1. You lose your breath going to the local panaderia (located a block away).
While Northeasterners in the US have occasional snow days, Santiaguinos have excessive pollution days. Smog levels in the Chilean capital are easily five times what are the World Health Organization deems a reliable maximum threshold, compelling health authorities to create “smog alerts” for top pollution days. Running outdoors becomes especially challenging whilst you get gasping for breath within 30 seconds and wondering if you\’re, in actual fact, causing yourself more damage than good with the training. That during wintertime, smog ominously hangs in the city a lot like dark clouds hover over Mount Doom is a bit disconcerting.
2. You can’t contend with calefonts anymore.
Here’s a predicament you could possibly experience one many times: mid-shower, you discrete an ear-splitting shriek as your calefont – heating appliance – has just deplete all of your gas. Often exacerbate the cold you’ve had for a month already (see #1), you hobble out of the bathroom, blindly groping to your website along the hall while shampoo drips for your eyes, and unhook the kitchen’s calefont through the stove. After this you lurch your way into the potty, heaving the gas appliance along the way, and hook it into the shower, doing all your far better to forget about the faint give an impression of gas escaping the barrel because you produce the switch. You hop into the tub and continue showering, hoping everything’s properly connected knowning that an accidental gas leak won’t lead you to die an atrocious flaming, naked death.
3. Other Latinos don’t understand something you say through your new Chilean accent.
You’ve finally wrapped your mouth around Chilean Spanish — dropping every word’s final syllable in addition to a few among, mainly for safe measure — just to realize you\’ll be able to will no longer speak with anyone outside Chile. Your conversation partners react to you with bewildered stares or encouraging nods, like adults condescending to a jabbering toddler before shoving a pacifier into his mouth. To add insult to injury, you discover which you still don’t understand 40 percent of what Chileans say, either.
4. You haven’t read an ebook in with three months given that they cost a leg as well as a leg.
For numerous reasons — including an outrageous 19% vat and also a reliance on foreign imports in lieu of Chilean publications — books in Chile are frighteningly expensive. Saunter into any bookstore and you’ll quickly feel your morale wane as you see prices all the way to US$80.00 for any new hardcover. Cannot read a decent novel for few months, you’ll have watched lots of Community re-runs to the stage you’re be capable of parrot entire segments in every character’s respective voice. Your roommates will need to kill you, so can you.
5. You think that all guys are lurid catcallers.
Expecting most male passersby to whisper getting some sort of lascivious comment whilst you walk by them in the pub, you viciously snap at one intending to open his mouth and then realize he simply designed to warn you of the truth your bag was open. Moreover, you may occasionally discover youself to be preemptively whistling at men only to beat them inside their own game, in complete defiance coming from all feminist / humanist principles you ordinarily embrace.
6. The cost of palta has moved up.
Avocado, your staple and godsend, costs 100 pesos more. It’s time for you to go.
