Bien Giorno!

So I have made it at last to South America, with 6 weeks at my disposal instead of the 6 months I had planned and still tender from the loss of my beautiful painted travel companion Toni.

Sure tis a tough life.

My accent was mistaken the other day for that of an American. This occurs regularly but this is the first time it was mistaken by another irish person. I have been away too long (I sooooooo didn't get it from Friends). At a climbing wall in Christchurch the receptionist asked where I was from and I told her Ireland. I love that accent, she says, practically doubling up, as if with indigestion. Yeah, well I don't really have an irish accent, I say, smiling winningly, meaning, tell me how hot my accent is. No, she says, you don't and turns away, tapping a pen in her teeth. It hurt a little. Even if she was a pig.

Now the problem is not one of accents but language, as I struggle to remember my 5 or 6 hours of Spanish lessons from ten months ago. In the hostel I stayed in in Santiago there was a bizarre mix of nationalities and languages. Ten of us around a dinner table with French, Spanish, Portuguese and English flying around and everyone seeming to be multilingual except me. If one of the French is talking to me a sentence may start in Spanish, meet a blank look, grind into English and then finish in French with a flare of frustration. It does not help that rogue elements of my long buried Italian and French keep rearing up and providing close but erroneous versions of Spanish words. I even had to babel fish the 'Diarmuid is a Tourist'.

I have painstakingly retro capitalised the languages in that paragraph. I think I got them all.

I visited a museum dealing in pre Columbian art and it was pretty fascinating. It struck me again the simliarities between races separated by oceans. The pyramid structures of the temples, so similar to the Asian ones I have seen. And the use of psychotropic substances by the shamans to predict the future and help cure ills, which sounds like what the druids of Ireland used to do. What we didn't have was a game called El Juego de Pelota, a popular ball game where the losing team was decapitated. (How did they ever keep a league running?)

In the same museum was a temporary exhibition on the Moche civilisation and the role of sex in the reincarnation of their leader. Various weird stuff involving slaves who had been skeletonised( ears, lips, nose, etc cut off) having, lets say, non procreational sex, with female slaves. And all participants would ultimately be executed. A quote "First 2 women give a stick to a bird with human features and then the figures use the stick to stir a potion, then the vessel is taken to a terraced platform where it is poured on the back of Wrinkle Face (a dominant supernatural force in the World of the Ancestors) while he engages in vaginal copulation with a woman in the shadow of a temple with a gable roof." The exhibition never really let you know if any of the acts or rites were actually carried out or were just legends which is mildly frustrating. Then again, childish as it may be, any exhibition featuring the phrase " A woman masturbating a pelican" can't be all bad.

But probably one of my favourite things about Chile so far is the mere existence of a character named, drum roll please... Bernardo O'Higgins. Brilliant. And he is actually a big deal in Chile's history, something about helping to found the country or something, but seriously, who cares, savour that name a little, its a thing of beauty.