the shoehorn quest: conclusion

I'm still uploading photos to Flickr, but I have to share this one, because I could not make this shit up. This is where you buy a shoehorn in Santiago:


Yes, that's an orthopedics/medical supply shop. They sell back braces and foot orthotics and such. Apparently, also shoe repair. And shoe polish. I had a brief neurotic moment of wondering if I wanted to pay $2 for a shoehorn when I already have one I like better (albeit on the wrong continent), and then I thought, "Wow, you're an idiot. You need a shoehorn, and this is a symbol of triumph."

No joke. I passed by a galería and for some reason I thought, "This is the right block; that might be the one the guy was trying to point me to." I asked a guy at the nice clothing store--the first person in Santiago to know what a calzador is when I talk about it!--and he pointed me a few doors down.

Chris 1, Chile 0. Yeah, bitches!

In the States it's obvious to us: a place that sells shoes that need a shoehorn, will probably also sell shoehorns. New research project: do Chileans actually think, "I need a shoehorn. I'll go to the shoe repair shop that is also a medical supply store?" Or do they think "shoe repair store" and this just happens to be a weird one? (That's possible, one respondent did say I needed to go to a reparador, which would make it just curiously different rather than thoroughly bizarre.) Time for more research.

Today we did an Amazing Race, which is sort of like a scavenger hunt but with an emphasis on speed, and the things to gather weren't very hard, just awkward to get to. It was pretty epic: Jeremy and Sharon took several cabs, but even so they only beat me and Brandi by 3 minutes. We in turn took one cab, but arrived at the final Metro station at the same time as Corrie and Heather, giving us a neck-and-neck final sprint. They'd budgeted 3 hours for the whole thing, but I called them after 45 minutes to say we were on the final mission.

I'd wanted to go running this morning, but instead I spent an hour literally running across central Santiago. So now I'm going to bed.

on a quest

I own two pairs of shoes that benefit from a shoehorn: my Clarks, and my canvas running shoes.

In a fit of false economy in my last-minute packing, I decided not to bring my shoehorn. I thought, "Nah, I can get by without it." The stupid plastic shoehorn weighs less than my glasses. And my running shoes are actually really hard to put on without one. What the hell? This was not a smart decision.

Okay, so I need to buy a shoehorn. Now, I've never tried living day-to-day abroad outside Latin America, but one of many things Chile has in common with Mexico is that if you need something, you can safely assume that someone sells it, but that it won't be where you expect and it's like a scavenger hunt to figure out where it is. For example:

1. I'm in La Vega, the big market across the river (more about that later). I ask the guy who sells household sundries about a calzador. He looks at me like I'm from Mars, so I mime/explain a shoehorn. He says, "Oh! Yeah, a calzador. I don't have those."
2. Find a nice lady and ask if there's a shoe vendor.
3. Ask the shoe vendor. Nope, he doesn't have them.
4. Head south back into the Centro.
5. Stop at a shoe store and ask about a calzador. The guy looks at me like I'm from Mars, so I mime/explain a shoehorn. He says, "Oh! Yeah, a calzador. I don't have those. You need to go to a place that sells dress shoes." Right! Off I go.
6. Stop at a dress-shoe place and ask about a calzador. The guy looks at me like I'm from Mars, so I mime/explain a shoehorn. He says, "Oh! Yeah, a calzador. You have to go to a reparador, they sell them. There's one down on Paseo Ahumada, between Compañia and Huérfanos."
7. If there's anything like a reparador on that block, it's closed and has no outside sign.
   
8. Stop at a Hush Puppies store and ask about a calzador. The very friendly and helpful guy looks at me like I'm from Mars, so I point to the metal shoehorns in the glass case in front of him. "Oh! Yeah, a calzador." "Do you sell plastic ones?" "No, and these aren't for sale, they're for people to try stuff on. If you go to a regalería, they'll have them. There's one right around the corner, [garbled] La Igriega. They'll have them."
9. There is, needless to say, no La Igriega anything where I'm pretty sure he told me to go. I set aside the shoehorn quest, get my ice cream, and come home for a nap.
   

There you have it: at least an hour spent walking around a huge city, from store to store, trying to figure out who sells shoehorns in this culture. And apparently there's something wrong with how I pronounce "calzador" that I need to work on.

(UPDATE 3/28/10: By asking someone else today, I discovered the guy was saying "la galería", not "regalería". A galería is a rabbit's warren of shops in first or lower floors of a building, clustered roughly by type: shoe stores, photo stores, etc. This makes future success more likely.)