She's Gonna Blow!

Mt. Calbuco.  Not my photo

This is going to be a large-ish rant.  If you want to sustain any kind of impression that travelling in Argentina and Chile is altogether enjoyable please stop reading here and go read a poem or two by Pablo Neruda.

I gotta say I feel a lot in common with Volcan Calbuco these days.  I have been trying to keep my blogs as positive as I can – believe it or not.  I was thinking today that if anyone ever had the misfortune to contract me as a writer for touristic activities I would create a book that would send potential visitors away in droves - if I let loose with my candid impressions. Humans are funny, but lately I’m not laughing with them. Maybe it’s my age, maybe it’s my increasingly short temper but I have such a hard time writing enthusiastically about Chile and Argentina.  I am having an interesting time – but not a particularly positive one.  I don’t want to come across as a racist, culturist, sexist, ageist griper though pretty much that’s what I am. It all seems to come back to that same opening phrase – ‘Why can’t they just.....’. I feel like exploding approximately 4237.5 times each day. I dreamt a few nights ago that I had been hired in Canada to design public spaces in a conscious, practical fashion – eliminating all the stupid barriers, restrictions and plain bad ideas that typify our urban experiences.  I think my subconscious is working overtime on this new obsession.

Start with the food?  Why not?  Why such a cavernous lack of imagination in Argentina and Chile regarding publicly available cuisine? Is Canada unique in its agglomeration of different styles and types of cooking.  I have always worried that might be the case –about 80% of the volume of our refrigerator is occupied by different condiments, pastes, chutneys, seasonings because we love to prepare meals from all over the world.  What I wouldn’t give for a Szechuan, Indian or Middle Eastern dish right now! Hell is filled with Parilla restaurants.  ‘What would you like today sir? We have beef, beef, beef, sirloin, flank, ribs, beef and beef.’ Of course you can have some potatoes on the side. ‘Salad?’ There’s lettuce, tomates, avocado and.....well that’s about it. For your dressing here is some olive oil and here is some white vinegar.  Help yourself to some salt.  Good luck finding some fucking pepper. Of course I exaggerate.  Chile has seafood as well.  Ceviche, mariscos, ostiones (clams) with some gloppy cheese that turns your mouth into a Carlsbad cavern of queso stalactites and there’s a decent fish called Reineta.  But no matter where you go it is all prepared the same way.  Overcooked and bland, bland, bland.  Did I mention that they don’t believe in pepper here?  Or any spices for that matter.  In fact there is no Spanish word for spice until you get up to Mexico where suddenly all that pent up avoidance of anything that might stimulate the oral cavity turns into, well, Mexican food = oral Calbuco. Only coriander here is de rigeur. I’m getting de rigeur mortis. (groan)

But the topper is bread.  I am told that Chileans love their ‘pan’.  You get soft, white bread with everything.  And LOTS of it.  Bread for breakfast, lunch, dinner and anytime you open your mouth.  Always that soft, bland, tasteless, slightly chewy bread. Never toasted, never a molecule of whole grain or, God forfend and Yoicks!, rye, spelt, quinoa, oats...  It’s like eating sugarless marshmallows every day.  One would avoid all that bread if there was an alternative – like fruit for instance – in an abundance of water the fool is thirsty – well where’s the collective dunce cap?  Everywhere you look while walking around you see are piles of fantastic fruits and vegetables but the hotels and restaurants can’t seem to get past bread. Their jams are delicious. I haven’t yet stuck just a spoonful of jam in my mouth yet to avoid the bread carrier but I have been sorely tempted.

Outside the room I am writing in there are dates, passion fruit, olives, lemons, limes and apples growing –  practically within arms reach.  But for breakfast we get... bread.  And Nescafe for heaven’s sake.  In Argentina they had high standards for coffee at least.  Really – it’s almost worth travelling to Argentina for coffee alone. Here you get mud-brown volcanic ash that dissolves in your cup.  Mind you Argentina was a bit manic with the medialunes – croissants that complemented the morning coffee - a novelty at first but after a few weeks that croissant would just perch like a Cheshire rictus on the breakfast plate each morning, cruelly reminding one that each bite delivered 5 cms of fat to the belly. Spontaneously.  Hideosity.

Ok, enough food.  Street layout and driving habits.  When we were primarily pedestrians in Buenos Aires it didn’t really faze us that streets were predominantly one way.  The traffic lights were tricky then – they often didn’t face you if you were walking on a one way street that ran opposite to your direction so it was difficult to know if it was safe to walk or you were going to be turned into human butter.  But we survived by observing what other people, or dogs, were doing.

But here we are driving much of the time. Chileans invented the phrase ‘You can’t get there from here.’  Streets are not only almost entirely one way; each direction alternates and each right of way is based on some infernal system I haven’t unravelled (so no need for stop or yield signs?). That seems easy enough except you have to add in the fact that you often can’t make a left on to the street you want (???!!?????don’taskmewhy!!!????!!!@#%$*^&LORD).  So, in Chile two wrongs don’t make a right but three rights make a left.  It’s enough to make you take up knitting.  And no u-turns on the boulevards and no right turns on a red light andthosefuckingChileanswhohonktheirhorn any time you slow down to only twice the speed limit and who try to jam their front fenders up your arse.  Just when you think you have it solved and you are confident that the generous thoroughfare you are on is going to take you out of whatever hellacious town you are suffering through the capacious artery dwindles to a minor corpuscle thruway which then turns into a wee blood vessel and then ceases to exist altogether – turning instead into a road that runs the opposite direction and offers you only one way to turn – right.  I have popped three eyeballs already.

The physical condition of the roads is pretty good in Chile.  And the sidewalks are generally smooth and free of bear-pits – so top marks for that. In fact I will go further, Canada could take a page or two out of the sidewalk design in Chile.  Sidewalks – amazingly true to my earlier proposal regarding standardized surfaces – are usually tiled, with a nice textured impression for good footing.  AND most sidewalks, even in this little town I am/was in (Vicuna), have that nifty textured path that enables blind persons to navigate by following the street Braille.  At most intersections the sidewalks have a nice, sloping ramp to road grade for wheelchair and cart use.  So, top marks there.  Get the Department of Sidewalks and Pedestrian Ways to talk to the Department of Insane Roads and Passive-Aggressive Thoroughfares people. I am not certain that the slope on the sidewalks that drop to street grade would work perfectly in Toronto with the Department of Public Jerk’s uniquely satanic treatment of putting salt on snow, thus turning it into zero-friction shaving-gel - creating a medium so slick in fact that there are often luge teams practicing at the foot of our street. We would have to design a grippier texture for that portion of the walkway.  Still waiting for those robotic sidewalk scrapers please.

I think that’s enough.  Half of my spleen is on the floor and some prick just tried to pick it up to cook it in the Parilla next door so I will retire for esta noche.  I’ll give myself a day to review this diatribe and perhaps edit out some of the more kind-hearted bits.