Lunch, Jogging in Place, and Blackouts

14 March 2010, Sunday

Today it was a little bit cooler outside, but still quite comfortable. The day started out pretty slow, we didn't have lunch until 2, mostly because everyone sleeps in really late on Sundays here. We had steak with fried egg on top, with fried potatoes and onions, which makes a delicious combination, for reference. I also tried for the first time sprite, but with added lemon, and it's pretty awesome. Not much went on today, partly because there's not really anywhere to go when everything is closed on Sunday, and partly because I'm just getting ready to start school tomorrow. My first class will be tomorrow at 9:45 in the morning, and I think it's my only class for the day. I basically sat around the house all day until dinner time, but right before dinner Julianne was trying to get me to go jogging since she didn't want to go alone. I agreed, but only if we walked toward the beach, and only if I could walk while she jogged next to me. We made it not too far before I realized that the sun would be down by the time we got to the beach, and since half the point of going to the beach was to watch a Chilean sunset, I decided to turn around. Julianne was cool with this, because then she could jog uphill. I was between very and extremely confident that she was just begging for us to get mugged by jogging through somewhat sketchy neighborhoods wearing standard US jogging attire. It was cool though, because since she was jogging ahead of me, I could just run away and they wouldn't even notice me. Of course, I would never do that, I would protect her from danger like a good person... In the end, we didn't get mugged, which is good. She followed me up to my host family's house, which is up the hill from hers, as part of her plan to exercise more and to “get her heart rate going.” My host mom offered her something to drink, and she hung out for a while and made fun of my scarf (which is hanging next to my dresser). She was also kind enough to mock me for having a small laptop. When we went downstairs so she could leave, there were three people in the sitting room of my family's house, so we introduced ourselves and enjoyed an awkward moment where I had no idea who these people were. I offered to walk Julianne home, but she refused rather adamantly, so I accepted it. Well, I accepted it until she walked out of the gate and went in the complete wrong direction.

The walk didn't take long, it was the walk back that was fun. As I started walking back, probably 20 seconds after I left Julianne at her doorstep, a dog on the street (a poodle, no less) started staring at me. I didn't think anything of it, because there are stray dogs staring at you all the time here, but then all the lights on the street went out. Just like a horror film or something, the moment the lights went out, the dog started barking viciously at me. I decided to just keep walking and avoid challenging the dog in what it seemed to think was its territory. It followed me for a little over a block, barking and snarling a foot away from me, but eventually it felt less threatened and went on its merry way. Beyond that, I got home without much problem, and it was then that I discovered that the lights in the whole city had gone out. I had been a little bit confused, because it didn't really make sense to turn off the street lights at night. I sat down at the dinner table where my parents and their friends had gathered, and after listening to the conversation for a while, along with the radio, I found out that the entire country was without power. Obviously, it took me a while to understand, and eventually I just asked, “todo el pais esta sin poder?” Everyone nodded and said yes, yes, the whole country doesn't had power. I had to actually ask, because I couldn't believe that such a huge country could simultaneously lose power like that in every city. Alberto's friend (I don't remember his name) explained that the whole country was broken up into 4 power districts, and that one of them was the main district, and that if it failed the whole system would break down. I didn't really understand how this could work, so I asked if this was nationalized power, but they said no, it is in the private sector. Later I found out, or at least at the time of this writing it's what everyone is saying, that there was too much demand and drain on the system, so the whole thing just shut down. I'm actually writing this in the dark right now, although we do have power, everyone has been advised to save energy and to not turn on too many lights and so on. So thus far we've had earthquakes, tsunamis, and power outages, enough so that Cecilia, Alberto, and their friends were joking around at the dinner table about how Chris and I have experienced every disaster possible here.