Drunken wafflings

Photos here:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/45804996@N03/sets/

Well, I just got back after a Saturday night out. I was vaguely planning to go to a jazz bar just off the delightfully named Rua Haddock Lobo (wolf-fish!?), but it was raining (and had been pissing it down earlier while I was back at the hotel) and I couldn't see the side street I'd been looking for, so when I saw some small bar with a woman singing I figured I'd go there and what the hell. And it was a fairly decent night. About £13 for five more-than-pints and another £5 for a cab home. They even had a Colombian guy singing at some point, so I felt slightly more at home as I could understand 75% of what he was singing as opposed to about 25% of the Portuguese songs.

I have to say that despite the impression I picked up from the guide books, everyone I have had any dealings with here has been remarkably pleasant and not ripped me off. For example, when I went up the Edificio Italia earlier, I had to nerve myself to go and talk to the security guard on the ground floor of what looked like a normal office building. He spoke very little English and no Spanish but went out of his way to show me to the lift to get up to the bar. And similarly, the taxi drivers have apparently been very reasonable and resisted the temptation to tell me it's £200 for a five minute journey. I'm almost disappointed, I had expected to find myself hating Brazilians with a passion and instead it turns out they are decent, normal people. :-)

The staff at the bar I was at tonight were similiar. Admittedly my Portuguese does just about stretch to ordering a beer and asking for the bill, but they somehow avoided the temptation to charge me double, or if they did it was still so reasonable I didn't notice.

I must observe that a lot of the bars here serve a 600ml bottle of beer in a polystyrene container (that's the guide book talking, I see the container but have no idea what is in it except beer) to keep it cool, and give you a small glass to pour beer into to drink. A bit odd but quite sensible and not a problem. At the bar tonight, however, the glass was extremely small, the sort of thing you'd use to put your toothbrush in, which made it a bit odd. Continually pouring beer into it made me feel a bit like I was stuck in a hotel somewhere drinking shots of whisky out of the tiny glass in the bathroom.

All things considered it's going pretty well. In fact my primary concerns are about booking the Easter Island trip and, more pressingly, sorting out the hotel in Tierra del Fuego. I vaguely plan to get up about midday tomorrow, do some kind of tour they offer at the Se metro station (I need to get there no later than 1:30pm to sign up, so an early start ;-) )  and then spend the evening trying to get some sort of plan together for the next bit of the trip.