A busy weekend

In today's potentially interesting but sadly longwinded episode, our intrepid hero speaks much Spanish without the use of a safety net or the subjunctive mood, delights an appreciative audience with his singing skills and has a brush with the law.

I went out on Friday night with my new book (Angels In The Snow, by Derek Lambert) intending to have a couple of beers then back to the hotel and out again around 9. As it happened, I figured I'd just switch to coke and stay out to save the hassle of going back to the hotel. The book had already started to disintegrate minutes after I bought it, and under the strain of being carried around the pages started to detach themselves like autumn leaves. I managed not to lose it over the course of the night, so I should at least get to read it once, but I think that's about as long as it will last. Maybe a little surgery with duck tape will fix it, if I can be bothered.

Anyway, I went over to Bella Vista, which I'd been advised by those students I met earlier (and already knew from the guide book) was quite lively. This is just north of the river (which is rather weedy and unimpressive, to be honest) and felt completely different to the other places I've been, it all looked a bit run down. However, it was indeed very lively - there's a long stretch of one street (Pio Nono, as it turns out) which is lined with bars on both sides, most with big collections of tables in the street, and all were absolutely heaving, not to mention the people inside. This was at about 10pm, I had expected things to not have started getting busy by then, but clearly I was wrong.

The atmosphere of the place and the style of the bars was a bit like I picture Camden in my head, although I never really went there a huge amount and it's probably completely different now. Generally young people, the bars all slightly down-at-heel in a slightly intimidating but satisfyingly un-glitzy way.

I did a couple of circuits of the street (the entire length, both sides) trying to find a bar that didn't look too intimidating and with a free table. In the end I came under pressure from my bladder to be less of a wuss and put up with a table inside in an only slightly intimidating bar. I had some difficulties buying a drink - in hindsight, I realise my UK-style efforts to buy a beer at the bar were the problem and I should have sat at a table and been served by a waiter. I always struggle to believe in the existence of table service in the average bar, partly because of a fear of sitting at a table like a lemon waiting to be served when I should be going to the bar myself. Anyway. We live and learn.

I felt like a two hundred year old loser sitting there reading my book, although looking around it wasn't as if I was the only person over 25. I was the only one on my own, though. But the way I try to look at it, I can't help being here on my own and I shouldn't let it stop me doing stuff even if I look stupid.

I started to feel a bit less conspicuous after I'd finished the extremely cheap (CLP1500, less than two quid) litre bottle of beer and figured I'd wander off and see if anywhere else on that street was better.

Observing, as if fate had guided my footsteps to this location, a bar across the street with the magic word "karaoke" on a big sign, I went and had a look. It was only the lure of making an idiot of myself by singing badly in public that induced me to go into somewhere called "Crazy Bar", the name conjuring up a horrible Timmy Mallett-esque vision of desperate zaniness. They charged me to get in, so I was kind of committed, but I had a look round anyway. In the small-ish front half of the bar there was indeed karaoke being performed, in the back was a cavernous and almost deserted dance floor, which I don't ever recall seeing very busy. (They had different music in the back, people didn't have to dance to the karaoke.)

It's a good thing they charged me to get in as otherwise I'd have probably left. There were no free tables in the front so I couldn't get served by a waiter, and the procedure for purchasing a drink in person at the bar was the sort of thing I'd previously only heard about in stories of shops in communist countries. It took me a considerable amount of milling around, asking people and then hitting subsequent brick walls to figure out the process. It turns out that you have to go to the payment point where you order your drink, pay and get given a written copy of your order. You then go over to the bar, fight your way between the waiters and wave the written order around until the barman gets fed up with ignoring you and swaps the paper for the drink.

I guess there's some kind of cross-checking system going on here, but it seems needlessly complex to me. I've seen the same thing in other bars since, it's not just Crazy Bar trying to live up to its name. Some places have let me, as an ignorant tourist, bypass the system by handing the money to the barman and have him give it to the cashier, but not all. Sometimes the cashier will serve you instead of making you take the ticket to the barman. Ah well, it's easy enough once you know how.

I signed up to sing "Si No Te Hubieras Ido" and, only having had that one litre of beer up to that point and spurred on by fear of suddenly being called up while practically sober, renewed my efforts to give them money in exchange for beer. I needn't have worried, my request to sing obviously got lost.

Wow, a thousand words already and nothing's happened except I've bought a couple of beers. Must suppress tendency to ramble.

While I was hanging around waiting (as it turned out, pointlessly) for my song, I spotted a free table and acquired it, primarily with a view to ordering my next drink via a waiter. A guy at the next table asked me if I spoke English and it turned out he was an exchange student at the university here, was from somewhere in California and fluent in Spanish as he had Mexican grandparents, if I recall correctly. He, Thomas, was with a Chilean guy who I assumed he'd just met that night, Enrique. So we got to chatting, although what with the music and my problems with the local accent, my direct conversation with Enrique was somewhat restricted. He was drinking the delightfully named local beverage piscola, which is coke with pisco in, the latter apparently being a Chilean spirit which is vaguely similar to brandy.

Once I wasn't just sat there on my own things went a lot better. I got dragged up onto the stage to dance by a woman from the next table and I put in a request to sing El Rey instead, since by this point I suspected my original request wasn't coming up. And sing it, badly, I did, with the aid of the woman who'd made me dance. I think they actually cut it short, although it wasn't done really obviously, but that was probably for the best. I'm quite chuffed with myself for doing it, in some strange way.

The bar was open until 5am, which I think is the standard and possibly legally enforced closing time. Earlier on I'd kind of promised to see the night through, so I was deliberately careful and kept switching between beer and coke. As they were throwing us out at 5am and I was expecting to go home, Thomas explained that they were going on somewhere else and I was welcome to join them. And obviously I couldn't turn down the chance to see more of the local nightlife. Fortunately I was pretty sober.

We wandered around a bit and after failing to get into one bar, five of us squeezed into a taxi to go to a bar someone knew. We were a pretty diverse group, a Brit (obviously), an American, a Puerto Rican and two Chileans. It was disappointing nothing terribly humorous showing the perceived differences in our national characters happened when we walked into the bar.

This bar was effectively secret, the guy who knew the place just walked up to some nondescript door, we paid the guy who answered and went in. The place was fairly small and to be frank a little bit intimidating at first, but it was OK.

At this point I ended up talking to the Puerto Rican guy, whose name turned out to be Estefano. I could understand him tolerably well and he seemed patient enough to repeat stuff all the time as necessary. I was a bit surprised but I think he said that he had worked in a number of different countries and it had sort of knocked the edges off his accent.

Enrique and Thomas left at about 7am, after Enrique very kindly expressed (via Thomas, it was incredibly embarassing but I could never understand a word he said, I assume I need to get used to the Chilean accent) concern about how I'd get home and said I could stay at his place if I wanted, but I explained that my hotel was pretty close and I could always get a cab. (Ives, Chubbard - if you're reading this, you may as well stop now and just switch over to your own fantasy version.)

I stayed there chatting with Estefano until they shut at something like 9am. He then suggested we go get some beer from the supermarket near his place, which was a short walk from the bar, and go drink them back there, so we did. We took our last cans of beer from the bar with us. Clearly this isn't allowed, a policeman spotted us and insisted on us throwing them in the bin. It was a good job Estefano was there, although of course if he hadn't been I wouldn't have been walking around with a can of beer anyway. I seem to recall seeing the guy approaching us, me asking him if there was a problem and him saying yes, there was a problem, in a slow and intimidating but also annoying way.

I am so glad I was taking it easy at the start of the night, I won't say I was sober when we left his place - the plan being to go get something to eat, then go home, get some sleep and meet up again that night - but I wasn't incredibly drunk. A good job too as we then ended up having a few more beers at his neighbour's flat for some reason.

We were talking about music with his neighbour and for some reason Hombres G came up. The (Chilean) neighbour had never heard of them, but Estefano had. I said they were Spanish, he said they were Argentinian, so we had a small bet on it.

When we left to get the metro into town for food, someone - it may have been me - suggested we ask some of the people going past. So we ended up accosting maybe ten groups of people waking down the street or on the metro asking them if they knew Hombres G. And I think what this survey reveals is that no Chileans know who they are. When we got to the restaurant, we asked a couple of women at the next table - and they knew. But they were Peruvian. And yes, Hombres G are Spanish, so I won.

The fact that I found this process of asking people amusing is perhaps the best indication of my position on the drunkenness scale.

The food was good, at Estefano's recommendation I tried the ceviche (raw fish marinated in lime juice), although I made sure to check with him he'd eaten it there before. And to his and the restuarant's credit, I haven't been ill yet and if I get sick now it's probably not caused by the ceviche.

It was about 4pm when we left the restuarant and we'd arranged to meet somewhere at 10pm. I went home, set the alarm for 9 and woke up feeling a bit under the weather. I made it to the agreed meeting point dead on time but had to hang around half an hour for Estefano. Well, 25 minutes to be more precise - I know because I was half tempted to just go back home and sleep some more, and I'd said to myself that after I'd been waiting half an hour I'd leave.

We went back to the restaurant we'd been to earlier, which has a sort of bar/nightclub upstairs at the weekend. It was about 11pm at this point and the place was deserted and I was feeling a sort of dull ache at the back of my eyeballs and thinking I'd stretch it out to about 2am and then leave with a plea of tiredness. I also kind of figured that wouldn't be necessary, as Estefano had already told me that he didn't go to bed at all, so it occurred to me that he might leave first.

But the place filled up and a friend of Estefano's joined us with a woman I take to be his girlfriend, although I never actually asked. He was not Chilean either, I don't know where they all are but there don't seem to be many in Santiago. :-) He was trilingual in Portuguese, Spanish and Guarani (the local language in Paraguay) and also spoke a little English, although - not for the last time that night - I found myself in the somewhat embarrassing position of not being able to understand someone's extremely well intentioned efforts to speak English to me.

And almost without me realising it, it was suddenly 3 or 4am and I'd bounced back and was having a pretty good time. At about 4am we were chatting to the Peruvian owner, who Estefano knows quite well. I was deeply impressed that he knew Procol Harum, he did in fact say he'd try to play one of their songs for me but I don't think they had one.

The guys behind the bar were using these sodding enormous knives to flick the bottle tops off. At first every time I saw them do it I winced. Apparently (I asked the owner, with Estefano acting as pseudo-translator where necessary) it's more impressive than using a bottle opener as the cap flies up into the air. He was waving the knife around jokingly pretending to cut himself while explaining this.

We were about the last to leave, as we were in the privileged position of knowing the staff. The owner gave me a CD of some sort, which I haven't tried (I don't have any way to do so here) but appears from the label to be a collection of photos produced by the Peruvian tourist board.

Estefano proposed that we get a cab over to the same after-hours bar we'd been to before, and I figured I might as well go for broke. We got chatting to a few people there and finally went back to Estefano's with the last couple of cans to finish them there. He was clearly showing signs of being knackered while we were at the last bar, and I guess as soon as he got back home it really hit him, so I left him to go to bed and got the metro back to the hotel. As I was walking from Baquedano station to the hotel, a small and inoffensive street dog walked past me and I was clearly sufficiently drunk to risk stroking it. It was very friendly, although it stood there staring at me in a slightly guilt-inducing fashion when I left it. Oh, and when I looked at my hand afterwards I realised the dog was absolutely filthy as well.

There are a few, although not loads, of presumably stray dogs around. They all seem very inoffensive, which is a good job for my peace of mind. (The biggest risk is probably treading on one sleeping in the street by accident.) I'm probably thinking too much, but it seems odd that there are a few. If there were loads then it would be a difficult problem to solve and would at least make sense, but there seem to be sufficiently few that it surely couldn't cost much to deal with them. And if no one is dealing with them, why aren't there loads by now? Maybe lots get killed off by traffic, but the more I think about it the less sense it makes. I'm sure there's a dead obvious explanation which I'm missing.

Anyway. I had a very quiet day on Sunday when I got home, I slept until about 6pm and dithered around in the flat til engaging in what turned out to be an epic quest to find food about 9:30. (Everywhere was either insanely expensive, shut, or absolutely heaving.) I had just planned to pop out very quickly but I ended up walking over what seemed like half the city. Still, I did get to see what it's like here on a Sunday night as a result - there were quite a lot of people around having dinner and a few drinks and a certain amount of street entertainers, there was obviously some sort of big musical performance going on in the Plaza de Arms when I walked through (I didn't stay, I was hungry and worried everywhere would close before I found somewhere to eat), as well as a few guys performing in the street. Miraculously no human statues were observed, so the artistic standard here is relatively high. :-)

Vague plan for today is to go over to Cerro San Cristobal, go up on the funicular to take a look at the view and wander around a bit. I also need to go to an internet cafe to print out the flight and hotel confirmations ready for the next few days. To be honest I'm a bit jittery about the next stage of the trip as it seems to involve a lot more travelling and less staying in one place having a good time than I'm used it. But I'm sure it will be OK.

(Oh, yes. One of the guys I met at the secret bar on Sunday morning said I would be absolutely fine just doing a one day bus tour of Torres del Paine. I half expected him to burst out laughing and tell me that I had to spend three weeks there at least and hike at least two of the trails. :-) )