Our new house mate

A few weeks ago, it must have been in early December, we noticed that we had a new house mate. No, it wasn't another street dog which followed us home or anything like that. He or she (...we haven't got very intimate, yet) might have even lived there before we moved in, it's hard to tell.

To fully appreciate the point of this blog post I am going to have to digress a little: Apparently Chile doesn't have the multitude of deadly creepy crawlers that come to mind when someone mentions "South America": venomous snakes, scorpions, etc. There may be some snakes which are venomous, but nothing of the die-a-horrible-death-within-minute-type. Probably not dissimilar to what one may encounter in some 'wild' places of Europe.

Of course there are pumas in some mountainous regions, but they are very shy and probably much prefer eating guanacos. Overall, it's fair to say that the local fauna doesn't make it to the top of the list in the 'risk assessment of life'. Personally, I worry more about falling victim to the - by our standards at least - poor road safety record in this country. If you are prepared to believe this website, road accidents are number 11 of the top 20 ways to meet one's end in Chile.

Experiencing first-hand on a daily basis

• the poor driving skills (until recently you weren't required to take any driving lession to get a licence!)
• poor urban planning (car is king, who cares about the rest!)
• a macho culture where drunk driving is looked at as something you can handle if you are a real man, where safety belts are worn only in order to avoid being fined, or where massive deadly pile-ups on the motorway are blamed on 'adverse meteoroligical conditions' as opposed to the STUDIPLY inappropriate speed, lack of safety distance, etc of some (if not all) of the involved

we have no difficulty believing it, though.

Sorry, I am getting carried away... I was talking about the local fauna and our new house mate. There are two species of venomous spiders: the araña del rincon (Chilean recluse) and the araña del trigo (a type of black widow). One is more likely to encounter the latter outdoors (open fields and shrubs), whereas the former is often found inside human dwellings (dark and not well cleaned corners). While neither are agressive spiders, ie they only bite in self-defense, their bites can be nasty and often require medical attention.

Locals have warned us about the araña del rincon, the type of spider we are more likely to encounter. Apparently the most common way accidents happen is: i) spider hides itself in pile of cloths, ii) items from the pile of cloths are put on by someone, iii) spider inside the cloths gets squeezed against the skin and defends itself by biting the source of the squeeze. Lesson learnt: Always shake out clothes properly before putting them on.

Anyway, back to our new house mate. Here is a picture of her/him:

[S]he lifes in our American style walk-in closet, spends most of her/his days dangling from the ceiling and doesn't appear to be moving very much at all. Her/his size is impressive, the body is probably close to a centimetre long and with legs stretched out [s]he would occupy Christian's palm of the hand. 

To our great relief, a little research on the www helped us establishing that [s]he is an araña de tigre, which is completely harmless. Interestingly, it appears to be a natural predator of the araña del rincon, so surely a good house mate to have around!