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Stories from a man who fails to meet media expectations of what it means to be gay:
white, frivolous, over sexed yet sexless, shrill, single, stylish, a clown, unimportant, et al.
Wednesday 09/15/2004
Bohemian chicken
The metro in Santiago is clean, largely convenient, and easy to use. �Unfortunately, the neighborhood that Carlos and Beth live in is way off in the suburbs, located in a well to do valley high above the city proper. �Well to do suburbia isn�t serviced by the subway system, so there were days when John and I took taxis to and from the nearest subway station.
I never did decide whether it was better to ride in the taxis with eyes open or closed. �Closed I could only imagine the number of times we jumped lanes, or ignored them altogether, but open, I could at least help the driver with the directions in getting back to Carlos & Beth�s place. � No one seemed to know where the heck their neighborhood was, or had even heard of the major cross streets. �
By the end of the trip, we realized that the lack of knowledge was because the housing development was relatively new, and we had been continually chosing drivers who looked to be kindly old men. � Kindly old men as it turned out, knew little of the newer developments surrounding the city. � Aside from lack of location, I�m still not sure why we kept choosing the older guys, �cause young or old, they all drove like maniacs. �The younger maniacs at least had a rough idea of where we were headed.
Anyway, the Monday after Fathers day we had a roller coaster taxi ride that deposited us at the metro, which we took the rest of the way in to the city. �This was our first view of the nekkid people Yo Tomo (milk) ads, which combined with other posters for various art shows has lead me to think that beneath their calm reserved exterior, there�s a good amount of passion to the Chileans.
Our tourist spot of the day was supposed to have been Cerro San Cristobal, a large hill overlooking the city, but it was so smoggy that visibility was near nil, so we settled on lunch in Barrio Bellavista, the �bohemian� neighborhood at the base of the hill.
Bohemian means that it is a rundown neighborhood of brightly painted buildings that house a number of lapis luzi shops, restaurants, bars, and nightclubs where hip folks waste the night away. �Bohemian also means that a number of those restaurants, bars, and nightclubs are gay, so in addition to being hip, some of these young nightclub goers are also �hip.� � We aren�t hip, so we only made it out to that neighborhood at night once, and that was merely to eat dinner. �
After walking through the neighborhood, reading and rejecting various restaurants based on their menu boards, we ended up at Antojo De Gauguin, a place described in tour books as being Arabic food and vegetarian friendly. I�d actually call it generic Mediterranean food, but quibbling over ethnicity doesn�t change that we had a good meal. � I no longer remember what John ordered, although I�m sure it was meatless and tasted good. �My memory of his meal is gone because the hue of my meal blocks everything else out. �
I chose the Pollo con salsa menta (chicken with mint sauce). �It tasted wonderful, but dang was it green. It practically glowed bright emerald. �Slicing through the little brochettes of meat showed that the chicken had absorbed the sauce nearly a third of the way through, giving me odd-looking green and beige cubes of meat for my meal. �Definitely strange in appearance, but again, it tasted great.
The rest of the day was spent looking through shops and walking through the Parque Forestal, a statue and fountain filled park which sort of runs parallel to the Rio Mapocho.
Tuesday was a much more low-key day. �Some of it was spent being lazy and enjoying the time off aspect of vacation, some of it was spent getting ready for our flight to Buenos Aires the next day, and a few hours were spent wandering through the local open air mall. � The place was anchored by a Jumbo, a large supersized grocery/everything store, and an Easy, an equally large homeowners/FYI type store. �I had never been in a FYI store before where you had everything from paint, to garden supplies, to pet store. �Being Californian, the ferrets for (legal) sale where unusual for me as well.
Stores in Chile were interesting because Chileans use the $ symbol for their Peso, and with an exchange rate (at the time) of 650 Chilean pesos to one dollar U.S., at first glance everything seemed to be wildly overpriced, with the simplest of things costing thousands and tens of thousands. � Eventually I got used to it, although my math skills are poor enough that it always took me a minute to translate the prices. �
Argentina was much easier in that respect since the exchange rate was three to one. �It also helped that with their crashed economy, most things were crazy cheap. Something we took advantage of the next few days. �A lot.
More later,
nico