August 11: El Clinic

Skipping the part where I run across Santiago like a chicken with my head cut off, I had quite a pleasant late afternoon. I wandered around Barrio Lastarría/Bellas Artes for a few hours. These are the "hip" areas of the cities- cute boutiques, bookstores and cafes line the streets. Being the huge nerd that I am, I was enthralled by the bookstores. Although books in Chile can be absurdly pricey, something I'm guessing has to do with the dictatorship, bookstores here are wonderfully academically oriented and being independent, haven't got the same crappy Barnes and Noble uniformity that is the US bookstore scene. It's interesting to see what authors translate well- the alter-globalization movement, Paul Auster and Foucault were just a few names that stood out far more than they ever would back home.
After a wonderful 2 hours of rambling, I met up at Bar The Clinic with our monitores culturales, Chilean students who are supposed to take us to fun places around the city and help us through Chilean slang, culture, university life, etc. Bar The Clinic is a spin off restaurant of a popular satirical newspaper, The Clinic, named for the London Clinic where Pinochet was arrested. Essentially, it pokes fun at pretty much every major player in Chilean political/cultural life. But since, as pretty much all satire does, it leans left, it's got plenty of material with the current right government of Sebastian Piñera. As it was described to us in orientation, imagine the only news sources in your country are Fox News or the Daily show. I don't know if the Chilean media is quite that bad, but it's definitely interesting to see how an irreverant newspaper functions as a political opposition. It was also great to have the Chilean students with us to explain the humor, mainly derived from double meanings of words, that filled the menus which were designed like newspapers.

In culinary news, we tried terremotos (earthquakes) for the first time, Chile's answer to Long Island Ice Tea, except delicious. While pisco (grape brandy), white wine and pineapple ice cream might not sound enticing, they come together well and made for quite a happy evening :)