El mes de los gatos/ Kitty month

So the end of August means many things to you. Perhaps it's the end of the blackberry season, time to dust off your pencils and books, looking forward to Labor day. I have been somewhat remiss in not educating you on the finer points of August here in Santiago, which is that it is cat month.

We don't exactly celebrate cats during this month, so much as we hear them yowling their fool heads off, because this is the month in which cats tend to entrar en celos (which sounds like they're getting jealous, but really means they go into heat). Because most people don't get their cats "operados" (fixed, neutered, spayed), the cats go a bit crazy this time of year.

Yesterday on a long walk with some friends to look for a new apartment (for me) on which we found absolutely nothing, apartment-wise, we did come across a lot of very sweet cats, like this one:



And it got me to thinking (aside from why am I not finding a spiffy new apartment), about all the ways in which we use the word gato in Spanish.

...There's gato the cat, which is easy enough to remember.
...Then there's the jack for the car, also a gato (or gata), though in Portuguese it's a monkey (macaco), which I think makes more sense, monkeys having actual fingers and things with which to hold onto stuff, and I daresay they are probably stronger, and mayhaps more cooperative than cats.
...Gato is also the game of tic-tac-toe, though not tiki-taka, which is the name of kerbangers (remember those, two plastic balls on string, and you had to make them hit each other without losing an eye?), which recently flooded the market here, I imagine from China and several times a day hear tiki-taka-tiki-taka-tiki-taka, and I kind of wish it would stop, and I bet the cats don't like it either.
...Gato is also the name of the number sign, or as the British among us would like to call it, a hash sign. This is becoming more well-known, as the word "hashtag" takes over the world, as a way to create community on twitter, by doing something like this #travel or #quirk or #perspective. I was at a conference here recently, and we were asked to "hashtaguear" our tweets (twitter posts, for the uninitiated) on the conference, or simply to "anteponer un gato," or put a number sign before what you were writing, though "anteponer un gato" sounds like putting the cat before something. (linguistic joke alert!!!) Like a hose?
Get it? Cat before the hose. Cart before the horse, both missing the R. Does your mind not work this way? You should get a tuneup.

Gato (usually the cat one) also has the fortune to show up in a bunch of expressions, such as:

...te pasaron gato por liebre (they gave you a cat rather than a hare, fig: you got duped)
...buscarle la quinta pata al gato (search for the cat's fifth paw, fig: violating occam's razor, which says the simplest explanation is probably the right one)
...defenderse como gato de espaldas, to defend yourself fiercely

There are many, many more, which I will leave hanging so the illustrious commenters may leave their wisdom re: cat sayings in the language of their choice.

A gato is also a person from Madrid, a money bag, the money inside the bag, an amateur, a folk dance, a punch to the thigh or bicep, and my favorite, is also (I believe) the root behind gatear, which sounds like it means "to cat" but actually means "to crawl," which is pretty great.

None of which has anything to do with this jolly soul, out juggling knives in the dying sun.



Which in Providencia, on a weekend afternoon, you can hardly swing a dead cat without hitting a traffic-light entertainer. Which as nothing to do with the blood on his apron.

I think.

Latin American fruits in (gasp!) Santiago de Chile. Del caribe opens juice shop in Providencia.

At the risk of being auto-referente (self-centered, which is not the same as egoísta, which is really more about being selfish, and yes, there is a difference), I would like to guide your reading eyes to this nifty story I wrote for Bootsnall about fifteen latin american fruits to surprise your palate (who wrote that headline, I wonder? The fact that I don't know is a sure sign that oy, I've got too much going on right now). Anyway, Latin American fruits! Go! Read!

And what inspired me to write this article? Years of near-vegetarianism, with a promise to myself that if something came across my plate (or in my glass) that I "could" eat (issues of whether I probably could eat meat aside) or drink, I would do so. Which brought me to the dreaded tomate de arbol, on many, many occasions.

I don't say it in this article, but tomate de arbol (or as I like to call it, the dreaded tomate de arbol) is one of only two fruit/plant based foods I've ever tasted that made me want to die. (The other is mozuku, a japanese seaweed dish I recently found out the name of through Pele Omori's recent article on Matadortravel.com). So, tomate de arbol. I don't want to ruin it for you, so I'll just say it tastes rusty to me, and let you do the rest of the taste adventures for yourselves. And I will also tell you that I've had it raw and cooked, with sugar and without and in all of its various juice forms. I almost wept when I saw that they had it growing outside of my host family's house in Cuenca, Ecuador.

And, all of this would be terribly unfair if I didn't do a plug for a place I found by happenstance the other day, which sells all kinds of tropical fruit juices, whipped up before your very eyes from frozen pulp, with as much sugar or sweetener as you like (or don't), and with water for luka (1,000 pesos, around 85 cents) or mil trecientos (1,300 pesos, you do the math) with milk. Half a liter is a lot of juice, people!

It's called Del Caribe, and it's just a little juice joint for carry-away. They have my all-time favorite fruit, Lulo (naranjilla in Ecuador), and a bunch of others, including the dreaded tomate de árbol. pineapple, blackberry, mango, curuba (what's that?) guava, passionfruit and soursop, too. You can buy a kilo of frozen fruit pulp to take home for 3,500 pesos, which they say makes 5 liters.

Datos: www.delcaribe.cl, Antonio Bellet and Providencia. While I give the juices a thumbs' up, I do not take any responsiblity for the overuse of really bad flash animation, nor for the image of the colliding decapitated fruit that then appears to bleed into a glass on the website. Don't say I didn't warn you.

As far as I know, this is the only place in Santiago to get this variety of fruit juices, and while it runs afoul of the whole "drink local" thing, so did the ginger-mango sour I had one night out with Chris when he was in town, and he didn't judge me, so you shouldn't either.

Anyone want to go out for a juice? We could walk over to the sculpture garden in Pedro de Valdivia norte to enjoy it, but by then we'd probably have drunk it all, sadly.

New Chilean government website translation leaves native speakers quizzical, at best.

Shattered meat. That's the topic of today's post. But first, the backstory. There's always a backstory.

Far be it from me to bite the hand of the government that allows me to become as accustomed to living in that lap of luxury as I probably ever will, living freely and working legally in a country that is not my own, living among its people like an equal (some say a better), in a one-bedroom apartment with a kitchen the size of a matchbox and all the bread I can possibly purchase from the corner store.

I love Chile. I live here by choice, despite raised-eyebrow looks and pleading pouts from several skilled family members.

Ahem. So this is the good-cop bad-cop routine, and I'm just about to bust out my bad cop. Don't worry, it doesn't look like this:



because at least at the moment, I don't believe that this topic is going to get that violent.

So. The Chilean government recently launched a new website, which you can find at estoeschile.cl Esto es Chile means "this is Chile," and the name has a really sweet ring to it, slightly self-effacing (as if you'd expect anything different!), kind of positive.

So. The website is a collection of the usual suspects, pictures of Rapa Nui, discussions of food, that kind of thing. Same packaging, different day. I was perusing the site, to see if I could get a fix on whether it would be useful to me or any of the various people that ask me for advice about Chile. On this I'll say, sure. It's what the government wants you to know about Chile. No photos of demonstrations or mention of what some call the civil war in the south of Chile between some Mapuche factions and the (mostly European) settlers there. But that's to be expected.

I was also expecting clunky, ugly translations of Spanish into English. So I was pleasantly surprised, toodling along with some quirky, but mostly decent translations. (Click on the English button to see the translations, as the site comes up in Spanish.)

Until I got to this page. This is the page where the description of an empanada, that quintessential any-time Chilean food, which this pigeon is thinking about eating in the following picture, appears.



and which I've (of course) also written about here, in this post about Pomaire and the mythical empanada.

Here's the estoeschile.cl description of an empanada.

Empanada: It’s one of the most typical Chilean dishes and consists of a stuffed bread that is filled with shattered meat, onion, egg, olives and raisin. It can also be prepared with cheese and shellfish. Though the empanada can be consumed in any date of the year, its stellar moment is during the independence celebration in September.

I've already kind of given it away, but what is the part of this description that most gives my inner prescriptive grammarian (where grammar also refers to word-level grammar, and in this case, collocations) a terrible case of the no-you-didn'ts?

Shattered meat? Shattered? Interesting. Since I stopped eating meat in a long-distant decade, I thought to myself, perhaps I do not know about the properties of meat. Maybe it is not ground, shredded or deboned, pulled apart, pounded, tenderized, pulverized. Maybe it's shattered. It's a funny thing, this shattering, as I'm under the impression that the things that can shatter, like glass, porcelain, your hopes, are things that are resilient to begin with, and react to a strong blow by breaking into tiny, unusable parts.

In order for meat to shatter, I would expect it would have to be frozen solid, and whacked with a mallet, Gallagher style. (Who is Gallagher? Wikipedia will tell you. Considering that my freezer leaves icecream a bit soupy, and can take days to freeze ice, and this is a new refrigerator, I don't think most empanada-makers have access to such technology. Hitting meat with a mallet in that case would lead to a thwonkslurp, not a crackshatter. So I'm going to call a foul on the translation.

Don't believe me? I googled "shattered meat." Got a whopping 272 hits, many of which were for things other than the actual shattering of meat. Then, ever resourceful, I googled "ground meat." And the googlefairies started singing and the planets aligned rightfully and this post was born. 1,380,000 hits, thankyouverymuch.

I know where this problem was born. It was born in the mind of a translator, who, not sure exactly how to render destrozado (in this case, probably shredded or ground) in English, referred to a giant dictionary like the one I have sitting on my couch next to me most of the time (Gran Diccionario Oxford Español-Inglés, Inglés-Español, one day I'll get my Amazon shop up and then you, too can plonk down scads of money on books n things to benefit meeee), looked up destrozar and found the entry about emotional health, where a woman was shattered by some bad news.

I don't even know what the lesson is here. Oh, yes I do. 1. Use a native speaker for the target language 2. Check your work and 3. Send it to me to check it again. Just for kicks. And to save me the energy of writing this long post all about a product I'll never eat, and whose heyday is right around the corner, all national holiday and fondas (Fiestas Patrias, Sept. 18th).

Don't miss it. You'll be shattered.

Funny linguistic joke falls flat. I'm sure the Bolivians would have liked it.

Even I, amateur linguist, translator and pun maker extraordinaire can have a joke fall flat. Apropos of nothing, except I was baby wrangling for the sweetest mama and baby pair today, and so I had some time to think when I wasn't swirling from side to side or doing a little dance to make the baby stop crying.

In those moments, when I was between swinging and dancing, I must have dislodged a memory, of a trip I took more than a decade ago, for what I believe was the week between finishing law school and actually graduating. Particularly, this one day, on which my ex and I decided to take a seakayaking trip out of the city of La Paz (no not THAT La Paz, the other one, Steinbeck's La Paz (on the Baja Peninsula, Mexico), not the one where you can get a dried llama fetus at the witchcraft market). So we were kayaking, both pasty and pale from too much Oregon winter, and we began our trip out to various features that we could then hop out of the boat and snorkel to.

This was before I spoke much Spanish, and our guide, a 6'2-ish hulk of a man who paddled with a grace normally reserved for professional crewers and diving herons, blathered on and on in pretty darn good English, while we paddled our two-seater kayak with short little chaotic strokes like a toddler trying to keep up with his mom who walks with normal adult strides. Paaaaaaddle, Paaaaaadle, he dipped langouriously into the water. paddlepaddlepaddlepaddle we went next to him, trying to keep up, hopelessly out of synch and I think there may have actually been holes in our paddles, we were that slow.

The guide gestured off into the distance, to a tiny blip on the horizon saying, "we'll to out to that lighthouse." "Oh, I said." And then a small, 25 watt (battery powered, of course, we were on the water) lightbulb went on above my head, and I said: (are you ready, here comes the joke)

That's FAR-O.

And the guide looked at me, bemused, and said, "it's not that far," thereby missing the entire point, and dipping his paddle splashlessly into the water.

When people want to make up words in Spanish, the rule seems to be "add an -o to the end" (similiarly, when Chileans want to make up a word in English, they like to add -ation to the end, which brings me to a story I have going up soon, but not yet, which makes fun of ugly travel-related neologisms, but more on that later.)

So, following that rule, if I want to tell you something is far, I should say faro. (Lejos is actually the word for far).

The hilarious part here, is that faro means lighthouse (like the one he was pointing to)

Get it? faro, like it's far, AND a lighthouse.

Trust me, it was kayak-capsizingly funny. Good thing seakayaks don't capsize easily. The guide failed to laugh, not even appreciating my joke. Trying to explain it just made it worse.

And so, I leave you with this picture. I'm sure that these ladies would have laughed at my far-o joke, llama fetuses and all. But then Bolivia (where that other La Paz is located) has no ocean access and it's a bit of a sore spot, so maybe they wouldn't have laughed at all.

But I know you would have.

Photos Galore! Santiago east and west on a beautiful sunshiney day.

On a picture postcard day like this, one that comes after the rain, and before the next rain, and before the smog has a chance to creep back like a midnight-snack running houseguest who opens your fridge and moves stuff around, you can't help but want to hang out the window and take pictures.



Everyone was in on the action, including this dog, who had been (somewhat unfortunately) dressed in a trash bag, cleverly fashioned into a cape. This makes me wonder a) who dresses the homeless dogs and b) why do they stand for it? My friend and I wondered if we should take his coat off for him, but weren't sure how he'd react, so we left him to bake in his mini-sauna. He didn't seem to mind.



And the day rolled on, and I walked through it, moving at roughly the same pace, though maybe slightly faster, like being on the moving walkway at the airport, hurtling towards the disembodied voice that says, please beware of the end of the moving walkway. On the way I found some sights. Here we're moving east, out of what I like to call "barrio bajo" (in contrast to the barrio alto, or "uptown" in every sense of the word) from Barrio Brasil into Bellas Artes (where I saw the pooch), and then further up into Providencia, and finally into Las Condes, and back down again.

Here's a piece of downtown that the tourist board probably doesn't expect you to want to see. It's an old facade that still stands, hopefully waiting to be one day used in some urban renewal project. I believe it might be the old El Mercurio (newspaper) building, but I could also be wrong. Any thoughts here, people?



Then we have this sight, close to the Casa Colorada, a Santiago-based museum, approaching Bellas Artes.



The day was so glorious, that even my old building (the farmed salmon-colored one) looked vaguely liveable. The giant blue building in the foreground is the by-the-hour hotel next to my old building. Classy! Oh, and of course I blogged about it here, this time for Steven from Travelojos, a sort of pan-latin american blog with hefty Mexico coverage and the occasional guest post.



Next up to Providencia, where this kid was out with his new-mom pooch, leaping and playing (both of them).



Behind him, this man was raking out the fountain.



And, piano, piano, I walked further and further up, to the reaches of what many consider to be "the promised land" of Santiago, and they're so clever that they've done word surgery and called it "Sanhattan." Commentary on why Chile insists on comparing itself to everyone like an insecure 12-year-old girl instead of just loving itself for what it is aside, this is some of what you can see if you go to "Sanhattan" on a sunny day. This is in Las Condes, near the metro stops El Golf and El Alcantara, or just steps from your hotel, particularly if you stay at the Ritz Carlton here in Santiago. (look! Santiaguinos jaywalk! just like Manhattan)



and then this building, at the corner of El Golf and Apoquindo, where you can go and say hello to one of my old students, if you like.



And then there's this somewhat-dated municipal building, which reminds me very much of a latticed pastry that I almost bought yesterday from Castaño, which is not, actually a chestnut tree, but rather a bakery chain. I didn't end up getting the pastry though, and I'm still a little bitter, although at least I have this building to look at. Too bad it doesn't (I believe) have raspberries inside.



At this point I was tuckered out from all the opulence, plus I had done what I'd needed to do and was starting get a nosebleed (insert exaggerated tone of voice here), and had to stop for some nibbles, back down in Providencia in one of my favorite places for sustenance, and for only about $6, you can get this (at Doner House, near Manuel Montt, review to follow):



(my friend's arms do not come included with the meal, sadly, and the beer wasn't mine either)

Then I headed home, where I was greeted by the the sight of this couple I always see under this structure (this is two blocks from my house).



They've got a pretty elaborate setup, and one time I saw the woman giving the man a haircut. I don't know where they are when they're not here, but I know that everyone pretty much ignores them, and they seem to live pretty much in their own world as well. They don't ask for money, I've never seen them leaving trash anywhere or drinking alcohol.



and before I leave you, here's a mural painted just a half-block from the couple, which I always think evokes the word, "fierce."



And maybe it's true that this entry is extralong because I haven't written in a couple of days or maybe it's just because I have so much to tell you and show you, and in the famous words of Tiffany Ard, on her blog electric boogaloo where she shows that she has as much creativity in her lower left liver lobe as I do in every fiber of my being, past, present and future and in which she talks about her really cool nerdy baby art for sale and her nerdy babies themeselves and loves her husband with warm awe, maybe you should have "read this part really fast" if it was too long for you. Of course, says that when she's talking about health care policy, and I haven't mentioned that yet, and might never do so.

And so I leave you to your sweltering summer and pending hurricanes and storm swells and tell you not to be jealous of my awesome views from that Wednesday because today they're hidden behind a giant curtain of clouds'n ick.

Eso. (that's it)

Brought to you from Electricity-free Wednesday (Chilectra vies with Telefónica for most hated service provider.)

It all started last night when I came home around midnight, and noticed the lobby suspiciously dark and the elevator out of order. The elevator is frequently out of order, so I dutifully trudged up the ten flights of stairs to my apartment, secretly thanking the gods that Chile uses the American system where the first floor is floor one, not the lobby, because if we were in Spain a) it would have already been six o'clock in the morning, and b) I'd have had to walk up twelve flights of stairs instead of ten to get to my sixth-floor apartment.

As I walked up the stairs, it got progressively darker in the hallways, and a single weak blinky flourescent bulb was doing its best to illuminate, but only in fits and starts when I came to the hallway outside my door. I came in to find the electricity blinky at best, and my modem displaying colors I prefer for cherries, tomato sauce and other cinnabar (but not the poisonous ones) foods to the preferred yellow and green which indicate proper functioning. I went to sleep without checking the internet and woke up to the only thing worse than red lights, which is no lights at all.

Apparently all the rain we've had has called some kind of a fryup (fryout? fishfry?) at Chilectra (which I always like to call Chilectrica), and the end result is a building full of people using the stove to heat water (rather than our teteras (electric kettle), as we normally do), bumbling around in the dark, and repeateldy switching lights on as we enter rooms, only to later say, "d'oh!"

So rather dwell on this ridiculous situation of being dependent on the sun and a hundred thousand squirrels running around to power a generator or however they do it down here (doubt they use squirrels, since in fact, there are no squirrels here, which is exemplified by the fact that if you ask people what animal Chip and Dale are, they will tell you squirrels (ardillas), which is clearly not true. I mean, at least if they said prairie dogs (marmotas) I would give them half-credit, as at least they are vaguely the right color), instead of doing that, I have been running around the city like a lunatic all day, eating lunch repeatedly and taking pictures of the postcard perfect day that the world shook out for us today. With apologies to whoever got the short end of the stick, on this, the day before my half birthday! (think I'm too old to care about half-birthdays? Think again!).

Okay, so what's this about electricity-free Wednesday? Well, there's all kinds of fabulously wonderful blogs with themed days. There's Fish Wednesday (I think) on one of my favorites, tons and sundry folk who do photo friday, and all other kinds of alliterative things (including followfriday and traveltuesday on twitter, which are adorable and awww when I'm a part of it, but pretty annoying when not).

I've been trying to think of a catchy phrase that's better than electricity-free Wednesday. There's miércoles de miseria (which you can figure out), but that's overkill, it's really not that bad. There's where's-my-lights-Wednesday, but I don't really miss the lights so much as I miss the internet.

So I submit to you that today, August 19th, 2009 is the day that Chilectrica got googleranked a 1, slightly lower than Telefónica's 2. And Movistar (my cell company) moved up a rank, to number 3, but that's only because I went to the commercial office in El Golf where everything is rainbows and butterflies, and sometimes unicorns, but none today because they were off holding up the backdrop, which was truly incredible, mountains and deep snow.

As I left the building tonight (in the dark), I saw a note that they're going to shut off the water. What's next? Are they going to shut off the gas? Take away the walls? Something tells me it might be time to look for a new apartment.

SAG uses frightening ruminant imagery to instill fear in travelers.

Caution: You may spit out whatever you are eating somewhere around photo four. You have been warned.

Four countries and seventeen hours later, I arrived to Santiago's spiffy airport and followed the usual hamster wheel to International Police, through the duty free shop and to pick up my luggage. Here, as is lately the case, I was asked on several occasions if I'd declared any food I might be carrying. Yes, I had, I responded (almond butter and grapenuts, if you were wondering).

And the puppies arrived, retrievers in little green SAG (Servicio Agrícola y Ganadero, the agriculture and livestock ministry) vests and they ran hither and yon, and sniffed and sniffed, becoming privy in the process (no doubt) to who among us had brought clean clothing, and who'd packed up their dirty unmentionables for the trip to Chile.

I was sad to see that the pretty dioramas that had previously displayed other seized items from travelers had disappeared, since the last photos I took of these did not really do them justice. Instead, on the last-chance-before-they-fine-your-unmentionable-clad-posterior table were these pretty bookmarks and postcards and things (at least that's how I like to think of them. If you'd like some more backstory on my experiences with SAG you can look for the story of the purloined pecans or of the great garlic debacle in these cleverly color-coded links.

First I'll give a preview of the quickly-nabbed printed matter and then we can go over them one by one. Les tinca? (does that work for you?)



Of course I took a copy of each, for future edification, mirth and publication. Thanks SAG! And yes, I have a paper problem, and so many dead relatives that I could blame that on, but this would be unfair, since they cannot defend themselves.

So. Let's start with the one that I feel is clunky and poorly-worded.



Sag has trust in you? What are we, a bank? How about "be honest!" or "SAG trusts you" (which is clearly not the case, since they Xray your luggage on the way into the country). Whatever. I don't love this one, but mainly think it's meh, not scorn-worthy, though I wonder why one would bring an apple or grapes into Chile since we produce so many of both, and here's probably where the came from in your country anyway. I'm just so glad they didn't try to depict animal semen, which is also verboten. And goodness I hope I don't get any hits on that.

Moving along to number two, Mr. Apple with his adorable drugstore mask.



This I think is clever, though I question why anyone would bring an apple to Chile. Plus it plays on our exaggerated fear of the swine flu, the poor feverish apple. Don't spread disease to our agricultural products. You know, it's fair. In fact, I'll say it's adorable. Memorable even. Publishable. I'll give it a thumbs' up. Heck, maybe I'll even tweet it, or stumble it, digg it or otherwise tell my friends inside the computer that I approve.

Moving on.

I don't
know
WTF
this
is
supposed to
be
(with a tip of the hat to Matt Logelin, who I read even though I have neither a deceased spouse nor an adorable imp of a child, and he is very famous and fabulous and smart and wow does he ever eat out alot.)

ready?



So here we have the text, "No extingues nuestra Flora o Fauna Silvestre" (don't wipe out (as in cause to become extinct) our wild flora or fauna).

Okay, point taken. It would be sad if someone rounded up all the pudús and huemules and paico and bailahuén plants and killed them all. Chile is very rich in biodiversity, and this should be protected.

But look at the picture, and tell me what you see. Do you see a cow? as a representation of "wild fauna?" I'm sorry, did I miss something? Are there wild cows in Chile? I'm assuming it's supposed to be the aforementioned pudú, but how many people entering Chile could draw a picture of a pudú or pick one out of a lineup at 5 meters(or manage to see one anywhere but a zoo, which this photo shows I also was unable to manage, this time in Seattle). Also, this cow/tiny deer is either a ghost (which I believe runs afoul of conservative Catholic doctrine which dictates that animals get no afterlife), or has escaped from some kind of cow/pudú-keeping Aladdin's lamp, in which case I would like to ask it for three wishes, the first of which is to please not become the icon of SAG, because it is giving me nightmares.

The reverse side of this postcard has three tiny pictures which look to be a vulture, a flamingo and a box of melons, or perhaps they are pears. I'm trying right now to imagine how one would try to secret a flamingo in their carry-on luggage, though this might be easier than a pudú, as they are substantially more plentiful.

I'm not sure if the SAG website has a place for you to comment on this latest PSA, and I will not link to the apparent creators of this item, since their website (like their creative concept) seems to be under construction.

But there you have it. SAG really, really doesn't want you to mess up the agricultural or livestock-related wealth of the country, or to steal flamingoes. And I'm all for that.

But that floating head? it's just creepy.

Dead men don't come knocking. Or do they?

When people ask me what languages I speak, I try to be fair, and say, just two, English and Spanish. But I can't help sometimes throwing in that I also speak Chilean. Chilean bears a striking resemblance to Spanish, but there is a point of departure after which you may find a gringa (that's me), expaining to a visiting Spaniard just what the heck is going on in a certain pop culture movie, and then realize that the two may be similar, but you don't want to throw them into the same bag (echarlos en la misma bolsa fig: cast too wide a net).


I honestly feel that little could top Eileen Shea and Margaret Snook's rendition of a recent comedic talk Eileen gave at a dinner, where she liberally back translates Spanish expressions back into English, which is probably what it sounds like when standard Spanish speakers hear Chileans speaking extra-slangy Spanish. Abby also makes a great show, telling her own particularly linguistically brilliant story here about running into a rooster and his three little goats at the mall.

Far be it from me to compete with the experts, so instead I'll tell a little story, as I am wont to do.

One day, when I was just a few months into living in Chile, fighting to find my voice and learning as much Spanish and as much Chilensis as I could, trying to keep them separate or weave them together as the situation warranted, I was eating lunch at a friend's house in Ñuñoa. Tortilla de acelga or swiss chard frittata as you might know it.

There was someone pounding quite insistently at the door, which was strange, since this particular house is down a tiny alley, and doesn't get much traffic. My friend got up to see what the ruckus was about, and was confronted by something that he would later describe to me as:

Un tipo con un gallo.

Now, I could cut to the chase and tell you the punchline, but what fun would that be? So I'll tell you my thought process.

A type with a rooster. Well, that doesn't make sense, it just can't be right. It must have been a guy, with, wait! I know, gallo can also mean guy. So it was a guy with a guy. Or better, a guy with a dude. That definitley sounds better.

Now, why didn't he just say two guys, I wondered?

He looked at me incredulously, expecting an exaggerated reaction. I've had two people come to the door before, sometimes prostelytizing, sometimes not, and I didn't see why I should get all up in arms. After all, it wasn't my fritatta that had gotten cold while he went to answer the door.

And? I said.

El gallo estaba muerto. (The guy was dead).

Wow! now that's interesting. I've never has someone show up at my door with a cadaver before, ala Weekend at Bernie's.

Had he been dead a long time? I asked?

I don't know, my friend said.

Well, who was he?

The guy? My friend said.

No, the dude! I said, getting frustrated that he couldn't see that it's more interesting to know who the dead person was than the live one.

Who? He said.

Yes! Who was he? I said.

I have no idea, he said. The guy said someone had ordered a dead dude, so he was looking for the person. Not me, I said, so he went away. He said.

Where's the dude now? I asked.

He took him away, he said.

...

Do you see where this is going? So strong was my Chilensis filter, that gallo could not make it through as rooster, and ended up turning into a dude. Most of the time this would be correct, as with the exception of my friends over at the Huerto Hada Verde, not too many people I know actually talk about roosters that much, so the word gallo does generally mean dude, animal husbandry aside. Also, while having someone knock on your door carrying a dead rooster is odd, to be sure, it is not nearly as terrible as having them dragging dead uncle fulano (tom, of tom dick and harry) around the alleys of Santiago.

So while I wholeheartedly support learning all the Chilean slang you can and reading everything these hilarious ladies have to say, I also suggest never losing your filter, and trying to make sense out of when a rooster is nothing but a rooster. Even if it's dead.

Machine translation! No! Pukey feeling? Yes!

There are two things that are making me think of this ill-translated menu I had the chance to hold for a minute or two while I considered which version of a cheese sandwich I should order (melted, of course) in Puno, Peru, while I waited for the next bus out of dodge, that would take me to meet some very cool Californians and also to the doctor for what was a brewing, pulsing infection in the nailbed of my right ring finger (one of my favorites, for the record).



The first thing is that I've been translating my little brain out all day, and as I posted on twitter (what? you don't follow that? why ever not!, I'm @bearshapedspher due to username length constraints which I must say I feel are antibearshapedspherist), I love it more than is rational or can be explained. I love translating because there are words! And you can knit them into sentences or unravel them into dependent clauses and skip around and make them dance, and ultimately make them do whatever you want. It's a beautiful thing, really. Spanish to English, occasional dictionary or internet support, NEVER machine translation, which may or may not be what happened to our fair menu, as seen above.

The other thing that has me thinking of that menu is how I felt when I held it in my hands. I was just a couple of days post puke-in-a-2-liter-bottle and still a little green around the gills. And my first attempt at standing up for any period today has demonstrated to me what I already knew. Words may dance and swirl in my brain, and so swims my brain in my head, and I should just sit the heck back down.

But social duty and birthday-gift distribution call, and the words will still be here when I get back. I hope I can get them to all swim in the same direction at once. A school of words, if you will. My dream snorkel adventure. What's yours?

Confessions of a Travel Writer, the view from Chile

I stumbled on the last fifteen or twenty minutes of Confessions of a Travel Writer on the Travel channel quite by accident. I happened to be in the United States, and relaxing after a long family-intensive day by turning on the TV as my mother, who'd had an allergic reaction and was resting up from that, sat beside me.

What I saw was a group of people explaining how to do something that I think I already know how to do, but want to do more of. They were traveling around Chile, from mid to south, buying fish, eating food, riding horses, regarding wild vistas, misidentifying the Torres del Paine massif as the Torres themselves, and bumbling around my adopted country, in a van. Then they'll go home and write about it, or post their video entries, as the case may be.

Now to me, traveling around Chile has something to do with Chileans, which requires talking to them, not just looking at them, and buying stuff from them. I understand now that this was a travel junket, and you do what you're told, and add on items that you'd like to know more about as time permits. I also know that travel writers travel all over the world, and can't be expected to speak every language, even as Chilean Spanish bursts from my every pore.

Popular opinion on the show's premiere tells us that in a word, it reeked. Maybe it's because of Charles Runette(the host)'s personality (get a peek here), or maybe it was something else, such as viewers not wanting to see the behind-the-scenes work of travel writers, or finding them spoiled or something else. The offical website of the program is here, and if you'd like to see other commentary on the show, you can see it here (with some really choice comments left by viewers).

Here's the thing: I don't much care about any of it. I live in Chile, I write about travel, I know a couple of people who went on the very same trip (but were in a different van, good news for them). What it makes me think is mainly that it's another cheapshot at reality television, aka TV that requires no plotline, no script. It's a moneymaker (or not) for its sheer honesty (or edited honesty), and for showing people tal como son (just as they are) or como quieren que creamos que son (or how they want us to think they are). I just wonder what is going on at the Travel Channel between this latest foray into I don't even know what, coupled with their 4-day courses on putting together travel videos, which they call the Travel Academy, where they are going to squash 1 year of NYU film school into four days. What are they up to over there, and who's in charge I wonder? (and as an aside, this reminds me of when I worked for a publishing company and I was asked by one of my fellow editors to put together a two-page sheet to explain everything they needed to know about the law, since I'd graduated from law school. Three years in two pages? No problem! Right after I engrave the Gutenberg Bible on this postage stamp).

Then I remember that I don't watch TV, am not a videographer, or even a wannabe videographer, and am not really the Travel Channel's target audience, and certainly am not the right audience for this pilot program. If I want to see Chile tal como es, all I have to do is open my eyes, open the window, go for a walk. If I wanted to be at Torres del Paine I could get there by noon, tomorrow. In fact, I've been thrice. But only once did I actually get a decentish view:



The program has not yet been shown in Chile, and I imagine that when it does, all eyes will be glued to the set, snippets of conversation will be strangely, if not badly translated, and everyone in Chile can think once again that the nation that I come from is populated by critical, self-important, whiny jerks. Kudos Runette, and kudos Travel Channel. I look forward to unraveling this for Chileans. One hour to undo nearly five years of mutual understanding. Good thing I have that engraving project to keep me busy.

None of which means I'm not up for a travel junket here and there. Bring them on. Or for a real look into Chile, read here, or any of the Chile-based blogs on my blogroll or out there on this equal-opportunity soapbox they call the internet.

On coming back home, in bullet points, without the bullets

In which I report the following things which I have learned since last we spoke:

Bathroom scales routinely underweigh luggage, by as much as six pounds according to the Taca check-in guy, who also assured me I would really like the airline (and if not, then what? Jump ship?). Luggage limit, 50 pounds per piece. Made it, whew!

The Boingo flashylight luggage tag won much admiration, and was not stolen by any of the airport staff in Kennedy, San Salvador, Lima or Santiago.

Homeland Security brings partially shaved-headed, partially gelled, bandana wearing neck-tattooed young men in frayed jeans and oversized shirts to the airport as a special service before they got on my flight with me. When said men were given a minute to go to the store and get something before the flight, they chose orange fanta.

Taca Airlines might win the award for most pasta served within 15 hours, including the pasta (or chicken) I was offered at 11:30 last night. I applaud their willingness to feed us frequently (3 times between 11:30 AM and PM), but think it is cruel that they laud cucumbers as a refreshing treat and then fill that side of the tray with a brownie (tasty) and Tillamook cheddar cheese and a saran-wrapped roll.

Diet coke comes in a redbullish-dimensioned can in El Salvador.

Flying from Lima to Santiago on a 10 PM flight is a sure way to get three seats to yourself to lie down in. I recommend belting yourself with the middle belt and sidesleeping. Dreamy.

Americans are a chatty bunch, especially from Kennedy to El Salvador. Met some teachers, a real estate guy, and a woman who worked in my school district as an adult, and as a teen went to the same high school as me (and my father some 50 years ago). Lovely, all of them. Hello if they're reading.

The North Face has fabric companies all over Latin America and a crack team of project managers who go around and check them out, then wear giant (noise-cancelling) headphones on the plane.

SAG (Chilean agricultural police) gives planes coming into Chile a tiny little aerosol can which the crew (tripulación in Chile, sobrecargo in many other countries, which just makes them sound overburdened) spray around the upper luggage holds, and then announce only in Spanish, which I suppose if you don't speak Spanish would leave you wondering what the heck that just was.

SAG no longer has the pretty dioramas near the luggage pickup with the popcorn and beans and other prohibited items. Now they have a 60-second sound blip that says things like, peanuts, almonds, raisins, dried fruit, peas, beans, legumes, seeds, cuttings, etc, etc, and has people (two, in my case) who accost you to be sure you've declared (I had). Plus a bunch of literature including a bookmark with an apple wearing a mask, which I guess gets you swine flu panic and agricultural protection all in one. I mean to take a picture of this, but not this second.

I was not hassled about the coffee, but was asked about the two glass jars I had in my luggage. I told them it was almond butter (which it was), and they hassledmenot. I guess they were just making sure it wasn't honey. This was the first time in the last 3 that I came back from the US that they didn't make me open my bags, but they also didn't help me to heft them onto the belt to take them through the xray machines, which at 2:30 in the morning seemed kind of mean.

Searing headache and short vomit episode aside, I am glad to be home. And no, I didn't drink the water, anywhere, though I did eat insipid pasta, twice. Connection?

Hakim's Truck, or what makes you happy

This afternoon my sister and I cajoled a wilted little boy to play with metal bowls of water in the yard, during which time he turned a fully flowing hose on the two of us not just a few times, and while I was able to get out of the way in time, my sister's laughter tripped her up, and she ended up changing her clothes before the excellent suburban stripmall Indian dinner and which bhindi masala and dal tarka and sag paneer and naan and pappardum and tamarind sauce and mango chutney and a whole bunch more food was eaten. Apparently there was also rhogan josh (lamb) and tandoori chicken, but I was on the veggie side of the table and hardly noticed, though I did taste the rose lassi and wonder how my overperfumed bathwater had made it into the kitchen.

But before we were able to defrock the boy and refrock him, he looked up with a giant smile and said to us, upon hearing the jingle jangle music down the hill, "Hakim's truck!"
,
Later at dinner, at desert time, he proclaimed, "Hakim's coming!"

Of course, this is not really what he said. This is my nephew's version (and my spelling) of the word ice cream, which of course he was excited to hear and know about and announce. Icecream, kulfi, helado, gelato, however you say it, is delicious. And its very existence makes my nephew wriggle.

Just think about it for a minute. I mean Hakim. What if you we all had a person in our lives that no matter when they arrived, or how they got there, we were happy for them to enter. If their specific ringtone on your phone made you smile, and their very footfall made you jump up and down in your booster seat?

What I'm saying here is that you can never have enough Hakim in your life. Or 2.3-year old nephews that speak in earnest little four word blips that are so easily open to misunderstanding. And great hilarity.

And here's the postscript where I tell you that if you are in any of the following airports during the day tomorrow, you are more than welcome to buy me a cup of coffee: JFK, San Salvador, Lima, Santiago. And also, yes, I'm cheap, and that's why I'm stopping so very many times before getting home. That way I can afford more Hakim. Or more trips to see the family, tiny monoglots notwithstanding.

Forty Carrots and a yogurt, also making a stranger almost cry

So I was in Bloomingdale's yesterday, looking, like you do for those famous underwear they had in the '80s that said bloomies across the tush. I was not looking for these for any real need to have words emblazoned across my posterior, but because due to an unfortunate packing snafu, I found myself clean bloomiless in the city, and either of the solutions to this problem are not exactly comfortable, and well, I'm pretty resourceful, so off I went to the cushiest most non-belongingest store I could think of, since I was on the upper east side (hey, that's upper to me, I grew up in Brooklyn), that was Bloomingdale's.

While I was there, I did not buy bloomies, and I also did not buy the Natori comforter cover that I fell in love with so strongly and unabashedly that I almost pitched an 8-year old's it-costs-$40-to-get-a-hair-wrap-and-my-mom-says-no-style fit when I saw that the cover alone cost $600. I also accidentally touched a bra that had been reduced to $105 on sale. At this point I backed slowly away from the merchandise, and headed to the main place any- and everywoman needs to go to in Bloomingdales, which is the seventh floor. First I visited the spiffy and spacious ladies' room, well-regarded, well-appointed and echoey with emptiness in a million-dollar-a-square-inch (or so it would seem) real estate market.

After this, I returned sadly, past the comforter cover which I would never buy, and headed, like you do, to Forty Carrots. Which looks like this, only less pukily green in person.



Wherepon I paid a small fortune for a plain (tart) yogurt with chocolate chips as a topping, which I pointed out to my sister, were actually in the middle of the yogurt, which she said made them a middling, but I found them more than fair (oy! do you see how this is genetic?). And said yogurt looked like this, and weighed as much as a large parrot I once had pressed upon my shoulder which made me grimace and cry because I was only six, and the claws grabbed into my shoulder, and who doesn't want a picture of their kid with a parrot's claws buried into her shoulder skin and the kid's face contorted into a wail that says, get this thing offa me?

Here's the yogurt:



And while I could have stayed in the beauty parlor-turned-yogurt eatery (or so it would seem)



I had miles to go before even thinking of sitting down, so instead I got into this beautiful elevator



Whereupon I was accosted by a sixty-something stranger who whipped a fused-glass-looking plastic bangle out of a bag at her side and asked if I liked it. I didn't, but I just said I'm a little more into sedate colors, and tried to leave it at that. She engaged me in conversation for seven long stories down in the beautiful elevator, and walked with me almost to the exit, talking about the bracelet while I made quick work of my yogurt and the middlings. Finally I asked if the bracelet was for her. And she said yes.

So I said, "my mother would tell you to 'wear it in good health'." And the woman looked at me and I saw her eyes grow wet, and she lowered her voice and said, "my mother would have said that, too." And then she thanked me twice, one of the thank yous perfunctory, and another more sincere, and walked off into the handbags.

And I went outside and finished my yogurt. And continued what shall heretofor be known as undiequest 2009.

Sesame Place surprises the bewhosis out of me for sheer multi cultural vastness

Please stay seated until your fish comes to a complete stop.

These were the first words I bothered to purposely listen to at a recent family trip to that most American of locations, Sesame Place. It's a rollicking good time, if you are between the ages of 2 and 7 or so, are well-slathered in sunscreen, not afraid of the water, availed of very game parents and don't mind weaving your way through literally a half century (numerically, not chronologically) of strollers to get to the GIRL'S BATHROOM (lest any of us be post-pubescent) when the need should arise.

Here is something great I will say about Sesame Place. It is one of the most multicultural, multiethnic places I have ever been outside of Arlington, Virginia, where I used to work teaching ESL to adults from pretty much all over the globe, and my goodness, does anyone know how a zero beginner Mongolian even gets out of the airport when they get to the United States? I had one amazing student from Mongolia who danced for the national dance troupe doing Mongolian dance and had a picture of herself in front of Genghis Khan's yurt, or recent iteration thereof and she said his name (pronounced correctly no doubt) about six times before whipping out her tooled leather wallet to show me an image of him on the outside and I repeated back to her (in my best fourth grade English), Genghis Khan about six times before pointing to the very same wallet. We had good times with the Mongolian students, we did.

So back to Sesame Place. There were white families, and black families, East Indian and Middle Eastern families, latino families, families from different parts of Asia, and many, many mixed families. People with white moms and latino dads and siblings who were black (or mixed), and wow, maybe I'm just living in a very whitebread society (yes I am, marraqueta anyone?), but I found it hard to be where I always want to be on the race scale, which is neutral. I don't want to be happy for anyone about their mixed family, I just want to be neutral about it. But seeing happy healthy families in a palette of pinky white to chocolate brown just filled my heart with some kind of freakish American pride, it really did.

Among the Muslim families and the Orthodox Jewish families, there were some truly excellent bathing suits. Long sleeved and panted jobbers with a dress overtop, all made out of that shiny lycra material, and some with matching headscarves. Or one woman just sat down in what appeared to be her street clothes and hijab and her two kids came running up to her and her husband for cuddles and then ran away to shriek it up with some other kids. There was a whole group of deaf signing families, and someone came up to ask them if they'd left a bag at another ride, and after checking on the size, shape and color of the bag in question, determined that it was not theirs, and I think we all just felt our hands feel heavy and voiceless at our sides. People in wheelchairs and on crutches and a kid running out of the parking lot in a bathingsuit and hopping slightly, because she uses a prosthetic leg.

If you'd asked me if I wanted to go to Sesame Place, even in the company of my illustrious niece and my not yet 2.4 year old nephew, who we all tried to con into saying "orange" because it delights us so when he says it "auzhun one" and butterfly, because this he says "butterfl-fly," I might have said no, because, you know, people. And lots of little ones. And plus I have some sort of tonsil-swelling plague.

But I'm thrilled I went, and not just because I stayed out in the hot sun picking up rocks with my nephew of auzhun one butterfl-fly fame, nor listened, one earphone in each of our right ears to Tom Petty's Free Falling with my niece, while my sister drove the lot of us down the highway, all of us imitating "the lady" who lives inside the GPS unit, and my mother's laughter leading us all into drizzles and then showers and full on storms of laughter.

Because the United States is just an amazing place to visit, and because I wish I could bottle this day and shake out a few drops whenever I hear someone that has another view of the country I grew up in, one that doesn't let a family look like whatever a family looks like, or wants to contain us all into tiny little cells, like bees in a hive who all do the same thing. But we all tend to overgeneralize, even as we introduce the statement with "in general" people in the United States do this or eat that. Educate their children like this or like that. Some of it's true, for some people, some times. But these two days reminded me to be careful when I do that, because I'm poniendo todo el mundo en el mismo saco (lit: putting everyone in the same bag, fig: casting too wide of a net).

I guess the person I really need to shake this day over sometimes really isn't everyone else, it's really me.

The war on stuff, and a solution they don't want you to know about!

Here in the land of buy this and buy that, the trade-in-a-clunker car program is all over the airwaves, along with really bad news about driving sloshed out of your brain and up the wrong side of the interstate. Turns out that's not life-compatible. Terrible. Truly terrible. There's economic frownie faces splashed all over the news as well, and when we're not telling stories of people slashed on the subway, killed in shootings in Chicago, we are all obsessing about the bottom line.

I don't mind not having a television in Santiago. In fact, it sort of feels like an appropriation of space, a cheat, if you will, that buys me X amount of space in my cluttered apartment. I also don't mind not standing still in a torrent of information, most of it bad (though I did sit spacily through a 60-minutes piece on Wyclef Jean and I love him even more than I did before, he does really good work in Haiti and seems like a very likeable human).

But what I'm really thinking about here is the money saving tips. At Blogher, there were a series of vendors and swag givers who promised to enter you in a contest to win something smashing and fabulous if you would sit down and record yourself giving a great money-saving tip. Tips like: cut the top off your little girls' dresses and put elastic in to turn them into skirts. This is the caliber of money-saving tip being given. And I found myself getting irrationally frustrated, as I gobbled down berry after berry (did you know it's summer here, and berries are in season?), flanked by the unflappable Rosalind and the uber transportable Pam. I was frustrated, because the main reason that we overspend, my friend, is not for failure to cut and mend, it is because we cannot grow the appendages to turn us into real women and men and STOP BUYING.

There, I said it. In all caps, and just as I'm waiting for a code from Blogher to post little adlets here on the side, and as I also admit that I suffer from this purchaseathon, from aquisitivia, despite my repeated desire to celebrate discardia, and banish affluenza for good.

And I hate those snippity little tips because they don't really save you any money at all, you just end up spending less, which is not really the same.

So how can I square my hate of the tips together with my dislike of aquisitivia (hey! you heard it here first) and give a tip that runs not afoul of my grand philosophic pronouncements?

Do not buy any storage solutions. No containers, no boxes, no handy underbed vacuum squeezy bags. None of it.

That simple. Your problem, unless you live on a boat, or in a verrrrrry teeeeeeny tiiiiiiiny apartment which requires copious use of multiple consonants and vowels, is not a lack of space. It is an excess of stuff. By saying no to the overdoor hanger or the plastic crates for the garage or another shelf to put in the entry way, you benefit thrice. One, you don't buy the storage solutions. 2, you do not keep buying more to fill up that space or possibly even 3, you realize you have too much stuff and now's a good time to have a garage sale or put up some ads on Ebay or Craigslist or whathaveyou. I've started my own little charity, which works only when you live in a neighborhood that sees not just a bit of poverty. I call it "debajo del puente," or under the bridge, where I leave bags of tidily folded clean items that will no longer grace my closet. The cartoneros pick up the stuff, bring it home and sort it, and their ladyfriends or wives sell it at the feria. Total win.

So that's my tip. I haven't introduced myself "Hi, this is Eileen Smith, from bearshapedsphere and I write about everything from donkey milk to abortion policy in Chile from an expat perspective" but I will give you my money saving tip. It's very War Games-y (ten points if you saw it in the theater!), Strange game. The only way to win is not to play. Or as I'll crystallize it down for you, since you've read this far is: storage solutions aren't.

And yeah, blogher was great. And now I'm outtie.

Murky Coffee No Iced Espresso Rule Bites me in the Palate. Or the tale of the ghetto latte that never was.

The other day while walking around DC with a friend who we all know as Mr. T, which is made somewhat hilarious by his mostly gentle demeanor and stringy physique, we decided to go check out a local cafe for an afternoon pick-me-up. We walked into Chinatown Coffee in (you guessed it) Chinatown whereupon I made the hideous and unforgiveable request for a coffee the way I like it.

My coffee of choice is cold, and it is strong. I like a doubleshot of espresso with some water and lots of ice. I used to order this as an iced americano, but too much of the time this comes only lukewarm, not cold, and too heavily diluted with water. So I took to ordering it as a double espresso over ice, figuring I could always ask them to top it up with a little water or more ice if the drink looked too concentrated.

Imagine my surprise when I was schooled on the finer points of coffee by the barista, who insisted that an iced espresso has been proven to taste bad, and then on proper coffeehouse etiquette, by telling me that 90-95% of the people who order an iced espresso then make themselves (and I'm quoting here, as this is exactly what was said,) "a ghetto latte" by filling up the cup with milk.

Ghetto latte? Ghetto? Are we still using this word? I prefer to invoke the shtetl in the old country, where my forebears would walk their tin cups of coffee poured over, I suppose snow (since refrigeration was antiquated at best there in the town of Necviz, which my grandfather once told me means "bad odor"). They'd then hold it under old Bessie and milk her right into the cup.

Sorry, is that the wrong ghetto? Perhaps you're referring to one of the poblaciones in Santiago, like La Victoria, or maybe a favela like Rocinha in Rio de Janiero. Or maybe Soweto in Johannesburg. Ghetto latte. Look it up. Or don't. I already have. 17,000 hits on Google can't be wrong.

Getting back to what's wrong with accusing me of being on the brink of the heinous sin of creating a "ghetto latte," I also don't ever put much milk in my coffee, which will be important in just a paragraph or two, show me patience (sorry, lotta two year old over here). So the preemptive accusation that I was planning on "stealing" an unfair quantity of milk, more than I deserved, in a world where coffee costs $12 a pound, and they use not a tenth of that and charge me $3 for my espresso, and then leave out all that free milk for the ghetto latte makers to dare to dump into their coffee is not only misguided, but also preposterous.

Plus I was surprised to find out that that the coffee I like, is simply not tasty. This reminds me of a time I went to a cafe in Santiago and ordered a tuna sandwich for breakfast. Eeew, the look on the waitress' face said. You eat that for breakfast? Yeah, I do, I said, Now smile and go get it, porfis (cute Chilean slang for please). Also, as Mr T pointed out, if someone wants their coffee with a raw egg and some toilet water in it, your job, as the barista is to prepare it that way with a smile. The economy's failing, people.

Back in the cafe, of the many things I would learn between the time I walked into the coffee bar and when I ultimately ordered something more mutually agreeable to both me and the barista at hand is that there was a giant to-do at the predecessor coffeeshop to this one, one called Murky Coffee, where an altercation between a customer who (guess what?) dared to order an iced espresso, and offered a work-around, when told he couldn't have one, which included a glass of ice and a triple shot of espresso, later led to the nasty scribbling of invectives on a dollar bill left as a tip, an offer to commit arson, and the owner threatening to punch the customer in a part of the anatomy that a) women don't have and b) I didn't even know people would want to punch. The owner's name rhymes with Rick. So does the part of the anatomy. So you'll imagine that these stories might not be exactly work-safe. Here, here, here and here.

In the end, we stayed, because we wanted to support a local business (though at the moment I question why we decided to support this one), we were thirsty, and wanted to try the coffee. I decided to order a cappucicino, which would rob me of the opportunity to partake in the putatively free milk, and then asked for it dry, because I don't like that much milk in my coffee (see above). But once again, the barista knew better than I did, and prepared a perfectly-frothed cappuccino, just like the man told him to, with a pretty little leaf design on the top. It was sublime, one of the best cups of cappuccino I've ever tasted. But it was not dry. It had lots of milk, despite my request.

So the cappuccino was tasty, and Mr. T's iced tea (that's allowed) seemed to perk him up a bit as well, but our grand entree into the cafe strewed seeds throughout my subconscious which grew into blog fodder, and I had to tell you about it, so that the next time you go anywhere to be served anything, you make sure not to step in the giant steaming pile of spent coffee grounds like I did. Don't ask for what you want, like a white wine with a well-done steak. Ask the waiter, the bargirl, the barista not for what you want, but for what they want to serve you.

Then wonder (like I did) they don't just invest in smaller cups in which to serve the iced espresso, or hold the precious milk behind the counter where the baristas can keep a better eye on it.

Then drink it, malign them, and don't leave a tip, or at least don't write anything nasty on the dollar that you do deign to leave.

Man I love the United States. And iced espresso. Even if the experts say it tastes bad. For I am a philistine. Please call me Phyllis.

(and I have a picture of the picture perfect extramilky cappuccino, but I am on the road and my cardreader is hidden (from me). Apenas lo encuentre, la subo. (As soon as I find it (the card reader), I'll upload it (the photo)).