Me" notes which seem a lot like eating sopaipillas, bland, dirty and self-indulgent but you can't help but do it. So I'll start off with "2 Things About Me". See if you can hold your attention through this.

1) I don't really have many ambitions in my life

2) The few that I do are mostly related to football (soccer, futbol, calcio, 'футбол')

So some of these petty, petty ambitions have been realised, I've been to the Maracana and I've seen Blackburn win something (Full Members Cup, 1987, vintage year), some are realisable like going to a World Cup and some are whole figments of fantasy. But it's always nice when one comes along unexpectantly and glasses you over the head like a drunken West Ham fan.

And so, last Sunday, I happened to find myself watching a superclasico between Boca Juniors and River Plate. This is pretty much the most intense derby in football and although the game was labelled a friendly it was clearly no such thing.

About 5 years ago I went to watch Boca play San Lorenzo at the Bombonera where I witnessed amongst other things, two gringos getting mugged, a handgun smuggled into the stadium, a whole stadium shaking as every single person jumped up and down singing how much they hated the English and fans throwing coins, lighters, mobiles, bottles, kitchen sinks and their own grandmothers at the San Lorenzo players.

So there was no chance we were standing with the Boca fans, unfortunatley that meant we had to go with the River fans. So we traded a free and casual attitude to violence for a brand of snobbish superiority. River like to call themselves los millionarios and represent the loaded hoity-toity neauvou riche Chelsea to Boca's despisable cockney "I'm ganna break your fackin' spine" Chelsea.

The atmosphere was tremendous, people arrived at the stadium four hours before the game to get prime spots, the noise was intense, there was a firework display, a samba band, showers of confetti and even what could only be called a flag-off. There were fans who didn't even bother watching the game, who just jumped up and down trying to get the rest of the stand to sing.

And obviously the game turned out to be a big pile of dog shit. Boca won 2-0, River had a player sent off, the ref was crap and some how none of this was even remotely interesting.

Anway to finish up here are "Probably Less than 25 Observations about Argentina"

1. There's really not a lot to do in Mendoza.
2. Every single dish contains some form of dead cow or pig. Vegetarianism an alien concept.
3. Mullets are even more popular here than in Chile.
4. They speak weird.
5. Compare these two links...
Miss Argentina- http://www.jujuy.com/fotos/alejandra-bernal.jpg
Miss Chile- http://www.explore-atacama.com/fotos/hi/arqueologia-2.jpg

That's it chau pescaos!

Of High Culture and Small Wonders

Having lived in foreign climes for some time now I've become quite accustomed to the fact the foreign telly is infinitely rubbisher than good old homegrown British broadcasting. My heart truly swells with pride whenever I think of the genius and insight that went into producing The Jeremy Kyle Show, My Family, Cash In the Attic and Hollyoaks. Having grown up surrounded by all this cultural richness it has no come as no suprise to me that Chilean TV is lamer than a one-legged arthritic duck.

My induction to it was flabbergasting, for want of a better word. In the 7 minutes of "Noche De Comedia" I watched before trying to claw out my own eyeballs I witnessed:

A midget dressed as an elephant, telling jokes about termites and breakdancing and
A labrador in a skirt and his owner performing a typical Chilean dance which incorporated the worst aspects of morris dancing and flamenco.

So after those traumatic minutes I've tried to give the telly a wide berth. This has, however, been near impossible at the hogar where the girls sit in front of the box in a soma-induced state for hours at a time. Now, I'm well aware that I work with teenage girls. I'm not expecting them to want to watch documentaries about Schiller or the latest interpretation of the Ring Cycle.

But what they do watch sears the retinas and temazipams the brain. There are big, sprawling 2-hour long soaps that make Neighbours seem like high art, there are horrendous MTV formats adopted for the local market but there are mostly lots of shows involving girls in bikinis, many a fine mullet, excessive amounts of reggaeton (any amount of reggaeton is excessive) and cameramen with vertigo.

And the girls at the residencia are happier than bi-phallic canines watching this fecal extract for hours and hours on end.

And this is where Vamos A Leer comes in. It's basically a reading project that tries to encourage the girls to do something more productive than pull each others hair out and gives them something more stimulating than Chilean Next.

I went into it with low expectations, everyone knows that reading is fome and the girls had to take a book, whether they wanted to or not. Then there were the books the titles we offered covered such classics of literature as "The Artic Tern" and "At last Susannah, you've got teeth!".

So when I handed the books I expected nothing more than supplying another form of weaponry to the girls armoury. I don't know if you've ever been hit by the spine of a book but it fucking hurts.

But then, something miraculous happened. The hogar descended into total silence, the TV was off, there were no cries of pain, no escape plans being hatched and most importantly no reggaeton. There were 30 girls reading books so quickly than some have already finished, given me synopsii (?) of such great depths I almost fell asleep and they started demanding "The Artic Tern: Part II" and "Oh My, Susannah! You've got some more teeth". (There's a whole series, there, I really recommend the wisdom teeth years),

Maybe I should have been less cynical and there's probably a lesson to be learned from this, but let's not get too deep. All I can say is it's been a lovely, really affecting week and I can't ask for any more than that. That's All!

Well, it's been a while since my last post so obviously many interesting things have happened in the meantime. And by interesting I mean vaguely abnormal and disturbing things.

These include: being robbed, going to a disco themed party filled with excessively tight pants, being bitten by a (possibly) rabid dog on the arse, applying foot powder to my testicles, going to a disco where everyone was web footed and six fingered; and just today a 6 year old girl spat in my face.

But hey, lets get down to the real nitty gritty, I worry for Chile and their food. Maybe, it's because it's shaped a little bit like the country, maybe it's because there's some weird Freudian phallic thing going on, but it's probably because Chile is just a bit wrong, as this country is obsessed by hotdogs.

Went to hiper lider today in a quest for some decent cheese, (I could rant about the lack of decent cheese for hours, but will spare you, for now) and whilst the cheese is divided into 2 varieties, sliced and unsliced- the hotdog aisle stretched on over the horizon all the way down to the Pacific. There's hotdogs of "pork", "turkey" and my personal favourite, "bird".

And no matter what you put on them, which here includes tomatoes, onions,avocadoes and the ubiquitous mayonaisse, nothing can disguise the fact that what you are eating is 25% eyeholes, earholes and arseholes, 75% grey.

But this really doesn't affect me as a vegemetarian. So what am I left to eat... Fried dough! This is all sopapillas are- fried dough with mayonnaise on the top. It tastes as good as it sounds. If this gets boring, there's always empanandas de queso- fried dough in fried cheese which are a lot better than they sound, in a Chilean wrong sort of way. Apparently there's also something called humitas, which is mashed corn. Can't wait to try that and exhaust my food options totally. I'll be left with eating bread and aji, or heaven forbid, salads.

OK, so this is probably not an honest reflection of Chilean cuisine, this is just the cheapest food you can eat, which is what I'm on until my bank cards get sent here. I'm sure there are some delicious seafood dishes and some excellent steaks which I'll never eat. And I'm sure there's some ace vegetarian fare that won't instantly clog up my arteries. So I'm making up for all this unhealthy crap I'm eating by supplementing my diet with a steady flow of Chilean red (and pisco, beer and a little rum). Which is very, very good. There's also a festive drink called cola de mono (monkey's tail) which sounds phenomenal, but is in fact a coffee based licquer.

So that's it for now, as it's Christmas in 2 days time, I'll write about that in my next post. In April. Ciao

ET

Wow, this is not only my first blog in Chile, it's also my first blog ever and it's both fully lubricated and hindered by several glasses of Chile's cheapest red wine, so here we go.

And where to start? It's been an intense week with all the comings and goings of the induction. I've heard a lot about VE and all it's multiple facets dimensions, but today we went to our hogars and met the chicas for the first time. And as this will be the core of my experience here, it seems as good place as any.

I was proper nervous going into the institution for the first time. Obviously these girls have had a really, difficult lives and at the minute I'm on the Titanic setting off from Liverpool- the tip of the iceberg is far, far away. But I'd heard enough horror stories/reality checks to be more than a little aprehensive.

And as I wandered into my hogar for the first time this feeling wasn't alieviated. My reception ranged from muted welcome to general ambivalence to "who the fuck are you and why are you interrupting my telenovela?".

But as I meandered aimlessly from courtyard to kitchen the girls began to emerge from the intellectual mist of Venezuelan soap operas and offered such pearls of wisdom and incisive questions:

"Is it true that people from your country never wash?" and
"It looks like all your teeth are falling out" and sobre todas
"I haven't got any idea what you're saying"

And both despite and because of this I left the hogar feeling so excited about the 6+ months ahead. Whether I still have that ganas in a weeks time, I'll let you know. Ciao pescaos!