Santiago 6

Café Caribe, short skirts but ugly women, so read the entry in my diary for this day. Intrigued, I looked it up on the Internet and it came back to me. It seems that in the 80s coffee wasn't good in Chile, so cafes, including the aforementioned Café Caribe, offered "Café con Piernas" (coffee with legs), waitresses dressed in micro-skirts to entice customers. I hope they have improved since. The coffees, that is.

This time I caught the metro to Tobalaba station, looking for an English language bookstore for a present. But they were few and the selection was poor. Shopping arcades had a mix of professional suites and shops. Many units were empty. The retail centre of gravity seemed to be moving towards Providencia. I found a late lunch of escalope a lo pobre (a variation on lomo a lo pobre) near Plaza de Armas. Had too much beer with it though.

In the evening I repacked my backpack for storage in Buenos Aires airport, as I intended to carry just a daypack for the last couple of days. I tried to look for more CDs and even took the metro to Los Leones station but the mall was closed by 2100. I gave in and had a burger as a late dinner. It tasted like fast food everywhere else in the world.

It was now evening and it looked like in darker corners men and women were having secret trysts. Was Chilean society a bit repressed?

I thought of getting an ice cream to round off the evening, but raindrops put paid to the idea. This was my last picture taken in Chile, of La Moneda by lamplight, before calling it a night.