National Barflies

So, last night in the really cute town of Iquique, they were setting up a stage on the front steps of the really beautiful theater. It seems tehre was a festival and there were posters about town promising a night of folkloric song and dance. So, I took a seat and as I waited I saw what I assumed were the performers approaching the theater. The men were wearing kind of gaucho cowboy outfits and the women some sort of squaredancing dresses. The hostess introduced the first performance and although I don´t understand the Spanish here, her´s was pretty easy to follow. She said that the first group would be performing the national dance of Chile. So, the music starts up and I expect the cowboys and square dancers to come out from behind the curtain ,but no, it is a trio of chubby ladies wearing clingy, teal, polyester low cut dresses that are embellished with some sort of bedazzled gold sparkly bits at the plunging necklines. They essentially looked like bar flies. THey started the dance by waving around handkerchiefs and did a fair bit of shimmying. I guess that´s the national dance. Ensuing acts included the aforementioned cowboys and squaredancers.
IN other news, although the Village People have been claiming for years that it´s fun to stay at the YMCA, I´m not so sure. I stayed there last night and it was clean, and they were very friendly but there were lots of ongoing loud dance classes and the water was barely lukewarm. On the upside though, I did get to see the ¨power¨dance class whilst I was showering from my shower window. It´s possible one of the actual village people was leading the group in dance as he pranced around wildly wearing red fringed MC Hammer style pants. IT was quite a cultural evening.
Today I spent another 7 1/2 hours seeing the desert. It´s just odd--there are no plants, no cactus or anything...just the dirt. IT´s reportedly the driest desert in the world which might explain the lack of any growth of any kind.
I am now in desert town of San Pedro de Atacama which is a little adobe village which is really quite cute but extremely touristy so everything costs twice as much as it does elsewhere which, of course, I view as a scam. I am hoping to go on a couple of tours to see stuff--volcanoes, salt lakes, flamingos, geysers, etc.
I had to skip the ghost town due to the bus schedule today but we did drive by a working nitrate mine oh and a HUGE copper mine. As you know, Chile has the largest copper producing mine in the world.
OFf to eat dinner.