On-the-Road Tales

The first thing I realize about Chileans – I can not understand a word they are saying. Just after finally after picking up on some of the portuguese verbs, wham I am back into spanish. Did I forget all my spanish already, is that what is going on? No when I speak they understand me, I just can not catch the rapid fire response they give me. After they repeat everything 3 times I can usually make out enough of it. With exhaustion kicking in, my other major obstacle is the money. There are 535 pesos for 1 dollar. First of all taking out hundreds of thousands of pesos form the ATM was wierd enough but then I was having extreme issues dealing with this conversion. Instead of $1.50, I gave the Naval museum attendant 15 cents and the internet lady 15$. Thankfully they were honest people and pointed out my errors. I explored town and figured out what to see in the next few days.

I went to La Luna for a bite. I ordered a big tasty Iceberg lettuce salad. Yum. You really miss salad when you can not have it. I could feel all the restaurant patrons staring at me as the waiter delivered my beverage. Was this chick crazy? Did she really just order a beer? Does she not realize we are in arguably the finest wine producing country on the planet and it is dead cheap? Yes, yes, I know but I always like to test out the local microbrews and I am a sucker for dark beer so I had to try it. Besides I had to banish from memory the taste of that brasilian syrupy oscuro and the Austral negra was not bad at all. These people take their wine very seriously. They even have a drink with wine and icecream, wine float? ewww. The supermarket is stocked with aisles of the stuff, 2-3$ a bottle. They also claim to have invented the Pisco Sour but I think I will leave that one to Peru.

Patagonia considers itself somewhat seperate since it is so far removed from the rest of Chile particularly the capital – it selfproclaims to be the Independent Republic of Magellenes due to its proximity to the Magellan strait. They have their own flag and all. The indeginous Indian population was wiped out to extinction after settlers arrived from slavery and disease. The English and Germans settled in the area 2 centuries ago to breed sheep. I was told there are so many lambs in the region that if you want one, you can take it you just must leave the wool behind. I thought this was a bit far fetched until a pickup rolled up with 5 or so de-skinned lambs legs up. No doubt off to the nearest 5 star for lamb roast.

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 at 8:01 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.