habla espanol?

I did some reading on wiki last night on Chile.  I know a guy from Chile, a blonde haired guy with a German surname.  Years ago when Wrigleyville was a Puerto Rican neighborhood we went up there from Champaign to catch a game. Some young Puerto Rican kids were making fun of the Gringos in Spanish and Pedro let them have it in Spanish much to their surprise.

My mother stayed in Gage Park as it turned Mexican.  One of the things she didn't like about her new neighbors is that they spoke Spanish.  I guess that was natural, their English was probably not so hot, and I imagine it is relaxing to lapse into your native tongue.  And you know it is probably fun to be in a crowd of English speakers and speak a language they didn't know, like having your own secret code.  I know it's not nice but sometimes you might want to poke a little fun at some stranger.  It's awkward to whisper it to your companion, so much easier to say it aloud in a language they can't understand.

Actually that is what my mother thought they were doing to her.  She'd be in the doctor's waiting room and everybody would be yakking in Spanish and she thought they were all talking about her.  My memory fails me, but I think there may have been an ugly scene or two.

But back to Chile.  It had an interesting history.  There were Indians in the southern part of Chile who the Incas could never conquer, and the mostly desert northern part, it seems like early on there were some battles with Venezuela and Ecuador and Colombia over that.  I'm not sure if it was liberated by Bolivar, being way over in the east behind the mountains,  In its first census it was 70 percent white, though after that it seems like the nonwhite percentage started to rise.

I would have thought that all the countries of South America would have similar stories, but maybe they have their own individual stories.  That's an awful lot to learn.  I tried to educate myself on the history of China some years ago, but one of the problems was that all the historical figures were strangers to me and they tended to blend together.

We read European or American history and familiar figures keep showing up and we have a general idea of how things were at the time, were they using swords or muskets, and were they wearing armor or wigs, that sort of thing.

I was intrigued by Beagles's assertion that Europe had more renters than the USA.  Could this be like the remnants of kingship, like that tv static that is the remnants of the big bang?   But according to wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_ownership_rate there are only four European countries with more renters than the USA.  But I guess there are a lot of factors that go into determining how many rent and how many own.  There are a couple old apartment buildings along Chicago Avenue west of State that were built to resemble a bunch of separate houses cheek by jowl and I remember reading that that was because Americans generally owned their own separate housed and the idea of unrelated people living in the same building was a bit scandalous.