Ram-Raiding and Other Activities.. or, Just Another Night in Santiago de Chile

The show never stops in Santiago. Just the other day, in actual fact in the last day of the old apartment, I saw two guys crash their ute into a tree directly outside my window*. It was like the apartment's final parting gift to me, complete with Crocodile Dundee delivering the line 'That's not noise.. THIS is noise' and a jump-cut to squealing tires and vision of truck careering off the road into said tree.
So I was pretty pleased to be moving.
Until Tuesday night, in which after a lovely dinner in lovely new apartment, a couple of glasses of wine and a viewing of 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' (which by the way I found somewhat enraging, given that it seems to suggest that the best way for a man to demonstrate love and commitment is to bugger off, and the best way for a woman to demonstrate it is to sit around literally wiping their husband's arse), we retired to bed, reveling in the lovely peace and quiet of the lovely new apartment.
Until.. CRASH.... (followed by several more similar crashes).
In my groggy half-sleep, my first thought was that someone's balcony had detached from the building and the noise I could hear was of it plunging to the ground. O later told me he had thought it was a crane falling off the top of a building.
We jumped out of bed, and went out onto the balcony to investigate, admittedly a strange choice given my prior concerns about its sturdiness, but by that stage I'd already kind of worked out that that couldn't be it.
No signs of fallen balconies nor cranes below.... but what we did see was a gang with two cars (red and white -see I'm observant!) - looting the fancy clothing and jewellery shop in the bottom of our very building! The crashes we'd heard were the shattering of the window, and as we stood there we watched them running in and out of the store, stolen goods in hand, transferring the stuff from the shop to their cars. It all lasted about thirty seconds, then everyone jumped into the two cars and sped off, the wrong way, up La Concepcion.
About a minute later, the crack emergency response looked like this:

 Plus three police cars (these in the pic are in fact not police but private guards from the security firm) that arrived a few minutes later. All the security guards and cops stood around for a bit, presumably investigating the crime though I saw very little evidence of that, then everyone went home.

After all this excitement, we went back to bed. Yesterday I saw on the news that the same gang had hit four different shops around the city in some kind of ram-raiding spree.

The weirdest thing is that the shop they chose to rob was selling some of the ugliest stuff that I've ever seen - the jewelery was all costume jewelery, the type with lots of sparkly and fake looking gems. And the clothes were kind of floaty hippy cheese-cloth numbers which haven't been fashionable since .. well ever. The piece d'resistance of this particular store (and this will give you an idea of the general aesthetic approach) are a life-sized pair of large Doberman dogs made entirely of purple plastic, which sit on either side of the door during the day like some kitsch re-invention of the guard dog of Hades.

Somewhat unfortunately, even the thieves didn't see fit to steal these.

So the moral of the story? Even the most blatantly taste-challenged stores are not safe from the aesthetically blind thieves of Santiago, but even they will draw the line somewhere.

* If you're concerned - both the tree and the guys survived. The car? Not so much.