Chile

It seems there are a lot of American women who come to Chile and never go home. Like Margaret who “didn’t know a soul or have a clue about what I was getting into, but had enrolled in a 6-week intensive language program at the Instituto Chileno Norte Americano, had a hotel address in my pocket, and a couple years of high school Spanish under my belt. And ganas—a great desire—to know this new country.” She’s still there 18 years later.

Then there’s Kyle who, when she arrived in Santiago in 1998 as an exchange student, was so overwhelmed “I got scared and just decided to hide in my room to try out a little theory—if I slept long enough eventually I’d wake back up in an English-speaking country with my mom and brother where nobody tried to invade my personal space with a slobbery kiss on the cheek. Clearly that idea failed….” And now Kyle is married to a Chilean and has a thriving wedding photography business.

But one of my favorite stories comes from Liz Caskey who graduated Cum Laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in Spanish and Latin American Studies and then got a job as an analyst with a small corporate finance advisory firm in Santiago in 2001. A job she hated. So she followed her passion—food and wine—and ended up starting her own food and wine tours, focusing on Santiago’s street food, picadas (mom-and-pop joints), and its fabulous markets.

When I e-mailed her before my arrival, telling her I wanted to explore the food scene in Santiago and would be thrilled with any recommendations she had, she immediately replied, offering to hang out with me for a day, taking me to her favorite bakery, pastry shop, cheese store, and the city’s two big markets: Mercado Central and Vega.

Which is what we did yesterday, starting with a stroll from her apartment across from the Museo de Bellas Artes to Vega, the produce and meat market.

First we stopped for breakfast at a little sidewalk cart, a carrito, where a woman in a hand-stitched blue apron was frying up puffy sopaipillas the size of a clutch purse. The cost was 200 pesos or about forty cents. “This is a typical Chilean breakfast,” Liz said as I dipped the still-hot pocket donut into a tub of homemade pebre, sort of like a Chilean salsa.

I love sopaipillas, having grown up across the street from a Hispanic family from New Mexico whose mom fried up these golden brown pillows every Saturday morning. We’d take them fresh from the hot oil and sprinkle a little cinnamon on them before dipping them in a bowl of honey. Fabulous.

Before I could even finish my sopaipilla, Liz was dragging me into a bakery in the funky Barrio Brasil. “Chileans are crazy about bread,” Liz said. “In fact, they’re the second-largest consumers of bread in the world, behind Germany. It’s not a meal unless there’s a basket of bread on the table and a bowl of pebre.”

Photos by David Lansing

There were shelves full of flat bread, the size of coffee table books, etched with hearts in the middle, and mounds of marraqueta, sort of the Chilean baquette, which is a favorite for serving sandwiches. But whatever the shape, it was all white bread. Obviously Chileans aren’t into whole grains or wheat flours or enchanted with things like rye bread or brotchen, the German breakfast bread. Which is kind of interesting because the dark-bread-loving Germans, more than any other nationality, have had a big influence on Chilean cuisine, right down to the kuchen you’ll find in almost every pastry shop and supermarket in Santiago.

Still, we had to get a still-warm marraqueta, just so I could try it. It comes in squares that you break off. Liz gave me the first piece then broke off a corner of hers and popped it in her mouth, moaning with delight. “This,” she said, dreamily closing her eyes, “is one of the great pleasures of living here.”

Maybe the marraqueta is the reason so many young women come here and never go home. It certainly can’t be the men.

Daniela and I were eating sopaipillas in the Plaza de la Constitución, in front of La Moneda, the presidential palace where Salvador Allende supposedly shot himself during the Chilean coup of 1973 (there has always been controversy over whether Allende committed suicide or not, largely because his death came from an AK-47 assault rifle, given to him as a gift by Fidel Castro, which seems like an odd way for a physician to kill himself, don’t you think?).
Anyway, we’re having some street food and looking at the palace, trying to figure out which parts had been destroyed by bombing during the coup, when BAM! a wild beast came out of nowhere and snatched my fluffy sopaipilla right out of my hand.
“What the hell was that?” I said. Daniela was laughing.
“No, no, it’s okay,” she said. “It’s just one of the street dogs.”

The sopaipilla-snatcher. Photos by David Lansing.

That’s when I noticed there were more strays around the presidential palace than soldiers (and there were a lot of soldiers).  In fact, wherever you go in Santiago, you will stumble across a street dog—sometimes literally. Most of them really are strays but quite a few of them—including a dozen or so around La Moneda—have collars on them, which means they are owned by someone (although Daniela says this can also be a ruse; evidently the government decided a couple of years ago to get rid of all the stray dogs in the downtown area around the palace, decreeing that any mutt without a license and collar would be picked up, so people went around putting bogus collars on strays to make it look like they were pets).
Stray dogs are like mosquitos; once you become aware of them, it seems like they’re everywhere. And in Santiago, they kind of are. There are a couple of reasons for this. For one, as in most Latin countries, Chileans seem to think that “fixing” an animal just isn’t right. God created cats and dogs to go out and procreate, so for god’s sakes, let them fulfill their biological destiny.
Secondly, Chileans think it’s mean to keep a dog locked up in a house all day. So even if the German shepherd that stole my sopaipilla is someone’s pet (and he certainly looked too healthy to be living on the streets), most likely he was let out of the apartment to go out and play with the other doggies when his owner went to work in the morning.
I know, weird, huh.

Do you think he’ll bite if we pet him?

So now I see street dogs everywhere in Santiago—chasing each other in Parque Forestal, snoozing in the doorway of an ice cream shop, wandering in packs around Plaza de Armas. But here’s the thing: They seem pretty meek. And, as I said, for the most part they look pretty well-fed (several times I’ve seen garbage collectors or park maintenance employees putting out bowls of food for the animals). It’s like everyone in Santiago has decided that all the stray dogs are communal pets and so everyone has a little bit of a responsibility to feed and take care of them.
Which includes, I suppose, letting them eat my sopaipilla. I just wish next time they’d do the traditional begging routine instead of dining and dashing.

Santiago is one of those places, like Spain and Florida, where the coffee sucks. I’m not saying you can’t get a decent espresso in Santiago, you can, but the average cup of joe here is worse than what you might find included with the free continental breakfast at a Courtyard by Marriott.
This morning I took the elevator up to the breakfast room on the 21st floor of my hotel where I sat facing a stunning view of the Andes while I tucked into fresh pastries, exquisite fruit, and one of the worst cups of coffee I’ve ever had. I mean, I knew that in Chile when you ask for coffee you traditionally get Nescafé, but this wasn’t even that good. I don’t know what it was. Carob powder? Instant chai?
If I don’t get a decent cup of coffee in the morning, I’m not fit for human conversation. Which was a real problem this morning because I was meeting Daniela, an editor for a Chilean magazine, early for a walking tour of downtown Santiago.
“Listen,” I told Daniela when she asked me if I wanted to go inside the Biblioteca Nacional for a look around, “if I don’t get some coffee quickly, I’m going to start kicking one of these street dogs…and what’s with all the street dogs anyway?”
Okay, fine, said Daniela, a dark-haired woman fresh out of college in Buenos Aires where she studied photography. “Would you like to go to a café con piernas?”

Photos by David Lansing

“Great,” I said, thinking this was the name of some Starbucks-like Santiago chain.
She led me to a very sleek, very modern café just off Plaza Armas confusingly called Café Haiti. Inside, a bevy of rather serious-looking (or perhaps bored) young women in brightly-colored short dresses and three-inch heels were serving espresso and café cortado, strong coffee with a little milk, to sharply-dressed businessmen standing up at a long chrome and black granite bar.

Café con piernas—coffee with legs—have been around “since before I was born,” Daniela told me. “I don’t know why. They are very Chilean. I heard someone tried to open one in Argentina but it immediately failed.”
These Chilean Hooters-for-the-coffee-set seem odd in a country where divorce was only recently legalized and abortion is still illegal. But while there was a definite sexist vibe to the place (Daniela, the only woman in the place not working, admitted she’d never been inside a café con piernas before—“This is a place for men”), I found Café Haiti to be oddly sedate—the men here seemed more interested in their coffee and their conversations with other men than in the women sashaying over to them on high heels while delicately balancing a tray full of beverages. There was no overt flirting, no boisterous joking, no sly winks. Frankly, I’d seen bawdier atmosphere at a corporate cocktail mixer. Which might explain things since at a café con piernas there is also no alcohol. Just a bunch of women who look like they might be backup dancers for the Like-A-Virgin-era Madona serving fairly decent coffee.