Photo: Niniel
1. You’ll erect altars to the palta (avocado) gods and according to your religion preferred by, realise you are lighting votives/softly chanting/depluming pigeons honoring the person who first looked at spreading it on sausages (completos) and other burgers (churrascos). Home-grown and delicious, Chilean avocados are so incredibly prized they\’ve got his or her Facebook page (seriously: look it down.) Seized by palta frenzy, many times yourself inclined to start complementing unorthodox choices — chocolate, Reese’s, socks — on this sweet, green substance. Tread carefully.
2. Bread will slowly but surely begin replacing any other categories until your own food pyramid is usually an amalgamation of marraquetas, hallullas, and cotizas. Typically consumed within the morning along with avocado (see #1), and a faithful lunch, dinner, just as soon as (the equivalent of the Brits’ elevenses) companion, its encroaching presence in your own life will finally manifest itself with your expanding midsection.
3. The sight of a mounted law enforcement officer galloping toward you at the major intersection won’t scare the living daylights out of you. It may initially produce images of ringwraiths charging Frodo, in time you will become so used to these towering law enforcers any time one night, because you try and hail a cab, one sidles up to you — purportedly to be certain your safety — and proceeds to ask you in your number, you’ll respond just by rolling you, and exchanging a complicit glance with its steed. See #4.
4. As the woman, you’ll master your ‘resting bitch face’ when to the shops — any expression learning to be a clear invitation to elope and/or fornicate with male passersby.
5. No matter how despotic your education in proper Spanish pronunciation, you’ll abandon the educational rigor your accent betrayed as well as sounding such as a Chilean trucker. Chileans are notorious for dropping d’s and s’s together with dousing their speech with chilenismos, words and expressions exclusively utilized in Chile, and speaking at an incomprehensibly fast pace. As a non-Latino, plan to be the laughing stock of other Spanish-speaking countries: basically, you’ll become the equal to a Swiss landing in the usa and speaking English which has a Bengali accent.
6. You’ll keep tears the first few times you’re requested to pay out monetary values during the thousands to get a simple beer or pack of hair scrunchies (thought they’d gone extinct once the 1990s? They died and went to the Southern Cone).
7. Thinking you’re going native, you’ll buy an alpaca wool sweater — the main one together with the llama soul train dancing across your chest — and then understand that not one of the locals could be caught dead wearing one, you tourist. Nevertheless, it can be commonplace in your winter wardrobe, not your your first skin essentially, as betrayed through your refusal to ever remove it from and, accordingly, wash it.
8. You’ll convince yourself you’ve learned to manage terremotos, a deadly mix of pineapple frozen goodies and young fermented wine. It will not be true, as you’ll discover (again) while you\’re blurrily debating if the lunar landing came about inside a Hollywood studio with random bar patrons.
9. After yearning for the country’s fabled beaches, you’ll dive into its sparkling waters to realize their sub-Arctic temperatures could only possibly accommodate beluga whales and other large maritime mammals (#2 will assist you to because pursuit). Thankfully, there are always the Andes.
