Authentically Vallarta

"Hey amigo with the pink purse." 

"You wanna buy some good junk?"

"Hey rich guy."

"Andale! Andale!"

Visiting "Vallarta" is like going on vacation with hecklers...  

We're in Phuket now, which is sort of the Asian equivalent of Puerto Vallarta: gorgeous tropical setting touristed to the hilt.  But the vibe on the street is radically different.  First off, I don't think Thais would ever openly ridicule visitors.  Publicly causing someone to lose face is not a casual sport here.  

But also, the tourists on the street (in Kata Beach, particularly) are not Americans.  They're Russians and Swedes.  I don't have much experience with these characters, but a few days' exposure gives me the impression that they're much cooler cats that we Americans are.

What is up with Americans?

Ten days in Puerto Vallarta and I have to say...have we no shame?

We arrive in Puerto Vallarta in big heaving planeloads, our obese backsides spandexed over with "comfy" pants.  All throughout the flight, there has been upping and downing and standing in the aisles and special requests and complaints and lots of talk, talk, talking about Where-are-you-from?  And Me-too!

Why do we Americans get our hair corn-rowed on vacation?

Why do we buy Frida Kahlo beach blankets?

 

And why do we patronize "Gourmet Fests" that...

...kick off with a papier mache cow? 

...and a wall-mounted TV playing football?

The whole time we were in Puerto Vallarta, I was in a state of cultural embarrassment.  Just moments like this...

They have these sculptures along the malecon that are dumbed-down to the consciousness of people who basically don't like to look at art.  Something that takes effort and causes you to see the world in a different way?  Nooo...  We prefer things that are blatantly obvious and evoke clichés!  

Which brings me back to the Gourmet Fest.  Ever-hopeful of finding a place in the sun with fabulous food, we decided to visit PV during its so-called "XVII International Gourmet" Festival.  Never having been to PV before, and being (both of us) very literal-minded, we didn't realize we were supposed to take that "Gourmet" and "International" with a grain of salt.

Gourmet, in this case, is whatever "gourmet" means to your average tourist who got the $249 direct flight from Minneapolis.  You think I'm being a ridiculous snob?  What if I am?  This so-called Gourmet Fest kicked off with a progressive dinner, one course of which was some sort of poached rabbit terrine with zucchini and rosemary...

However, out of respect for our delicate American (there are lots of Canadians too, by the way) consciousness, the organizers refused to tell us what this dish was until we had eaten it.  Why?  Because they were afraid we wouldn't eat it!

At a "gourmet" fest.

Aaaaa....

E, incidentally, was the only one of 30+ diners (including yours truly) who knew we were eating rabbit before they told us.  He left the event shortly thereafter.

I ate on and was rewarded for my intrepid spirit by...

...deep-fried alfalfa sprouts (no really, you shouldn't have) and...

...peach bubbles that I later learned had been created with an aquarium pump! 

Perhaps you're thinking, Alright smartypants, how come you're not eating Mexican food in Mexico if you're so gourmet?  Well, I was very excited to go to El Arrayán, the celebrated retro-traditional Mexican joint in town in the spirit of Diana Kennedy.  I know, I know, Diana Kennedy is from the UK, so how can a Mexican restaurant be authentic if it's in the spirit of an English woman's celebration of traditional Mexican cooking?  Whatever.  The point is, retro-traditional Mexican cuisine, complete with oilcloth table covers.

Well, I'll give them this: the handmade tortillas rocked!

However, the duck mole that is supposedly their pride and joy?  A big 'ol brick of dried-out duck meat in a pool of mole.  Sure, it was helpful to have the mole to smear on the mouthful of dry muscle fibre, but the two components were totally un-integrated.   

A far cry from the fabulous duck mole we had at Izote in Mexico City.

I ran into a French expat, a long-time PV resident whose identity I'll protect, but...we couldn't resist dishing El Arrayan's duck together!  His brother, a chef in Paris, came to town and they ate in all the "top" PV restaurants: Cafe des Artistes, Trio, etc.  Nothing doing.  Trio was ok, but overpriced (we concur).  So, what's good?  I asked.  He gave me a worried look, seemed frustrated, and finally said, "Oh...just go to Paris."  Ahem.

Pressed further, he said you can generally get decent fresh food at Jo Jack's Fish (again, we concur) and at local taco stands.  Look for where the food is fresh.  Look in the dining room...it's fancy decor, but no one is there.  What's going to be in the back, in the refrigerator?  It's not fresh.  Exactly!

So there you have it, the best food we had in PV was at popular upscale-casual gringo joints with silly names like Jo Jack's Fish, No Way, José!, and Daiquiri Dick's.  We also had a couple of decent lunches at the spot to the right of over-rated La Palapa if you're facing away from the ocean. 

Above: salad at Jo Jack's Fish

Above: tuna poke at Jo Jack's Fish (fish tacos rocked too)

  

 

Above: mussels with chorizo at Daiquiri Dick's

Above: flank steak (looks odd, but was delish) at No Way Jose!

Above: tuna sandwich at the place next to La Palapa

So that's it.  What's good in Vallarta is what's authentic.  And what's authentic in Vallarta isn't traditional Mexican.  It's this kind of old-school expat culture -- everyone in town has been coming here for 20 years.  The nice thing about that is it's laid back.

One of my favorite events of the Gourmet Fest was actually the cooking demonstration, which featured four chefs and was actually very nicely produced.  It was kind of a slapstick routine in English-Spanish translation.  Almost everyone was bilingual and nobody could remember what language they were speaking...so the audience frequently got English-to-English and Spanish-to-Spanish.  

Happily, I understand Spanish pretty well, so I didn't miss moments like when the visiting chef from Casa del Conde de la Valenciana in Guanajuato said something in Spanish like, "Maybe you think that Mexican cuisine is limited.  But it's your idea of Mexican cuisine that's limited.  If you open your mind, you'll have an amazing experience," -- and this was translated as, "Mexican food is very good.  You should enjoy it." 

Nonetheless, one of the chefs who participates in the Fest is Gerard Dupont, who is president of Académie Culinaire de France worldwide, an organization focused on the evolution and modern practice of French Cuisine.  I expected someone very serious, but he was in fact, the funniest act on the stage!  Speaking heavily French-accented Spanish the whole time, he told us to gratinee our vegetables until they were the color of his hair...or the color his hair used to be (he is blond gone snowy white).  He also did a bit of virtuoso knife work, julienning without a glance while he chatted people up all over the room.

That's when I realized that part of cooking (or being a chef) anyway is probably a lot like being a musician: you have that muscle memory in your fingers...

In the end, being laid back about everything (including authenticity) was the best way to enjoy Vallarta.

I laughed at the story of the expat couple who were broken into five (!) times by the same guy.  They physically caught and held him 'til the police took him away.  He quickly got out of jail, came back, and robbed them again.  Meanwhile other robbers sit outside Costco and watch who takes home the flat-screen TVs...

And I got used to the cops shlepping up and down the beach with machine guns.

And I had a fabulous time going up, up, up into the air on a parachute!

Magic City

 





"You call that a knife?"

That's how I feel about Mexico City.

All the other cities I've met in my life...SF, LA, Buenos Aires, NYC, London, Paris, even Hong Kong. You call those cities?

MEXICO CITY is a city.

Mexico City crackles with energy. I don't know if the people or the place have some super-charged chi going on, but this city feels electric.

I'm going to dive right into the danger topic first, because, on the one hand, it sucks. On the other hand, it adds an element of anxiety that makes each moment...intense.

The danger here has a particular flavor.

Before we arrived a friend told me about getting attacked in a market in Mexico City five years ago. In his own words, "I turned a corner and within 15 seconds two guys were choking me in front of 10 people that didn't care or were too afraid to intervene." Jeez!  

That reminded me of a story I read in a newspaper several years ago (2004) about two undercover police who were burned to death by a crowd in Tlahuac on the outskirts of Mexico City. To be clear, this event that was not in any way condoned by the people of Mexico City. It was seen as desperate vigilantism in the face of lawlessness and police indifference.

Nonetheless...burned alive?

I don't mean to romanticize something so terrible. What I'm trying to get at is that there is a sense of...the gothic...or an imagination of darkness...that is darker...than anything I am familiar with. (I'm not going to write about Santa Muerte. If that interests you, here is the Time magazine article about it.)



Certainly this impression of gothic-ness was heightened because we were visiting Mexico City during Dia de Muertos. I didn't know this before coming to Mexico City, but November 1 is dedicated to angelitos, or children who have died. Perhaps in reference to this, there were children everywhere dressed like skeletons. I was slightly shocked rounding a corner and running straight into a mini-casket with a doll in it, being pushed on a dolly by a eight-year-old girl dressed like a bloody bride skeleton! You'll notice that I don't have many photos of my own from this trip because I was paranoid about whipping out the nice new camera.



The photo I snapped above captures a little flavor of the scary-looking people out and about...


At Templo Mayor, the archeological site of the important Aztec/Mexica temple, right in the heart of Mexico City with the Spanish Metropolitan Cathedral just beyond -- I accidentally bought a postcard with an image of Tepeyolohtli on it. The postcard described the figure as "God of sin and misery" (also "heart of the mountain"). My immediate, superstitious reaction was to get rid of the postcard, get it as far away from me as possible. But I didn't do that.



Later I learned that Tepeyolohtli is an incarnation of Tezcatlipoca, who together with Quetzalcoatl, is one of the creators of the universe. It is the conflict between these gods, not loving cooperation, that brings about the universe. Interestingly, the wall text at the Museo Nacional de Antropologia also says,

Black was his defining color, which is why he was considered the god of darkness and of all that occurred at night, such as theft, adultery, etc. He was the god of masculinity, the patron of procreation;

This was stunning to me. Masculinity associated with darkness? I am accustomed to the ancient Greek duality of Apollonian reason/light/masculinity and Dionysian chaos/darkness/femininity.



Hmmm. This association of masculinity and darkness somehow helps to explain the dedicated section for women and children on the Mexico City Metro. When I heard about this I thought, Do women and children need to be protected from men on the train?

And speaking of transportation, when you are sitting in the worst traffic you have ever seen in your life (as we did for one hour driving the 10 km from the airport to our hotel), you may see some of the same street performers that busk in traffic in other Latin American cities. What's the difference? In Santiago you might see a juggler with a clown nose. In Mexico City, it's a man juggling fire, painted head to toe in silver, standing on a ladder directly in front of an enormous line of traffic...



Or maybe they're just breakdancing in traffic. This, to me, encapsulates the whole thing. The whole MEXICO CITY is a city-thing. Mexico City has style, balls, imagination, ambition.



You wanna talk ambition? E knew (I did not) that the richest man in the world, Carlos Slim Helú, worth $63.3 billion, is from Mexico City. Mr. Slim, interestingly, is the son of two Lebanese immigrants to Mexico (his father brought the first Arabic printing press to Mexico). Among other things, Slim is the man behind Telmex and Telcel. When you're the richest man in the world, you have to get serious about philanthropy. One thing Slim has done is create the radical-looking Soumaya Museum designed by architect Fernando Romero, who I just learned is his son-in-law.



It's painful to write this, but...I didn't go to the Soumaya Museum. It pains me even more that I wasn't able to visit the UNESCO World Heritage listed home of modernist architect Luis Barragán.



I also missed the ancient Teotihuacan pyramids outside of Mexico City and Xochimilco and the Frida Kahlo Museum...and probably a ton of amazing contemporary art. By the time we were leaving, I was in kind of a panic...there is simply too much to see and do.



There is also way too much to eat.

I love Mexican food. I didn't realize how much until this trip.

By chance I had the pleasure of dining with a new friend from Chowhound, Cristina Potters. Although born in the USA, Cristina took like a fish to the waters of Mexican culture 30 years ago and is now a Mexican citizen too. Cristina writes a deliciously informative blog called Mexico Cooks!, designs culinary tours of Mexico, and helps to organize the Michoacán Festival of Traditional Cuisine that takes place in early December. She is also a translator!



We started lunch with...tequila. No, it wasn't tequila. It was mezcal. What's the difference? Technically, tequila is a type of mezcal, which is simply liquor made from agave. By Mexican law, tequila can only be made from blue agave in a specified geographical region, mainly in the state of Jalisco. In practice, Cristina said, tequila is now made by big liquor companies while mezcal is the provence of small producers. In Mexico City, people like to drink mezcal.



We had a Oaxacan mezcal made from organic agave espadin by a company called Delirio. This photo from their Web site shows the piñas, or sheared hearts of the agave plant, that are baked in underground charcoal ovens before the aguamiel (honey water) is crushed out and fermented. 

The custom is to drink mezcal from a jícara (goard) with a slice of orange and a sprinkle of sal de gusano, which is (everyone shudder) worm salt. People who love sal de gusano really dig the stuff. For some reason I couldn't get what was distinctive about it. It tasted like slightly tangy chili salt to me. But the overall ensemble -- tangy/spicy/salty, refreshing/aromatic/sweet, oaky/smokey/intoxicating -- was a wonderful opening of the senses for the start of a meal.

We shared many powerfully-flavored dishes at Azul Condessa, a restaurant run by chef Ricardo Muñoz Zurita, who just won the Travel and Leisure award for best regional and traditional cuisine. The most memorable dish for me was the chicken enchiladas de mole negro, which had such a complex set of concentrated flavors with chile humming in the background all the while. Very, very...stimulating. Unfortunately I was so stimulated that I forgot to take a picture!

But there were more memorable moles...



E keeps talking about the duck with black mole at Izote by Patricia Quintana. A pile of shredded, tender duck in the most intense, sweet, salty, savory, spicy, unfamiliar...addictive, overwhelming sauce that looks like hot tar. Under a little pile of paper-thin onion shavings and a little flat disc of a tamal to mellow the flavor and settle your tummy. It was really good.



So was the scallop ceviche. I felt like I was back in Hong Kong. Eh? Texture! Toothiness, fleshiness, delicacy. Tiny little bites. Like nibbling on someone's earlobe. In a strangely tangy-salty juice that must have had soy in it. And saltines! Somehow it was perfect. I couldn't have eaten more than they served, but it was absolutely memorable.

Let me take you into a different texture universe... Ooh, but first, imagine nuns. With buns ;-)



Sorry, couldn't resist. It's true...if you have been seduced by the display of voluptuous baked goods in the window of Café Tacuba, and charmed despite yourself by the stained glass, brass, and dark wood...so that you drift hopelessly against your will inside the tiny doorway... You will find nuns. And you must confess to the nuns that what you really want in your deepest heart of hearts is one of those conchas with the sandy chocolate crust and buttery dough. Oh my lord, I am really defenseless when it comes to pan dulce.

The whole time we were in Mexico City I felt the same way I do when there is a chocolate bar in the house. I was aware the entire time that there was pan dulce to be had.



To make things worse, because it was Dia de Muertos, there was pan de muerto everywhere. A big, puffy turban-shaped bread crossed on the top with two "bones" made out of dough, dusted everywhere with granulated sugar and flavored subtly with orange flower water. Pan de muerto, sugar skulls, and all sorts of skeleton-shaped pastries were flying off the shelves at the much-loved Pasteleria Ideal on Uruguay Street in the historic center.



We are not done with sweets yet. Oh no. We had some extraordinary sweets by a really talented young chef named Sonia Arias. If I understand correctly, she is originally from Mexico City, trained at the prestigious Culinary Institute of America in NYC, worked in some top NYC restaurants, and returned to Mexico City with her husband Jared Reardon, himself a CIA grad (and Bostonian), to start a restaurant together that celebrates his savory cooking and her sweet creations. The restaurant is an amalgam of their names -- Jaso -- a la Bennifer or Brangelina.

Ok, so first the sweet...



This was a coffee-chocolate salty-sweet temperature-texture explosion. Doesn't look like much in the photo, I know. But those are triangles of some kind of creamy, nutty ice cream. Then there was coarse, gravely espresso granita (not too sweet), and then gooey molten chocolate cake with a crispy surface. Maybe there was something else in there too. There was so much going on, and it was so decadent, that I disappeared into my plate. When I came up for air, E had scarfed down his entire postmodern crème brûlée so I can't really tell you what that was like.



And now for the savory... This was the star of the savory show, in my opinion. It was called a squid dumpling. What it seemed to be, in fact, was a tenderly cooked piece of squid that was wrapped, like dumpling pasta, around a delicious crab filling. On top was a sauce that had something like crème fraîche in it, a perfect balance of tangy and creamy. On top of that, maybe a dusting of black truffle? I dunno. I disappeared into my plate on this one too.

Since we were still recovering from nonconsensual steak over-consumption in Argentina...we ate a lot of seafood in Mexico City. And I have to say that tuna tostadas at Contramar were not only some of the best seafood we had there, but strong contenders for one of the yummiest things I've ever eaten. Fabulous quality tuna tartar, dried or deep-fried onion shavings, chipotle mayo, lime, all on top of a fresh, crunchy tostada. My whole body just relaxed when I had a bite, and I said to E, "This is perfect food." It was a fresh, balanced, totally coherent dish. Yay!



Another thing I loved at Contramar were their sopes. Oh man. I love the smell of corn. A satisfyingly thick patty of it, not too big. Brilliantly tenderly crispy, with black beans on top, shredded lettuce, Cotija cheese, and natilla (?). I feel happy just thinking about them!



And then there was this salad I thought was going to be one of those throw-away dishes. You know, it balances out the menu, but it's nothing to write home about. Well, here I am writing home about it. Super grilled shrimp in a marinade that enhanced, rather than overwhelmed the shrimp flavor; thin slices of avocado, and tender chunks of sweet grapefruit, on a bed of arugula in a light vinaigrette. Delightful!

Oh, another thing about Contramar. Their waiters are really good: fast, focused, knowledgeable and polite. Really first class. Whoever owns the restaurant knows what they are doing. And I apologize to those guys because we had a reservation at their new restaurant called Merotoro, but we no-showed because our supposedly hotel-vetted taxi tried to charge an extortionate amount of money (200 pesos to go 3 km) and we both kind of melted down. Everyone tells you that it's dangerous not to take a vetted taxi (really, everyone), and every taxi ride was proceeded by a kind of edgy negotiation in which we tried to just get ripped off (not royally ripped off). Anyway, melt down, no cell phones. PF Chang. We punished ourselves!

One last thing... I'm a sucker for old-school good service. Not fussy service, but formal service. It makes me feel like all is right in the world. Estoril, a truly old-school Mexico City restaurant with very good food, has those kind of waiters who actually do take care of you. When they say, "Good evening Ms. X" it sounds genuine. Their menu is a funny combination of traditional Mexican dishes with some gourmet flair and then creaky old European classics like Chateaubriand and escargot.



They are famous for their shrimp tacos with deep-fried parsley (in Bacon fat!). Crispy, light, fresh. It rocked. Their sauteed squash blossoms in an artichoke heart was nice too.



Ooh, ooh, one more thing...

A disappointment: Biko.

Perhaps you have heard of the San Pellegrino Top 50 Restaurants in the World list? Well, Biko (another example of Basque culinary overachievement) is #31 on the list. I don't know what happened. But our meal did not go so well.

My Spanish is usually good enough to navigate most menus and dining scenarios. At Biko however, I simply could not understand anything coming out of our waiter's mouth. And he did not speak English. Nor did anyone else. And they were very busy. And then...it was a conceptual menu. Actually two parallel conceptual menus, one with the theme "abundance" and the other...I don't remember. Something like "discovery" or "innovation." Anyway, faced with dishes titled (in Spanish) things like La Naturaleza de Atun (the naturalness of tuna), I was screwed. I ordered badly and they over-sauced. E gritted his teeth. It was not fun.


One bright spot: a brilliant tender baby squid appetizer with smoked potato architectural constructions on the plate and the word "txipis" which I think means "squid" in Basque. Conceptual food by someone who hasn't worked at El Bulli and can actually conceptualize for themselves.  Wow.

To me, this meal was a service failure on their part and a research failure on mine. But nonetheless interesting.  

So, whoof, I am exhausted, overstimulated, overfed, and could easily spend months, if not years, getting my head wrapped around Mexico City, if such a thing is even possible.

Comfortable (but not too comfortable) in Chile

I feel sad today.

We're leaving Santiago tomorrow and I'm not ready to go.

Before we got here I had no expectations, maybe even low expectations, of the city.

Lonely Planet told me, "Santiago might be dirty and loud, and it might not match the grandeur of Buenos Aires - but it is cultured, quirky and ambitious."

Well, my first impressions of Santiago went something like...



Holy cow, are those mountains?





What a pretty neighborhood (Providencia & Ñuñoa)!



What a pretty street!





What a cool (and clean) apartment!



And a real kitchen! With a gas range, dishwasher, and a washer-dryer to boot. We're back in civilization, folks!

And then (drumroll please)...



A real smile on the other side of the table as a steaming, fragrant platter of perfectly seared Eastern Island tuna and octopus appeared in front of us at La Mar restaurant.

Not so shabby, Santiago. I wonder if Lonely Planet has been to BA recently, because what I remember more than the "grandeur" was a whole lotta this:



Lots and lots of formerly grand, and now broken, sidewalks.

As we settled into our flat in Santiago and went about daily life, I discovered...



There are roses...



Everywhere.



Plus, there's a real, 100+ year-old, central market called La Vega. According to Liz Caskey, a surprisingly young sommelier, chef, and local food-and-wine guide, La Vega stretches for 24 acres of...



artichokes,



as many as *nine* different varieties of avocado,



chiles, which Chilenos call ají, the most Chilean of which is the rocoto pepper.

You can buy nice salsas made with rocoto and other peppers in little 200-peso (about US$0.40) sacks. I created a tabla for E with a selection of salsas (including rocoto), fresh carrots (1/2 kilo for another US$0.40), cancha (toasted corn), and toasted habas, or fava beans.



Habas in their fresh form are abundant and have an attractive luminous, fuzzy skin...



One other wonderful thing you can get at La Vega is fresh merkén, a fabulous Chilean invention of smoked cacho de cabra chiles and dried coriander seeds (some versions may have cumin?).



Markets aside (and I highly recommend buying Liz's US$27 eatwineguide for its glossary and market intro), we couldn't get enough of the ceviche in Chile...



at the afore-mentioned La Mar,



at Astrid y Gastón, Gastón Acurio's mothership restaurant in the whole AyG, La Mar, Tanta, Madam Tusan stable of restaurants,



and at the old school, slightly weird, and very yummy, Barandiaran restaurant. Be very, very careful with their pisco sours, by the way. They come out of a plastic soda-counter juice machine and hit you like a Mack truck.

The life-blood of all of this Peruvian ceviche is leche de tigre. If you haven't yet tried it, you are in for a treat. Of course, everyone disagrees about what goes in it, but it's some combination of lime juice, aji (chili), ginger, and maybe cilantro, black pepper, and fish juice of some kind. It jump starts all of your senses at once. Awesome and invigorating.

We ate more Peruvian food in Santiago than any other type of cuisine. Maybe we should go to Lima, E mused. Then he asked a (Peruvian) waiter at Barandiaran if Lima was safe. The waiter kind of shrugged his shoulders and made a "weeeelll" sound. Hmm.

We were also happy to find an abundance of French bistro-style restaurants, among which my favorite was charming Le Flaubert where we had a simple artichoke salad followed by delicious beef with rosemary and rock salt. Yum, yum, yum.





To my surprise there is are also a large number of Basque restaurants in Santiago. Proportionally, I'd say as many as there are Japanese restaurants in NYC.

Apparently, Basque descendents are at least 10% of the Chilean population. Basque folks were some of the first European settlers of Chile, arriving en force as traders and entrepreneurs in the 18th century. They were successful in business and married well too, so their descendents are supposedly well-represented among Chile's "elite."

The Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno once said, "The Jesuits and the Republic of Chile are the two great feats of the Basque people."

Interesting.

I would add that a minor feat of the Basque people in Chile is machas a la parmesana (razor clams au gratin). Oh my god, so friggin' decadent, but so, so good.



If the very charming waiter at the (all-smoking!) restaurant Txoko Alavés hadn't suggested it, we might have missed out on this delectable dish. It's one of those things where the magic of the texture -- the firmness of the razor clambs, the chewiness of the baked cheese -- harmonizes magically with the rich flavors -- pink clam juice and parmesan sweetness.Yay!



And, of course, the waiter won my heart when he ran back to the kitchen and brought out a raw clam to show me what a macha was.



Did you know there are Palestinians in Chile too? They first started coming to Chile in the 19th century, and there are now about 500,000 Palestinian descendants in Chile, making it the largest such community outside of the Middle East. There is a professional futbal (soccer) club in Chile called Club Deportivo Palestino and a prestigious social club called Club Palestino founded in 1938. Interesting! Arab Chileans in general make up 5% of Chile's population.

(Sorry, I'm a data nerd. Can't help it.)

One tasty biproduct of this immigration is Bombón Oriental, an Arab sweets shop in the Lastarria neighborhood of Santiago. Besides having a charming old-fashioned sign, their windows are filled with decadent and intriguing cakes.



After much deliberation, I settled on this delicate, multi-layered poppy seed and orange rind glaze cake. Really a nice afternoon treat. There was another cake with walnuts and manjar that had me drooling too ;-)



All of this culinary diversity is kind of a surprise.

For years I've thought about Chileans as the "Germans of South America." I think my Chilean macroeconomics professor planted this seed in my head. He said that Chileans were so "German" he could only hold down one full-time job in Chile, whereas in Argentina he had two ;-)

Without getting into the whole German migration story, we didn't find Santiaguinos to be "German" at all (I'll let you infer for yourselves what that might mean). Maybe this has to do with the influence of all of these other cultures (Peruvian, Basque, French, Palestinian).

If anything, I would describe Santiaguinos as...

Very funny, in an understated and kind of cool way. People were busting my chops right and left, and I couldn't help laughing. For example, after I answered the immigration officer at the airport in lugubrious Spanish, he told me, "In Chile we speak more cortito" (i.e., short). And then he taught me a new word, altiro, which means "right now!" in local slang.

Irreverent and not-all-that law-abiding. Taxis would pull crazy u-turns, crossing eight lanes of traffic to pick you up if there was no cop in sight. Unfortunately, they also cheerfully ripped me off right and left without hesitation too.

Goofy! Before our trip, a friend described Chileans as "the wooden people." And it's true that people have their poker faces on walking down the street. But oddly enough, there are Santiaguinos juggling in traffic, singing love songs on the bus, and walking tight-rope between city trees next to stoplights to earn a few bucks.



Lovers...of people and dogs. I got piropo-d up and down in this town. Big wet kisses out the window, I'm telling you. I also saw a fair amount of shnugging in public parks. But what really cracked me up was people's sweetness toward dogs.

In Santiago, dogs are just walking around free, as if they were independent people. In a city of 5+ million people. You'll see them ownerless and leashless standing next to you in the crosswalk, waiting to cross. Even more so, you'll see them taking siestas, flat on their sides, like pancakes, particularly at 3pm in the afternoon. One dog I saw in a perfect state of relaxation flat on his back in rush hour foot traffic. Clearly, people treat these dogs well, otherwise how could they be this relaxed?







People seemed relaxed in Santiago too. You can feel that there is money in the economy right now. It's like good blood flow. People are cheerfully walking their children to school, taking ballet classes, riding bikes. People's houses are well cared for... You don't do those things when you're desperate for work.

Where does this money come from?

This is something that made me nervous about enjoying myself too much, or allowing myself to be too charmed by the life in Santiago.

That blood coursing through the city's veins comes from mining. According to the CIA World Factbook, copper mining alone accounts for 1/3 of government revenue. There are smart people in Chile. They don't want to suffer the same boom-and-bust of nitrate mining in the 19th century so they're hedging against this exposure...

The Chilean government conducts a rule-based countercyclical fiscal policy, accumulating surpluses in sovereign wealth funds during periods of high copper prices and economic growth, and allowing deficit spending only during periods of low copper prices and growth. As of September 2008, those sovereign wealth funds - kept mostly outside the country and separate from Central Bank reserves - amounted to more than $20 billion. Chile used $4 billion from this fund to finance a fiscal stimulus package to fend off recession. (CIA World Factbook)

That's nice, but I still feel nervous. On some level it's a visceral nervousness. Last weekend, we went on a very strange tour to El Teniente outside of Santiago. El Teniente is the largest underground copper mine in the world.









We took a bus deep into the heart of a mountain of solid rock, 6 km into the heart. (The guide said there are 3000 km of tunnels inside the mountain.)



Once inside this cold, damp, dark, heavy-feeling place, we saw the enormous "crunching" equipment for breaking down large rocks into smaller rocks (which get broken down into smaller and smaller rocks before the copper is extracted).



...and then we saw the little "crystal cavern," a pocket of water that had remained sealed for 4,000 years in which massive crystals had grown (the one we saw was more than 2 m long and almost 1 m wide) in this rare environment.



After seeing this, I don't know why, but I just wanted to get out of there. Like I had done something wrong. There's something about drilling into the core of this mountain that felt like a real desecration, in the same way that deep water oil drilling seems so deeply disrespectful. It feels dangerous. Not that the mining itself puts workers at risk, but that interacting with these massive mountains in this way seems really dumb.

Some other things made me nervous too...

Although all the guide books reassured me that Santiago is one of the safest cities in Latin America, while we were there students were burning buses and coordinating protests across the city, which somehow felt like terrorist events. The students are protesting inequality in education and demanding free education from the government.



This tension may have been one of the reasons the police (called the Carabineros de Chile) in Santiago seemed so spooky. I saw them on powerful motorbikes and horses rushing aggressively around the Parque Forestal as if to scare and scatter people.

But it's also the Carabineros' uniforms, which are highly militaristic, and their logo, which has two crossed rifles and the words "Orden y Patria" (order and the fatherland). To me, the logo looks like "keeping people in order, with guns."





This creeps me out because it resonates with the belief of former Pinochet supporters, that the human rights abuses of his regime were necessary to keep order and restore the economy that was faltering in Allende's hands.

Pinochet rejected the idea of an activist state and instead talked about the need to modernize Chile, with the exclusion of political liberties. Inspired by the works of Hayek and Friedman, and working with the so-called "Chicago Boys", the military government introduced an austere and extremely radical neo-liberal economic plan. For Pinochet, this model of development meant freeing market forces, privatizing vast segments of the economy, the reversal of both Frei and Allende's land reforms, and withdrawing the state from its previous role in overseeing economic and social change. The economic liberalization model, however, was coupled with severe political repression and human suffering. (Oxford Dictionary of Political Biography)

I learned something new about Pinochet too. Apparently he was thought to be a supporter of democracy and constitutional government...until he wasn't. He held his cards close to his chest until he saw the opportunity to seize control. Of course, the opportunity was provided by my fabulous country, as CIA documents declassified in 2003 show.

Why Chileans don't hate us Norteamericanos baffles me. But actually I'm not sure that Chileans don't hate NAs. Maybe they just hold their cards close to their chests. People called me gringo in Chile, which was sort of a shock. Gringo, to me connotes the edgy us-and-them dynamic in USA-Mexico relationships. I was walking around Santiago thinking it was all just "us," but people kept reminding me how we gringos get better technology, get better education, have more in general than they Chileans do.

It's gradually sinking in for us that there may be no place on the planet where us gringo-gweilos are welcomed with open arms.