Overexposure?

Though we still have thirty degree termperature swings from day to night, the weather is getting gorgeous here in Santiago. The past two weekends have been absolutely spectacular, and, after a long, grey winter (well, actually, two winters in a row, with a brief Santiago fall), my sun-starved friends and I were anxious to soak up some rays. There's a huge park pretty close to where I live and four of us donned our bathing suits and planted ourselves on the grass for a few hours. We received a couple strange looks from passing joggers, but nothing out of the ordinary for Chile. As I'm sure I've noted before, Chileans will stare unabashedly at anything that is even the slightest bit out of the ordinary.  Four girls in bikinis in a park fell into this category. Or so we thought.

Like good addicts, we got a taste and wanted more. We returned Sunday for a few more hours worth of Vitamin B. Unfortunately, we were not so lucky round two and were approached almost immediately  by some jotes (Spanish for vultures, but used for creepy, pestering men). We tried our best to ignore them, pretending to not speak Spanish, and trying to continue our conversations. When that failed we told them curtly to leave us alone, but it became clear that we would have no choice but to leave. Luckily as we were leaving a friend who has a rooftop pool called, we told her about our predicament, she laughed and said to come right over. We spent the rest of a beautiful afternoon with a much better view.

It wasn't until this weekend at a friend of a friend's birthday lunch in the country that I realized just how out of the ordinary our tomando el sol en bikini en el parque* really was. Chelsey and I recounted our story, which proved to be a real crowd-pleaser. The Chileans we were with just couldn't believe that we were using a park as our personal sun deck. They asked if police had approached us (they hadn't), and laughingly accused us of trying to cause a desorden público.* They were full of suggestions: go to the public pool on San Cristobal (it doesn't open until mid November), come to my apartment building any time you want, try Parque O'Higgins (this last suggestion reflecting Chileans' ingrained classism--apparently, our behavior was more suited to the lower class recreational area downtown than to chi-chi Las Condes).

Wait a minute. Help a gringa get this straight. You go to a pool or the beach in Chile, or any other Latin American country, and the bathing suit cut of choice is a thong, and no one looks twice. Women are laying around with their entire booties exposed and no one bats an eye. But.....we sit outside--in a large, sunny, open area, where men are playing soccer shirtless, people are lounging reading in shorts and tanktops, young couples are making out in the grass (this is a park in Chile, after all)--and we decide to wear our extremely-modest-by-Chilean-standards bathing suits, and it causes a public disturbance? As they say here in Chile, INJUSTICIA!!!

*Sunbathing in bikinis in the park 
* public disturbance