4th January

City tour and Couch Salsa.

We got up in plenty of time for breakfast and by 9.30 (so early!) were ready to explore the city. We had heard about a free walking tour that takes place from the Plaza de Armas and decided that would be good to give us a bit of an insight and general overview of the city and its people. We weren't wrong and in fact it turned out to be an exceptionally good tour with lots of info you don't find in the guide books such as the info on 'coffee with legs' which was a bit of an eye opener! Basically the coffee in Chile is awful, no-one used to drink it and so when someone had the idea of opening a coffee shop, naturally it didn't do too great, so they changed the concept and made it a place with no chairs where you just walked in and stood to drink your (imported) coffee. The main difference however and what drew the crowds in is that the coffee is always served by beautiful women with rather short skirts, hence the nickname 'coffee with legs'! This proved to be very popular and they sprung up all over town and many men would go to work with a smile on their face in the mornings. Someone else had the thought to take things one step further though and you can now go to 'New' coffee with legs which have blacked out windows and are for over 18s only. As you can guess these shops are the same principle except that the women serving the coffee do so in bikinis and thongs or costumes and the like. They also have a 'happy minute' 4 times a day which can be at any time, no one knows when, when the doors are locked so no-one can come in or go out and the waitresses strip and dance for 1 minute then get dressed again and carry on!! Strange people these Chileans who look very conservative compared with the Cubans yet have these establishments (which welcome women too though there is no equivalent as apparently Chilean men are getting uglier every year according to our guide lol) all over the business sector of the city, we went through 1 arcade where there were at least 5 almost next door to each other! This was one of the highlights of the information on the tour and not at all what we had expected to hear, the rest was very interesting however but mainly dealt with the history of the country, city and its people. There has been a lot of political trouble for many years with many military coops and huge protests which occasionally turn into riots but it sounds as if things are slowly sorting themselves out. Things we saw included many stray dogs which the Chilean people treat as their own, all giving a little bit of food when they can or worming them, getting their inoculations, everything, in return the dogs are very friendly and will often accompany you down the street or sit next to you for some fuss. We also passed a few ice cream parlours which we will have to sample as they have some of the strangest flavours you can imagine, rose, chocolate chilli, raspberry mint, cheeseburger, fish.....and many more! We walked past a pretty hill/park in the centre that kind of divides the city into its business and residential zones which turns out to be half man made! Originally a huge pile of rock and rubble the government had the idea of making something pleasant out of it and got the prisoners at the time to work taking soil and planting trees, laying grass etc until now it is a cool relaxing place to spend your lunch hour under the shade of the trees or to climb to the top where there is a small castle and look out over the city. Its not high enough to see everything though, for this you have to climb the San Cristobal hill which I'm told takes about 2 hours, or you can pay and take the cable car. We are intending to climb it as there are parks all the way up and it looks very beautiful to walk through, when you get to the top there is a giant statue of the virgin that is lit up at night and watches over the whole of Santiago. One other rather Chilean thing is the food and drink...Pisco Sours are claimed by both Chile and Peru with arguments about who's drink it is going on for years until in the end the Chileans said 'right, OK, Pisco Sours are Peru's drink cos we have something better!' At this point they came up with the 'terremoto' or 'earthquake' which consists of ½ pint of wine on top of which is a shot of pisco, then a shot of grenadine topped off with a scoop of pineapple ice cream!! Apparently once you've drunk one of these you stand up and its like you're in the middle of an earthquake! The other rather odd Chilean thing is a street food which comes in a plastic glass of a scoop of cooked wheat with 2 peach halves on top and then filled to the brim with peach juice...sounds rather odd but is actually quite nice, filling and cheap! Another traditional dish we intend to try is a Chorrillano which is a dish large enough to feed 2 made up of a plate of chips then a layer of beef, followed by a layer of chicken, scrambled eggs, fried onions topped of with your choice of sauces...nom!! To finish off the tour we ended up at the house of a man named Pablo Neruda who, when he was alive, was an avid collector of everything from figureheads from ships to cigarette butts to chairs and many other bizarre things which he distributed throughout his 3 houses in the area. He was a man who always had guests and friends over for meals or drinks and so you could be sitting eating at a table with a mermaid hovering above you, such was the extent of his collection that everything was crammed in wherever it would fit, including hanging things from the ceilings! His houses are now museums and I think will be on our list of things to look at while we're in Chile as they sound fascinating, many things to do!! After the tour finished we were in the Bella Vista area and so decided to find the various reported salsotecas to see if we could find out prices etc and so spent an hour or so doing this before returning to the hostel. We did some more bits on the internet, Andy had a nap before cooking dinner (rice and carrots) then we headed out to go to a couchsurfing meeting we had seen advertised on the website with a view to meeting some local people. We found the bar, La Puerta Roja, and found ourselves amidst about 30 couchsurfers, some living in Santiago and others travellers like ourselves. After talking to several people for about an hour we finally hit on the subject of salsa and discovered that there is a couch meeting of salsa people on in a club at the same time and a few people were interested in going so me, Andy a guy from Turkey and another girl from England jumped into Cristian's (Santiago couch surfer and awesome guy)big 4x4 and drove over to club mangosta which is free entry on Wednesdays to find a small group of surfers amidst a heaving dance floor of proper salsa dancers!! We were so excited to find real dancing after so long we were soon on the lovely wooden dance floor dancing away to very un Cuban like music ( lots of breaks and different sounds) for a couple of hours before it looked like it was time to go. We were almost out the door and the salsa music stopped and some clubbing type music came on to which we started dancing and ended up back on the dance floor for another hour until it just about finished! Cristian gave us all a lift back to our various hostels, such a nice guy, and at about 3.30 we crashed out.