apparently christmas is coming

So it's about a week and a half until Christmas, but I can't say it really feels like it here. I think a lot of people in my volunteer group are sharing the same feeling, but more so because they are used to having snow surrounding them for the festive season, where as I'm used to the lovely summer weather. There is no Christmas tree in our apartment, but of course I could easily purchase one in the street for a luca (about $3 NZ) if I really wanted to.

You can get everything you need for Xmas en la calle!

Yesterday there was a Christmas Parade down the main street running through Santiago, that my friend so luckily happens to have an apartment. So we sat outside on her balcony listening to appropriate Christmas songs like Twisted Sister's 'Oh come all ye faithful' (haha) with a few beers watching the crowds of people migrating towards what we thought was the beginning point of the parade. After not seeing anything mildly resembling Christmas for over an hour, we firstly blamed 'chilean time' (the fact everyone is so late for everything here it is almost absurd. If you have a party and invite people for 8pm, expect them at 10pm no earlier.) Although when we started seeing masses of people walking back towards us, we went downstairs to find that the parade wasn't coming past the apartment like the online map had said and stopped a few blocks earlier. I knew our prime parade viewing spot was too good to be true!

Yes we were pretty happy up there until we realised we weren't going to see anything.

We still managed to catch the end of it a little further up and saw the giant 'monos'. Mono translates to monkey in English, but for some reason here they call the giant balloon floats 'monos'. This confused my room mate earlier in the day, who had no idea about the parade and asked a policeman what was going on. He responded "The monkeys are coming." She thought perhaps a circus or something was approaching?
Anyways, we got to see Spongebob square pants (bob esponja), Dumbo, Bob the builder, Cookie monster and of course Viejo Pascuero (Old man Christmas) himself. In almost every other Spanish speaking country Santa Claus is called  Papá Noel, but of course it's no surprise Chile has their own name for the old man. I learnt this the other day at Aldea when I was trying to find the translation for Father Christmas. To do this I found myself describing to the girls in Spanish,

Sabes el hombre, que viene a su casa, en la noche de navidad, el llevas regalos.........you know the man, that comes to your house, the night of christmas, he brings presents.... it was funnier at the time ok.

Hola Viejo Pascuero!!!!!

Today I'm off to start teaching the Aldea girls the Christmas dance I made up. I don't think we are going to perform it on the 22nd as originally planned now because the director of the hogar said the girls always dance something too sexy. But apparently there is another Xmas party on Dec 21, where members from the Bank of Chile come and the sexy dancing is allowed for this audience.......????????????.......yeah I know.


My dance is definitely G-rated so hopefully today it will not be greeted with cries of 'Fome!' (lame)