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.

Buenos Aires 2

Argentine National Congress

My room had a TV and there were a couple of decent channels such the Latin American music one. Must buy some CDs at the end of the trip, I decided. There was also a TV España channel. Still looking towards Europe it seemed.

Breakfast at Coto was American: bread, jam, butter, eggs with ham, coffee with milk, orange juice and dulce de leche. The locals like the last, but I will never get used to it; too sweet and gooey. It's essentially caramelised condensed milk. My diary records that breakfast cost me the princely sum of 1 peso, or 1 USD. I think that was no mistake because Coto could sell those meals cheaply.

I found the porteños cordial. Once a couple of women offered to take my picture. But they seemed to be always on the move. I had to walk just as fast or I would get trampled, or so it seemed to me.

I noted that João Gilberto was playing on Sunday night so I decided to attend. The box office had a manual but effective booking system: a pegboard recorded which seats had been sold.

For lunch I had a couple of empanadas, of pollo and carne (chicken and meat). Not bad. Before I set out my ex-colleague whose family had migrated from Baires to the US when she was a teenager gave me a list of nostalgic food I should try, and I was going to work through the whole list. Dulce de leche was one, already did that. Sandwiches de miga were essentially the same as English tea sandwiches. I had one of jamon and huevo (ham and egg). Ok, they get a pass mark. I couldn't find bananitas de chocolate, which I suspect are these: bananita dolca. Must have been a childhood treat for my friend. Alfajores were too sweet for my taste. Like everywhere else in the world, French croissants and baguettes had conquered patisseries.

Bookshops were well-stocked. Besides Spanish, I found English, French and Italian works. The antiquarian bookshops had a lot of ancient stuff. Porteños read really esoteric stuff; at a magazine vendor in the underground I saw titles such as Journal of Mass Transit!