There are many odd differences that I've noticed between Chile and the U.S. One that I find particularly interesting is that though I can sort of/kind of play the guitar, I wouldn't be able to play a song if a Chilean handed me a song with all the chords. This is because they actually have different names for music notes down here. I thought it was pretty much a standard thing, but evidently I was wrong. Instead of using the C-D-E-F, etc. system, they actually named their notes Do-Ra-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti-Do. So crazy. One of the men here kept telling me to play the Fa chord and I had no idea what he was talking about. I had to count it out on my fingers to figure it out. "Oh, you want me to play an F"? Then he didn't know what I was talking about. As far as I knew the whole Do-Ra-Mi thing came from Sound of Music, but evidently I was wrong.

Another interesting thing is the way they view black people. It's quite shocking for someone like me who grew up learning about racial prejudice in a country with a vast history of racism. Chile on the other hand never had slavery. Correction, they did have slavery, but since the Spaniards enslaved the native people when they came they had no need to bring in slaves from Africa. For this reason, there are no black people in Chile. Well, there may be some, but they are either visiting from Brazil, who did enslave Africans, or their family has immigrated here. Either way, you will be hard pressed to find any black people in Chile. Because there is no negative history between Chileans and Africans, unlike the U.S., they have a very innocent and different way of viewing them. For instance, a common pet name for people with darker skin tones is Negrito/a. A local pastor calls his wife negrita because she has darker skin than he does. This isn't a derogatory term or a put down in any way, it's just a statement of fact that they have dark skin. We went to a lunch on Saturday where they served chocolate cake for dessert. The lady across from me held up her piece, told me it was African cake, and started laughing. I didn't get it, but I laughed as if I had. My aunt then leaned over to me and said it was because the cake was black. As much as I wanted to think this comment was in extremely bad taste, she reminded me that since they have no concept of being racist against blacks, that this was a perfectly acceptable comment to make.