Reflections# 611: Food and Hostels

    Empanadas are not on every street corner; however, there abundance could satiate the hungriest of travelers at 800 pesos, about $1.50 US, a piece.  Despite the fact that the common empanada del pino contains mystery meat, hardboiled egg, lots of onions and a single unpitted olive (watch out), they taste muy deliciosas.  Empanadas have served as the cornerstone of our low budget travel, and we guarantee a full report at the end of our journey here on who cooks the best empanadas in this long and slender country.
    Also in abundance, a tragic export we think from the US, is fast food, especially in Santiago. Beneath 400 years old archways, stalls of fast food line the sides and through the center waddles the transitional Chilean.  Standing, they grab vienesas (hotdogs) smothered in guacamole and mayonnaise, or pollo pronto-a cheap replica just two doors down from its inspiration, KFC.  More traditional Chilean meals however, are there if you look for them. Costing a bit more, though not much over 3,000 pesos (US $7.50), you can find cored potatoes filled with beef and veggies and a side of tabbouleh, salads with lettuce, corn, chicken and veggies, and much more.  The diversity in these traditional meals, as well as a diversity of international cuisine available such as Chinese, Italian, and Indian, surpasses most other Latin American countries, though it pales in comparison to the melting pot that is the US.
    In most hostels, you can´t escape cheap white bread as the staple of breakfast. More like rolls than wonderbread, they´re served with jelly from a bag, a small cup of the ubiquitous jugo de durazno (peach juice) which pours like syrup, and instant Nescafe or Lipton tea.  Most of the hostels we´ve stayed at offer this cheap breakfast as part of the package, but we´ve also sought out hostels that will let us use the kitchen to cook lunch and dinner.  Hostels have turned out to be more expensive than we thought, and our guidebook has often led us astray- always ask to check out the bathrooms before you agree to stay anywhere, and sometimes it is worth the extra money.  As we write this, we´re eating lunch at our hostel  in Castro on the island of Chiloé; we got to Castro 2 days ago and love the change from Santiago.  The mountains here are not veiled behind a thick layer of smog, and the tides from the surrounding fjords remind you that people here are much more  tied into nature than in the crazy city.
      We treated ourselves the first night to Hostal Palafito, which sits on stilts  above the water overlooking the fjord.  By far the  nicest of the hostels we´ve stayed in, we  splurged a  bit in part because it started to rain as we arrived and we didn´t want to tote our massive packs around in that weather, and in part because we had just escaped a slum of a  hostel in Santiago.  This quaint, new, incredibly clean, and totally vacant hostel felt more like a B&B  on the Oregon coast than anything else.  After 16 hours on a bus to get down here, grabbing a bottle of  cheap Chilean cab-sav wine, cooking a little dinner, and staring out at the ocean from the balcony, created the exact atmosphere we were craving in high-tailing it from the city.
    In an effort to recoup our financial losses from this splurge, we took off the next morning for another space.  The first hostel we stopped  at had the right price so we dropped our bags and took off.  We spent the afternoon touring the isolated island of Quinchao; playing on the beach while we  bundled in our scarves and down jackets, eating tomato and avocado sandwiches, and all sorts of other fun touristy stuff like standing in awe beneath a beautiful 1740´s wooden church ceiling or trying to find a bathroom that didn´t cost anything.  When we got back to the hostel that night though, we realized why you should ask to see the bathrooms first.  We also realized the beauty of central heating and that the Hostal Central most likely serves as a cover up for  some  very shifty dealings.  (Our theory is that its the port of entry for Peruvian goods to be sold on the black market: things such as gloves, scarves, and other woven wares from the  locally forsaken alpaca.  Though this is just a theory).
    Needless to say, we´re at a much nicer hostel today, with clean bathrooms,  a charming front woman, a beautiful view of the harbor and minimal illegal dealings in woolen woven wears.  We hope all you gringos are  rockin out stateside.   We leave for our farm Monday morning and will try to stay in good touch.
Much love.  Matt & Andi.

Anecdotal contraindications to Lonely Planet advise: Despite what the guidebook says, the popular Cafés con Piernas (Coffee with Legs) in Santiago are strip joints that happen to serve coffee, not coffee shops where baristas happen to wear a string bikini to work.  Also, the clientelle isn´t the average Santiaguino conducting business over coffee.  He is the "lonely-midlife-crisis-man"  who needs far more than a coffee upper.
PS  #74:  The beauty of no central heating  is that this entire island smells like a campfire,  another great change from the big city, which lacked both central heating and fireplaces.

Thoughts over la Plaza de Armas...

The bullhorn flattens but elevates the voice of an angry protestor.  His revolutionary rhetoric flits constantly like a small bird around the Plaza de Armas.  He is not visible to me from our hostel terrace.  He is not going to stop, and he is not a single person.  As Columbus Day, a national holiday here that seems to receive as much positive press as an illegal hanging would in Alabama, draws close, the Mapuche people come out to show the strength of their numbers.  Pharmacy workers wail on their plastic trumpets and bang on drums, not working.  And the Iglesia Metropolitana teems with salvation seekers, grabbing for grace at the feet of Jesus, shelling out their last monedas for a better life to come.

No, not everyone here wants or needs more.  In fact many people seem quite plump and happy here.  Men and women in business suits sit in quieter, cleaner, and brighter parts of town, sipping an afternoon coffee, wine or beer.  Teenagers lay in the shaded grass of the park on Cerro Santa Lucia, kissing and flirting until their antsy hearts are swollen.  And even in the Plaza de Armas, little girls with their abuelitas throw old bread to chriping pigeons.  Heck, the wii sells on every commercial street corner, and workmen, as I write, plant trees along the busy Avenida Merced.

But looking down on the Plaza de Armas, the central square where dictator Pinochet held public executions up until the early 90´s, one can see an obvious transition taking place here in Santiago.  The vioce of a not yet at peace public rolls beneath the palms in the square, while the spring sun tries to beat back the smog of an overpopulated South American city.

Efficient travel

Today Andi and I got our feet wet in Toronto. The rain soaked through our new Toms shoes efficiently, our food in China-town came efficiently, commuting around the city worked efficiently as well; however, coming to Toronto en route to Santiago Chile: totally inefficient. Although,after a craZy summer we welcome this backward step and relished walking slowly through downtown. Furthermore, we wait excitedly in the airport here to have 11 lazy hours catching up on all the films we've missed!
Still, as avid travelers concerned with the proverbial Sasquatch footprint we are creating, we can't help but notice the inefficiency of our jaunt to Toronto. We booked this trip with frequent flyer miles so apparently for United it was cheaper to add in a few hundred miles to our itinerary. I feel like a dead salmon flying from Seattle to be processed in China, then sold in Manhattan as lox. Anyway, enough griping. In the morning we will arrive in Santiago, a couple of very fortunate travelers, ready for the next adventure. Keep connected and we'll do our darndest to fill you in on how the southern most vineyard in America is run!