The Czar likes the country of Chile since he first thought about it ten minutes ago. The Czar personally pronounces it “chee-lay,” although you can also pronounce it like the ground beef and bean food if you think that’s not in any way totally insulting.

Chile is easily the nicest country in South America, just as your garbage is the least smelly on a hot day. Although it is not as nice as America, or perhaps Canada, you should rest assured that Chile is a country less likely to imprison you in a work camp on bogus charges than you think.

Chile is an interesting place. It is 10 times longer than it is wide, and its height varies from 3 to 7, with a 5 put in for the fourth part underneath. It certainly is a narrow country: on the Czar’s map of the country, it is as skinny as a quarter-inch wide in some parts. It must be tough to set up a bridge table, if people still do that sort of thing.

As a result of its length, every building in the country is technically on a side street of Highway 5. Chile is very easy to get to, and the Czar had little trouble locating it on a map of the world.

In Chile, most people speak Spanish, although English is mandatory from Kindergarten on up. As a result, Chilean Spanish is heavily influenced by English vocabulary, including such items as sandwichs (sandwiches), overols (overalls), overol sandwichs (overall sandwiches), and obama sa quenyan (Obama’s a Kenyan).

Chilean cuisine is very fascinating, but it is a little tough to fathom and basically all we got out of three minutes of research is that they don’t eat tacos. There were a lot of German immigrants in the mid-1940s (los nazios), so one assumes you can get every conceivable delicacy packed into a pork sausage. Germans are nuts about sausage; it’s the only place in the world the Czar knows of that has sausage salad, for heaven’s sake.

Andean music is very popular, especially with the Czar’s kids. The Цесаревич once got to dance with a very pretty Chilean girl to some fast-moving Andean flute music. The video for it is really funny, but it’s on an iPhone, so you can’t export more than 2 seconds of it before iTunes demands you load the new version and click through 80 terms and conditions of use before billing you for an app you’re pretty sure has nothing to do with Chile. The Царевич is the only 9-year-old he knows that can name Incan songs and has a couple CDs of Andean music we borrowed from the library with no intention of returning. Every second of it sounds incredibly like Simon and Garfunkel’s El Cóndor Pasa, to the point the Czar advises they get a lawyer and sue the Chileans.

The CIA World Factbook has a website on Chile you could click on if you want to be bored to tears by numbers and statistics that were last updated when Bill Clinton was president. Of America, that is.

Chile sits on a tectonic plate along the famous Ring of Fire, which means as far as we’re concerned there’s nothing but constant earthquakes and volcanoes blowing up all over the place. The puma is native to Chile, and is perfectly adapted to life there because it apparently eats lava. Also, there are condors, which are huge, magnificent birds with impressive wing spans, who wheel gracefully through the thermal risers like wonderful kites, before they swoop down to eat the rectum out of a two-hour-dead maggot-festering fox. There are also animals called pudú there, which you can read about on Wikipedia because the Czar spotted a photo of one on their Chile page, near the middle. And large things called guanacos, which may be some sort of prehistoric reptile. Or a deer. Or something.

Chile is famous for the Andes mountains and the harsh Atacama desert, meaning that a good portion of Chile’s surface area is committed to killing you. In fact, in between the brutally lethal weather conditions and the volcano earthquakes, there’s probably no good reason to ever go there.