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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.
lunes 09/06/2004
Taking an overnight flight sounds as if it should be restful. Too bad it isn’t.
A few years ago John and I used having friends living in Tokyo as an excuse to visit Japan. Carlos has since been transferred by his company to Chile, so we felt it our duty as good friends to visit Carlos, Beth, and their kids once again, and since that involved a long trip, staying with them for a couple of weeks for a full fledged vacation, and since it was so close by, making a side trip to Argentina as well. Actually, Carlos and Beth have been offering their guest bedroom to us for a while now, so our trip to South America was not as abusive as I’m making it out to be.
Choices for flights to Santiago de Chile from Los Angeles are not exactly overwhelming. There are no direct flights anymore, and the options that do exist tend towards the oddly timed. I had no real desire to fly all the way to the east coast, just so that we could turn around and head on down towards South America. I also did not want to fly to Mexico City, arriving at 1:00 A.M., so I could wait at the airport for six hours before taking another flight out.
We opted for the less annoying 8 1/2 hour LanChile flight to Lima, Peru, arriving at midnight, with an hour stay, NOT switching planes, then traveling for another 3 hours, arriving in Santiago at 7:00 A.M. the next day. Presumably a saner choice than the option of doing the exact same thing, for the exact same amount of money, except that we would be expected to change planes during that hour space in Lima.
Taking an overnight flight sounds as if it should be restful. Too bad it isn’t. If we were rolling in money, we would have gone first class and made use of the larger seats, but the flight was an Airbuse with only two seats by the windows so it wasn’t too terrible. With the handrest turned up, there was that much more room. In other words, not much. All well, if anyone bothered to notice our nonhetero male personal space behavior, no one made any comments.
For some unknown reason, the flight left LAX nearly an hour late, but we made up for the delay in Lima, staying for only 20 minutes instead of the allotted hour. The plane parked out away from the terminal, and portable stairs were rolled up for the passengers to disembark, creating an odd movie feel to the situation. They let anyone who wanted to get off the plane for a little bit so John and I did, and after standing around for a few minutes breathing in the cold night air mixed with exhaust from busses ferrying passengers around, we decided that we had been there long enough to justify claiming that we had been to Peru.
Most of the passengers got off at Lima, and I hoped that I would get to claim one of the empty rows for myself, and possibly manage to get some sleep, but the plane filled up again with new people before we left, so no go on sleep. John had a much easier time sleeping than I, and told me that School of Rock was the perfect movie to sleep though. Just boring enough to not tempt him to stay awake. He at least slept some. I didn’t manage to nod off until a couple of minutes before the captain announced that we were making our decent into Santiago a half hour earlier than scheduled and raised all the cabin lights.
There weren’t too many people working immigration at 6:30 in the morning, but luckily there was only our flight to deal with at that hour, so the line was long, but not crazily so. There is a $100 dollars U.S. visa fee for U.S. citizens to enter Chile. Pricey, but understandable considering that Chile imposed the fees in a tit for tat reaction to the U.S. charging Chileans the same amount to get into the states. I haven’t bothered to research why “we” raised the fees so high in the first place.
The fee proved to be a problem in that not everyone knew about it, so the entire process was slowed down by people getting up to the head of the line, then being sent back to a kiosk behind the lines so they could pay, before cutting back into line at front. John and I knew to pay before getting in line, which ultimately didn’t help speed up the process as much as we initially thought it would.
It was funny that the immigration officer I dealt with essentially waived me through with only a couple of questions, while John spent several minutes explaining that the purpose of his trip was merely a vacation. I’m more used to being the one dealing with hassles in security situations. I guess for once, I was part of the majority…in a generic “Latino” sense at least, since from the people I saw during the trip, I did not look overly Chilean. I certainly didn’t speak like one. It was even more obvious I wasn’t Argentinean, but that’s another story.
Despite the early hour, Carlos drove out to the airport to pick us up, braving thick early morning fog added onto the beginnings of rush hour traffic. He even had a traffic jam trailing behind a horse drawn cart slowly working it’s way down the middle of a eight lane highway.
After a 50-minute drive through terrain that looked just like the one we had just left in California, we finally arrived at their place. The boys were shy at first, but soon warmed up to us, and quickly started calling us the grandpas. Not that we are ancient, it’s just that living out of country, the boys have no real memories of their real uncles, and as a result, didn’t quite “get” the requests to call us uncle John and uncle Nico. Grandpas on the other hand, they do know about. Those are fun old guys you play games with, who tell you stories and give you gifts.
Grandpa Nico quickly wore out and took a long nap, waking up just in time for dinner. Our first jaunt out was at a nearby Italian joint Pizza Sí. It was practically empty since we were early for dinner at merely 6:30 P.M. The food was good, pizzas with cracker thin crusts that were all about the toppings, prosciutto, mozzarella, piles of arugula, puddles of olive oil, and for John an attractive and tasty potato and stinky cheese pizza.
The pizzeria looked out onto pastures where horses grazed (the neighborhoods they lived in being a well to do suburb in the hills above the city jutting into rural areas), and there was a mini market next door named Big John. Like all the markets we walked into in Chile, big or small, there was a large open self service selection of fresh breads. No dead and wrapped in plastic pan for these gente.
It was a good meal; just filling enough to get me ready for the nap I took back at their place before settling down for the evening.
more later,
nico