Chile, Day 22

Stay away from El Mismo...

I have to say, I’m thrilled to be leaving Santiago. Not thrilled to be leaving Chile, as I basically liked it, but Santiago…get me out of here and get me out of here fast.

I’m leaving Santiago more or less with the same kind of ridiculous encounter that I had in my first hour here when a belligerent drunk took a swing at me as I was trying to photograph a building. Tonight, the owner of a restaurant where I went to eat, El Mismo (511 Monjitas Street), which is a “local” establishment more or less next door to my hotel, asked me where I was from. I said, “Estados Unidos.” He scowled and replied that in Chile people call my country, “Putos Unidos.” I didn’t know what this meant, but by his demeanor I immediately wondered if he was insulting me. Not that I’m paranoid, but he didn’t seem very pleased that I was there. This feeling was reinforced when the man, who at 50-something should have known better, kind of dropped my food on the table and wouldn’t respond to my waves or calls of “Señor” to get the bill, even though we were twenty feet from each other and no one else was there. When I got back to the hotel I looked up the word “puto” and found that it means “homosexual,” but in a more derogatory way.

So I went downstairs and mentioned this to the hotel manager, who speaks English. He told me that in Chile the United States is often call “Estados Juntos,” and "juntos" is synonymous with "unidos." However, the restaurant owner didn’t use the word “Estados” in his response. Also, even though my Spanish is bad, I can definitely distinguish between a Spanish “j”-sound and a “p”-sound. I can also tell when there is or is not an “n” in a word. And since I’d never heard the word “puto” before, it’s an odd coincidence that this is what I remembered and then looked up. But the kicker is that he was rude. Also, not surprisingly, his food wasn’t very good.

So I’ll put up a photo of his restaurant along with the address so that anyone who happens to be in Santiago and staying in the vicinity of Mosqueto and Monjitas in the El Centro district – for example, at the Andes Hostel or Hotel Ciudad de Vitoria, which are a stone’s throw away from the restaurant – doesn’t support his business.

Like I said, I’m happy to be leaving Santiago. I’m sure Santiago has many nice people – millions, in fact – but I have had too many bad experiences with rude people in this city to leave with positive memories. Chiloe I loved. But Santiago…

Chile, Day 21

Women on the corner of Santiago's Monjitas and Mosqueto streets, celebrating their new president.

Well, as many of you probably know already, Chile elected a new president today: Sebastian Pinera, a Harvard-educated billionaire who, according to the AP News wire, helped popularize credit cards in Chile, and whose fortune includes a significant share in LAN (Chile’s main airline, which I’ve flown all the time during my trip, thus putting money unwittingly into his pocket), a national TV channel, and a professional soccer team. Pinera has promised to produce a million jobs during his time as president and double Chile’s median annual income to $24,000 -- all within four years. Good luck with that. The biggest surprise about his victory, at least to me, and I know very little about Chilean politics, is that he’s right-wing – his coalition once strongly supported Pinochet’s dictatorship. And apparently he’s quite popular in Santiago. His victory was declared at around the dinner hour, and people poured out onto the streets waving the Chilean flag, waving Pinochet-for-President banners, shouting jubilantly, and driving around waving flags from their windows and honking, honking, honking. There were plenty of other people not celebrating, but I'm not sure if they were being reserved or had been backing the other candidate, Eduardo Frei.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. This morning I left Puerto Varas at 7:30 a.m. for a flight back to Santiago. The weather had improved, though I still couldn’t see either volcano due to the low-hanging clouds. It’s a shame I didn’t have time to hike up one of them, but there’s always the future.

I didn’t have time for the free breakfast at my hotel, which is too bad because it looked fantastic. Instead, I opted for a quick bite at an airport restaurant.

The airport in Puerto Varas has one restaurant: this one.

Again, I really wish I’d taken the time to eat at the hotel. I ordered pancakes and a double espresso. The latter was good – the caffeine got me going like the nice, mild drug that it is – but the former was basically a crepe drowning in a plate of brown goop.

Nothing like a week's worth of sugar and a bazillion calories for breakfast.

It was a bad choice. I’m not sure I’ve eaten anything so sweet in my life, and half my effort at downing the “pancakes" was expended on scraping the brown goop off of them. And if that wasn’t enough sweet stuff for me, the flight, as before, served three small packs of cookies in a decorative box. I passed on mine and just had water.

When I arrived in Santiago, the whole place was shut down. It was like a ghost city; no one was on the streets or sidewalks, and every business had its doors shuttered. That’s when I remembered that Chile would have a new president by the end of the day. However, I arrived at around lunchtime, and the ghost town-feel of the city was obviously going to pose problems for me. A few small, independent restaurants were open, and of course Burger King and Dunkin Donuts were doing business, but otherwise the city was on holiday.

At one o’clock I walked eight blocks toward downtown, sure that I’d find something near the Plaza de Armas, but nothing was open – just two hot dog stands, which were totally packed, and which I wasn’t interested in anyway. (No more completos! Ack!) Another eight blocks later, and very close to where I was staying – I should have gone there first – I found a small café called Antay and took a seat inside.

I had plenty of time to take photos here. As usual in Santiago, I'm apparently invisible to restaurant workers.

Despite the fact that I was sitting right in front of the counter where three workers were, I had to wait ten minutes for a menu. (I would have gotten one myself but it wasn’t obvious where they kept them.) I ended up ordering a frutilla drink (mixed fruit juice) and an “Italian No. 1,” which is a sandwich made with cheese, tomato, lettuce, arugula, and avocado.

It took at least twenty minutes to get either item, and when my sandwich came it had no avocado. It wasn’t a great loss. However, the sandwich had no flavor to speak of. For 1900 pesos ($3.89), maybe I should have expected as much. At least the frutilla (1800 pesos) was nice.

Since absolutely nothing was open today, I hung out in my room and finished a book I’d started in 2007. I’m glad I finished it. I’m not sure what took me so long to get through 200 pages.

For dinner tonight, I headed to Sicosis, one of the closest places to my hotel that was open. When I tried to order beer, my waiter, who had no patience for my Spanish, told me that no restaurants are allowed to serve alcohol on election night. Why it has to apply to foreign tourists, I have no idea…nah, just kidding. That was fine. I’ll just double my alcohol intake tomorrow.

The streets were empty when I arrived here, but by the time I left they were full of people again.

I ordered a smoked salmon pizza, which included hearts of palm, tomato, and cheese, and a crust that was very thick and hard – more hockey puck than anything else.

How to make salmon pizza: make regular pizza; dump a pound of lox on top of it; sprinkle with oregano; serve.

The smoked salmon made the pizza. Without it, I doubt it would have been very good. But for only 3500 pesos (~$7.15), I guess I can’t complain too much. In Santiago, at a sit-down restaurant, that’s cheap.

Things were starting to open again by the time I'd finished. I headed to the grocery store to buy water and fruit -- a nice option, since earlier the grocery store had been closed down, too.

Cars were honking constantly, which naturally made the neighborhood dogs bark like crazy and chase after them.

I hate it when parents recruit their kids to help them play politics. This guy in the photo isn't that young, but there were lots of grade school-age kids hanging from the windows of cars, blowing whistles and waving flags in support of Pinera's right-wing party.

Chile, Day 5

Happy New Year!

Last night I opted to await the New Year on the rooftop of the building adjoining my hotel. (Because of the rooftop pool, the hotel’s guests have access to the area.) Although only about 10 other people were there when I arrived at 11:30, by the time midnight rolled around and the fireworks show started there were well over 100 people. The main fireworks show was far from grand, but the nice thing was that there were four other fireworks shows going on simultaneously on the outer edges of Santiago, and from the rooftop, if you were sitting on, say, a rotating platter, or a Sit-N-Spin, you could have seen a new explosion of color in the sky with every 90 degrees that you turned. It ended after 20 minutes and I returned to my room and went to bed.

At around 10 in the morning, when I finally managed to leave the hotel, I found a city without people. All the shops and restaurants were closed, no one was on the sidewalks, and not a car could be seen or heard in the streets. It was a little eerie. But I figured there’d be people in the Plaza de Armas, so I walked there, stepping gingerly over a scattered army of sleeping drunks, and decided I’d enter the one place that happened to be open to the public: the Catedral Metropolitana. I’m not religious or anything, but on New Year’s morning it felt kind of nice to enter a huge cathedral in Santiago’s main plaza and be greeted with an overwhelming silence. Since I was wearing shorts I didn’t venture too far inside, but it was enough to hang out in the back and just observe people’s goings-on.

Inside of the Catedral Metropolitana on the Plaza de Armas.

From there, I eventually found myself back at El Mercado Central, mostly because I thought it, too, would be open on New Year’s morning. It turned out that it was, and I wandered once more through the seafood department, which was much better stocked this time around. It even had fresh sea squirt, though I didn’t pull an Andrew Zimmern – who was shocked when he saw what it looked like here – and eat a piece of it raw. Since I wasn’t hungry yet, I kept wandering around and people-watched until I was hungry. Then I came back to have my first real meal of the New Year. (My free hotel breakfast didn’t count – I was served toast, coffee, peach nectar, and a chocolate Ding Dong.)

That giant log of ocean grit and shell is actually a colony of sea squirts.

I came across this place near the Central Market. Those are the worst depictions of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley I've ever seen. Surprisingly, the place appeared to be a cultural center.

I chose a restaurant near the back entrance called Marisqueria Clarita, in part because the people working there didn’t aggressively try to herd me inside, which is what so many of the restaurants here do. I ordered fried salmon with potato salad and mixed greens (4500 pesos/US$8.87), and while waiting in my seat was approached by a drunk man trying to sell me his old bus pass; had a dog unsuccessfully attack a cat beneath the table next to mine; and was watched intensely for about five minutes by another drunk man teetering against a wall opposite me.

From my table I could see all the action, which tended to center on drunk people.

In any case, my food arrived, the drunks were chased off, and I dug in. My salmon actually came deep-fried, I think, and yes, it was good. It was almost like biting into salmon cake, but that description will probably leave you with the wrong impression. The portion they served was enormous, and by the time I’d finished I wasn’t sure I could walk all the way home. But walk home I did, first stepping over more drunk revelers from last night by the market's exit. Marisqueria Y Restaurante Clarita is at Mercado Central, Local 97. Tel: 687-3975. I highly recommend it for the quality of the food, the good prices, and the friendly people who run it.

Fried salmon with lots of extras.

Later in the afternoon, still with hardly anything open, I decided to climb to the top of Cerro Santa Lucia, which is in Santiago Centro – only about a five-minute walk from my hotel. There were quite a few people already here, picnicking and canoodling, and the climb to the top was fairly crowded. I’m not sure why this park is here, other than because a Santiago mayor in the 19th century decided to make one out of this giant mound in the middle of the city. But whoever designed the park did a great job.

I snapped this photo about two-thirds of the way up the hill. The mountain in the background is the one I climbed over yesterday.

It’s a wonderful oasis filled with all kinds of shady vegetation, sculptures, fountains, cannons, brick edifices that resemble fortresses, and areas for viewing the city and the surrounding Andes.

I have no idea what this building is, or was, for. But it's kind of charming standing high above the city.

When dinnertime rolled around, my options were limited. I actually went with pizza – Amasanderia “Papy’ Pizza” – mostly because it was virtually the only thing open and because it was right across the street from my hotel.

Get on Juan Carlos's good side -- he may give you free pizza.

It was my first South American pizza, and I have to say, it was pretty darned good: a somewhat thick crust, very little tomato sauce, a generous sprinkling of oregano, and cheese, mushrooms, pepperoni, ham, and sausage. Not exceptional, but for less than $1 a slice (500 pesos), combined with a super-friendly owner named Juan Carlos who rewarded me with a free slice for engaging with him in what was ultimately pretty ridiculous Spanglish, it was definitely worth it. Juan Carlos serves handmade pizzas and also empanadas, as well as some desserts.

Papy Pizza can be found on Monjitas, on the corner of an alley between Mosqueto and Miraflores. I don’t know their hours, but I know they open early and close late.

A bad photo, but the grease was quickly soaking through my takeaway paper bag...

Chile, Day 4

Halfway up Cerro San Cristóbal.

Another day in Santiago, another late start. Last night there was construction going on outside my window until after midnight – complete with an American or Canadian man yelling, with the occasional F-bomb thrown in, at the workers to shut up – followed by music in some apartment nearby. Then a laundry machine started thumping against my wall at 7 a.m., followed by more music blasting from outside. I lay comatose in bed until after 10, then decided to skip breakfast, slathered on some sunscreen, and went for a really long walk.

I was going to take the funicular from the Plaza Caupolicán, at the bottom of Cerro San Cristóbal, and then take cable cars to different parts of the park I wanted to visit, but the funicular was apparently closed and I never saw a single cable car during the two hours I wandered uphill (284 m) and through the Parque Metropolitano. Luckily it’s wasn’t too hot, and after 45 minutes of climbing up the switchbacks to the top of the hill there was occasional shade to protect me from overheating.

The park was stunning, and for anyone wanting some good exercise while in Santiago I really recommend walking through Barrio Bellavista, up the steep hill, and following the main road until it exits the park and becomes Avenida Pedro de Valdivia on the other side of the hill, in affluent and, at times, Pasadena-like Barrio Providencia. The roads in the park are popular with bikers and stray but friendly dogs, and on a clear day – unlike today – you’d have spectacular views of Santiago and its environs. Cerro San Cristóbal is dotted with small, well-maintained parks, including Jardín Botánico Mapulemu and Jardín Japones, as well as a wine museum, botanical garden, two giant and beautiful swimming pools ($10 entrance fee), and a fancy-looking restaurant.

Entrance to Jardín Botánico Mapulemu.

There was also a kiosk near the top that was a lifesaver for me: for $1.30 I refueled there with bottled water and a banana.

That horse was eyeing my banana, so I had to eat it fast.

The botanical garden and wine museum were closed, presumably because it’s the last day of the year, but the small gardens were open and they’re all free.

My main destination was the Japanese garden.


Heavily perfumed with wisteria, the Japanese garden was rather small, but it was also very tranquil.

The scent of wisteria hung heavily in the air. It was great.

At least it was until a group of about a dozen people sitting to the side of the garden started performing charades – then the tranquility was shattered. But it was still a nice place to go – it would have been perfect for a picnic.

I had no idea where I was when I got to the other side of the hill, so I decided I’d just keep walking and see where I ended up. Eventually the street I was on appeared on my guidebook’s map of Santiago, and I figured out how to get back to my hotel – though it took a good hour.

There was an impressive sculpture garden along the river on my way back.

Actually, I didn’t go straight back to my hotel but, since it was already 1:30, had lunch at Emporio la Rosa, which was on the edge of a park – Santiago is filled with parks, which are invariably clean, beautiful, and centered around sculptures or monuments (or both). I took a seat outside and ordered a smoked ham, cheese, and tomato sandwich (4000 pesos, or about $8) and a fresh squeezed orange juice (1600 pesos, or about $3.15). Both were good – I guess I was hungrier than I realized – and since Emporio la Rose is actually better known for ice cream than sandwiches, I also had a cone with a double scoop of pistachio and mojar chocolate ice cream (2200 pesos, or about $4.30). Kind of expensive, but hey, it’s my last lunch of the year and I skipped breakfast…Emporio La Rosa is at Merced 291. Tel: 638-9257.

Not long after this I decided that I really needed coffee, so at around 3 p.m. I went down charming Mosqueto Street and settled on Melinka Café, which has outdoor seating. (Santiago has so many restaurants and cafés with outdoor seating – I love this about the city.)

Although I ordered a double cappuccino, what I got looked more like a dessert, which I didn’t want after two scoops of ice cream. So I drank around that mountain of whipped cream and shaved chocolate and got my caffeine fix for the day.

When dinner rolled around, I found myself in the fix I was expecting – everything was closed for New Year’s Eve. After walking around Central Santiago for 20 minutes, I realized that the only places that were open were Chinese restaurants. So I settled on Restaurant Kuan Ming, about a block away from where I live.

I turned out to be the only one eating there – the place was much, much bigger than my photo shows – though they had at least six employees shuttling back and forth (only one was Chinese). I ended up ordering a congrio fuyon, what I thought was a vegetable soup, and a pisco sour.

Not what I'd call vegetable soup...

I’m finding out that in restaurants where people are very friendly, this is an indication of not very good food. It’s as if they think that by making me feel welcome and comfortable at my table I might overlook the fact that their chefs need retraining. Honestly, these people were so nice, and I wanted to like their food so much. However…My pisco sour came first, and it tasted very much like the salt-rimmed glass of a margarita. A more accurate name would have been pisco salty. I drank it all, but that’s only because it cost me nearly $4.

Pisco salty...

I immediately ordered a Royal Guard beer (it’s Chilean) after that, which was necessary to help counteract the additional salt that came from my entrée: the conger eel “quesadilla” – which turned out to be a conger eel omelet.

Egads, I can still taste the salt...

The problem with this was that it was basically just overly salty eggs. Like most fish cooked with eggs, the fish flavor was almost wholly absent. Again, all I could taste was salt. At least the rice was good. At the end of my meal, which cost 9600 pesos (US$18.91), I was given a complimentary shot of brandy. I’m fairly confident that Kuan Ming does better with other, more obviously Chinese dishes than with conger eel, so I don’t want anyone to get the impression that I’m giving them a bad recommendation. I’d go back if had to. I just wouldn’t order conger eel or a pisco sour. Kuan Ming can be found at Merced 551, and they do delivery. Tel: 639-5984.

I’m not sure what I’ll tonight for New Year’s. I’m tempted to sleep through it, though if I can stay awake long enough I’ll either climb up to the rooftop pool and look out for fireworks or else I’ll actually brave the crowds about five blocks from where I’m staying and watch the show in person.

Happy New Year Everyone!!

Chile, Day 3

Like yesterday, I got a late start to the day. Unlike the day before, however, it wasn’t because I needed to catch up on sleep. In fact, I hardly slept. I woke up early and ended up screwing around on the Internet, and I didn’t leave my hotel until around 11:30. I still had about an hour left of beautiful, spring-like weather to avail myself of, and then it got very hot. Because it was so hot, and not good for hoofing it around Santiago, I didn’t do very much today. I did visit two museums, though neither was especially noteworthy.

The first museum I went to was the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, which is certainly impressive from the outside. Next year this neoclassical building will turn 100 years old, so I’m sure there will be interesting things going on for that. Until then, however, you’ll have to settle for a mostly uninteresting group of exhibitions, which fortunately rotate. Fortunately, too, the museum’s centennial is only two days away – at least it becomes 2010 in two more days – so it shouldn’t be too long a wait. They do have a fair share of works by famed Chilean artists Roberto Matta and Luis Vargas Rosas, but most of the exhibits I saw weren’t very interesting. There were a lot of grainy black and white photographs and videos from the 70s of buildings being torn down, and images of cities as seen from holes in dilapidated structures. The museum also had some modern art, which I personally always have a hard time with, and some replicas of famous European sculptures. One major downside is that there is no information in English, so I had a hard time understanding what I was looking at. The museum was free on the day I went, though normally it costs 600 pesos (US$1.18) for an adult. It’s located right next to the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, and is open from 10 a.m. – 6:50 p.m. (yes, that’s 10 til 7) Tuesday through Sunday. Tel: 633-0655. Web: www.mnba.cl.

After this I walked across town to see the Museo Colonial de San Francisco, which is tucked off to the side of the much grander Iglesia de San Francisco.

This museum cost 1000 pesos (~$2), which isn’t bad for what it offers. What I liked best about it was its dark, dingy atmosphere – it clearly hasn’t figured out how to incorporate electric lighting, and its aged effect is heightened somewhat by the “garden” (i.e., tangled mass of greenery) in the large first-floor courtyard. Of course, I don’t think everyone appreciates a dingy museum, but hey, it’s my blog and I’m going to recommend the place.

The religious artwork and artifacts are rather interesting – the old lock collection is sufficiently surprising so as not to be boring – and to the museum’s credit they include English translations of most items on display. Another interesting thing about the museum is that it houses a replica of Garbriela Mistral’s 1945 Nobel Prize medal as well as correspondence between the Chilean poet and other individuals and organizations. The museum is located on Avenida O’Higgins 834 and is open from Tuesday to Saturday from 10-1 and 3-6, and on Sunday from 10-2. Web: www.museosanfrancisco.cl.

After this I walked back to my hotel and downed about a liter of water. Once I’d quenched my thirst I decided to grab some lunch. Since I needed to use the Internet to reserve accommodations for next week’s trips to Viña del Mar and La Serena, I took my computer over to Café de Las Artes (see yesterday’s entry) and ordered a salmon, cream cheese, and tomato sandwich on olive bread and a fruit juice.

It was good – nothing that special, and certainly not “Chilean” (though I’m finding that typical Chilean food is harder to come by than typical Peruvian and Ecuadorian food was in Peru and Ecuador respectively). I hogged my table for about an hour, then ordered a dulce café: espresso with vaporized milk and condensed milk, the last of which seemed to be an entire can’s worth that sat on the bottom of my glass. It was insanely sweet, and I couldn’t manage to finish it. For all of this I paid 7350 pesos (~$14.50), which is kind of a lot.

It was around five o’clock at this point, so I decided to hit the rooftop pool that guests of the hotel have access to (it’s actually atop an apartment building next door) and read. I wasn’t the only one who had the idea of cooling off up there, though, and seating was a little tight. After about an hour up there I went to research coastal bus travel out of Santiago, and then I decided I might as well go have dinner. (Again, more time has passed than my blog readily indicates – I’m not the eating machine I’m sure I make myself out to be here…)

Feeling tired, and wanting to stay close to the hotel, I decided to give South American sushi another shot. There’s a place called Kintaro Sushi across the street from where I’m staying, however they didn’t open until eight. Since I had time to kill I went to a sidewalk café called Vuelta next door and nursed a cold mora berry juice (which, as always, was about 15% seeds) and read a little more.

Finally Kintaro opened and I grabbed a seat in the back and ordered an awesome beer called Cerveza Austral as well as a sushi combination that, in the menu photo, looked a lot more exciting than the sushi I was served.

The sushi was fine – a bit mealy at times, a bit stringy at other times, and not that flavorful – definitely not worth the $15 I paid for it. However, the people working there were really nice. The Japanese owner sat at the register drinking beer, which kind of cracked me up, and my waiter turned out to be from Huanchaco, Peru, and was excited to learn that I’d visited his hometown a few weeks ago. His English was great, which was nice, as I haven’t had a lot of conversations with people so far in Chile. Kintaro Sushi is located at Monjitas 460. Tel: 638-2448. Web: www.kintaro.cl.