Coffee with a Chilean acquaintance.

The other weekend I had coffee with my one (retired community college professor) (Jewish Hungarian immigrant) (Chilean) acquaintance.

Some highlights:

1) When I brought up how no anti-Semitic stereotypes were really at play in the city's recent mayoral campaign, though they easily could have been since the mayor's Israeli and in the pocket of finance, she was like, "No, anti-Semitism cannot be successful in this country any more, everyone loves money so much!".

She then also added that she could say that because she's Jewish.

2) She remembered a joke her parents told her:

Q:  How do you make a Romanian omelette?

A:  First, go steal two eggs from your Hungarian neighbor...

She then was like, "But you can flip the 2 countries if you want, and I bet that people do that."

3) She said that the night before her dad was to sign the check so that she could go to college for theater, her mom stepped in and said that she didn't want her daughter hanging around with "prostitutes and homosexuals", so her dad didn't sign the check, and she had to wait another year and then go into a medicine-related program.

(Which, incidentally, her mother loved, since she had more chances to marry a doctor.)

Years later, she was in a music ensemble in the U.S., and all her friends were gay.

One time after a European trip in the 70s, she was back in Chile visiting her parents, and her mom was asking her about travelling with her friend the doctor.

"Oh, it was wonderful," my acquaintance told her mom.

"But did you stay in separate rooms?", she was like.

"No, always the same room," my acquaintance told her mom.

Then, her mother took the bait and said "!ay!" or something like that and was deeply scandalized, and then my acquaintance was like, "But mom, he has a boyfriend, don't be silly."

4) She said that the majority of her teachers at her high school in Santiago growing up were communist, and always asked students what they were doing for society.

Two were killed under Pinochet.