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Day 4: 13 June 2002 - "Spongebob Squarepants is a bisexual."

Thursday morning, Pato and I got up and lazed around a bit. We had breakfast and listened to CDs, including Jillian's, so "Stain of Blue" was stuck in our head for much of the morning. Then we went out driving through Santiago and took Myriam and Ismael's daughter, María Eliana, on some errands at the Universidad de Santiago. A couple of things that struck me while we were driving around were a bus driving by with a Confederate flag in the window (sorry, no, a bus didn't literally strike me - sorry for any confusion) and the street vendors. Pato says that the street vendors aren't legal, but the police don't really bother with them. At all of the red lights, the vendors descend upon the road, walking in between the lanes, carrying candy, cigarettes, vegetables, sweets, or whatever their specialty happens to be. At one point, I also saw someone juggling fire in the street.

In the afternoon, we went to a shopping mall to change money and shop. It was a lot like American shopping malls, but the best thing about a foreign country is that just when you think you've found something comfortable and familiar, it surprises you. One of my favorite things about the mall was what I dubbed the "Husband Corral". There was a roped-off area in the middle of the store with a big screen TV showing a fútbol game. I assumed that the wives paid for a seat for their husbands to sit in so that they would be occupied while the wives were shopping. I also liked picking up little bits of Chilean Engrish, like the stores called Bubble Gummers, Dijon Kids (yum!), Zapping Book, and Jai Level (the letter J in Spanish is pronounced like an English H...).

We had lunch in a cafeteria-style restaurant called Gatsby's. Cafeteria-style restaurants are good for foreigners because you can try a lot of things you don't recognize. I had fishless sushi and 300 different kinds of salad and salmon and a wide array of desserts, including mil hojas. This is a lovely cake with layer on layer of pastry and manjar, a sort of dulce de leche/caramel spread that Chileans seem to enjoy at every time of the day. Mmmmm. After I ate the mil hojas, which was very filling, I decided that I would never need to eat anything else as long as I lived. In fact, for several days afterwards, just thinking of mil hojas made me feel full.

That evening, we set off for Rancagua, which is about 1.5 hours south of Santiago. I asked Pato about Super Pollo, a sign I kept seeing all over Santiago and on billboards between Santiago and Rancagua. I couldn't decide if it was a brand of chicken or cereal. He told me that Super Chicken was their national hero and a great symbol of Chile. After a while, he gave in and told me that it was, indeed, a brand of chicken.

We arrived in Rancagua and I met tía Soledad and tío Teddy as well as their youngest daughter, Pato's cousin Tamara. They had to make a trip to the supermarket, so Pato, tía Amada (Pato's mom) and I went along. I like to visit foreign supermarkets for the same reason I like to visit foreign shopping malls. Tamara and Pato and I wandered off and did our own thing, picking up bread and Pato's favorite cereal, Chocapic, and browsing all of the other aisles. Pato told Tamara about the Chilean hero Super Pollo, which she found quite amusing.

We went home and had some tea, then we all went to bed. It was a bit cold, but it didn't seem much colder than Santiago...

...yet.

srah - Thursday, 13 June 2002 - 11:40 PM
Tags: chile, travel

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