To kiss or not to kiss

Trip Start Jul 09, 2008

Trip End Ongoing

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Flag of Chile Santiago, Chile
Thursday, July 17, 2008

We've discovered pretty quickly the Chilean custom of kissing on your first meeting. It's quite bizarre. I mean, I usually tend to give people I know reasonably well a bit of a hug but not someone I don't know at all. When we went to look at one of the apartments, this guy who owned it came to do the door and slammed one on my cheek. Well anyway, at least that takes some of the awkwardness out of knowing when it's appropriate to kiss or not ...now i should just always do it. Oh and just to clarify, its only man/woman and woman/woman, the guys still shake hands. ;-)

We had the internet turned on this morning. The cable guys came out to turn it on and also install cable tv. One of the guys was so cute. He's a little short guy, as most Chileans are. And he was so excited about it all. He spent ages going through the remote and showing us to work it all. He was trying to speak English and communicate with sign language and seemed to be thrilled when we understood him.

It seems we've been a little spoilt with US cable TV and the inbuilt disk for recording tv shows. After they left we played around with it for a while and found a button to record tv shows. We were pretty excited about being able to record some English shows until we read the message that said, "Ok, now press record on your VCR". VCR? Do they even exist anymore??

Obviously Chileans like music. Most of the apartments that we've seen don't even have a TV in the family room. They seem to keep those only in the bedroom. Of course Mark would die without a TV so lucky we have a nice big LCD in our family room. :-) Anyway, the TV stations tend to just throw in a video clip here and there. So you'll be watching a good show, break for some ads and then break for a bit of a tune, couple more ads and then back to the show.