drinking, with science.

I was in Mexico for a few months once. It's a long story, involving a girl and a sailboat. The sailboat was neither mine nor the girl's, which was part of the problem, but not nearly so much as the lunatic combination of me and the girl.

Anyway. Mexico.

We were in Guanajuato--nowhere near a sailboat, I said it was a long story--wandering one evening, and we went into a bar.

6pm was far too early for Mexicans to be in a bar, but it was a pleasant place to sit, and practically shouted that it had been invaded by artists. The standard restaurant tables were brightly painted, and had matching curvy edges, so they would pair up in varied combinations.

It turned out to be run by some kid who was probably 19. He said his parents were opening a restaurant in the building, though that end of the space looked empty, so that may have been happening on Mexico Time (where mañana gets a range of new meanings, from its traditional "tomorrow" or "morning" all the way to "next week," "next month," and "I don't like you, stop asking").

We went back hours later, and it was all you could have hoped for, full of arty-cosmopolitan young Mexicans, and foreigners looking to avoid the "do any Mexicans actually live here?" vibe of nearby San Miguel de Allende. So we're hanging out with the manager kid, who speaks okay English, and some guy from Comfort, Texas who says it's a great place because a mob of Germans arrived in the 1800s and decided they would ban the practice of law inside town limits. The manager is pouring shots of tequila like there's no tomorrow: good stuff, and not charging us, just having fun. I watch him do the damnedest thing.

He says he's invented a drink, the Ráfago (which name surely resonates with Mexicans somehow).

1 tall skinny 2oz shotglass
1oz orange liqueur, chocolate liqueur, or both
1oz tequila

1 cigarette lighter

Drink half the shotglass, but do not swallow. Swish it around in your mouth.
Tilt your head back.
Dip lighter flame into your mouth until the alcohol vapor in your mouth ignites.
Enjoy the tickling sensation of the flames for a few seconds.
Close your mouth (make sure to seal your lips, to extinguish the flame) and swallow.

The main challenge here is that you can't see what you're doing, or whether you're getting the flame too close to your teeth (which have no external nerves). It's not rocket science, though, and it tastes much better with some of the alcohol burned off.

This worked more or less flawlessly at the time, and I was less able to reproduce it back home; but now that I am trying to find the burning temperature of alcohol vapor, I learn that an alcohol solution's flammability depends also on temperature and pressure, and Guanajuato is 6,600 feet above sea level, while the Bay Area is mostly at sea level.

It does sound nuts when I write it down, but I watched this other guy do it right in front of me, and he wasn't superhuman or anything. Also, delicious! With science!

Teachers' Day dinner

[Clearing out some backlog. I wrote this on October 14, 2010.]

The faculty all went out for the Teachers' Day dinner, at a charming little banquet hall. I sat with the same people I always sit with: Oscar, Ximena, Sara, Gladys, Pamela, Jorge, José.

We eventually developed an extremely heated discussion, mostly between Oscar and Jorge, about the Chilean educational system--universal agreement that it's broken, but there's lots to discuss about why, and how to fix it. After joining in for a while, I broke it up with a toast:

"I'd like to offer a toast: the thing that strikes me, is that you all care. This all matters to all of you, and that's what's important."

That started the toasts, including this gem:

Que nunca nos enamoremos; si enamoramos, que nunca se casemos; si nos casamos, que nunca nos engañemos; si nos engañamos, que no nos importa.

May we never fall in love; if we fall in love, may we never marry; if we marry, may we never cheat on each other; if we cheat, may we not care.

After another one, I said that I had an Irish (I think) toast, which of course I had to translate (into Chilean--other dialects won't use pololas):

A nuestras esposas y pololas: que nunca se conozcan.

To our wives and girlfriends: may they never meet.

They collapsed, laughing.

Chiloé: Ancud rundown

It's a small town, but we'll see what we can do.

You might want to avoid using Buses Queilen: they use their own terminal about 1.5km from the town center, and I didn't enjoy the walk with all my stuff. Plenty of other companies use the municipal terminal, a warehouse that's not in the middle of nowhere, or take Cruz del Sur. Or there are taxis, probably for about US$2.

I'm staying at Hostal Lluhay, which is a low-cost place for grown-ups: every day they come clean your room, make the bed, and leave you new towels (some days scratchier than others). Breakfast is fine, but the "kuchen," at least this week, has a top layer of Jell-O. (Kuchen is normally a German-originated fruit crumble dessert.) But here's the view from the common/dining room:

It's also a couple blocks from the town center, and the dining room has a very nice fireplace that eventually gives off heat.

Curanto is pitched as the culinary awesomeness of Chiloé. I've had curanto and its slightly smaller sibling pulmay (back at Sacho in Castro), and while I don't want to be jaded and negative, it's basically a clambake, but not as good. The shellfish, especially the clams, are full of sand, which I guess means they don't clean them (by leaving them alive in clean, sand-free water for a while). The sausage, chicken, and pork end up steamed, which gives them a weird texture and flavor. The broth was mediocre-to-tasty. Feel free to try it as a cultural experiment; I think it's vastly over-hyped, but I'm a food snob with a lot of seafood experience.

Food:

• Retro's Pub - Probably the winner, given I'm avoiding Chilean food. Excellent service, good-enough nachos (made with Doritos, so don't expect them to satisfy a purist)`, excellent burgers (if slightly awkward at 6-7 inches wide).
• Kuranton - Where I had the curanto. Meh.
• La Botica de Café - Chilean-style sad espresso and no wifi, but it's smoke-free and pleasant, with excellent desserts. Ordering a ristretto gets you good espresso.
• El Embrujo de Chiloé - I asked them to run the espresso machine for 30 seconds and they still failed. Ordering a ristretto was much better. Wireless, and nice people.
• DH Pub - Hiding up Pudeto a few blocks from the center. They have Chilote beer, which isn't good (at least the lager/blonde), but they made a mighty whiskey sour and it came with some kind of fried-dough snackies with spicy cheese.

Stuff To Do:

• Pingüinera Puñihuil - Penguins! Humboldt and Magellanic. Pictures here. It's a 3-4-hour jaunt unless you take the Mar Brava bus from their garage on Calle Anibal Pinto, which will leave you waiting on the beach for a couple hours. (I hitched a ride back with a private group.) If you've got an extra US$15 it might be worth a tour group, which will include other stuff; otherwise, take the bus or a taxi to the beach yourself and arrange with one of the two of three companies that actually take you out on the boat. Penguin verdict: cute and worthwhile, in beautiful secluded scenery.

It's a nice little town. I'm skipping the trip to Quemchi, which I'm fine with, since I was only going to a Chilote restaurant there. Ancud is an adorable little town, and for Chiloé in general, I could easily spend another week or more traveling around to different towns and islands.

the Chilean evening schedule

I met up with Corrie for dinner in Vina del Mar: she hitched a ride with her friends from Calera, Edgardo and his 6-months-pregnant wife Kati. Then it turned out that volunteers Lauren and Allison, with respective boyfriends Jorge and Marcelo, also showed up. We had a lovely actually-Italian meal at a cute reasonably-priced restaurant off in an alley.

Then around 10:30, we headed over to a pub owned by one of Kati's friends. I left my backpack in their car, saying "I can only stay for one drink."

"Oh yeah, us too," says Marcelo.

I ordered a gin & tonic, which came with the typical 3 shots of hard liquor in the glass. Marcelo and Kati had to leave relatively early, around 12:15--after all, they were dropping me off in Valparaiso and then had a 90-minute drive back to Calera.

I had a lovely time, but oy, their party schedule.

time spent with people.

Last night I finally met up again with my Chilean pal Karen (she's been sick). I met her at her workplace, but then she had to recover her house keys from a friend and we ended up back at her apartment, where there were her housemates and boyfriends/girlfriends, all university students, including Jaclyn, an exchange student from Michigan.

It was awesome. Chilean university students tend to be 4-8 years older than American college students, so they were mostly closer to my age; and they were far easier to understand than the teachers at school (I think they were speaking more clearly for Jaclyn's benefit). There was a lot of good talk about Chile and cultural differences and the manifold problems here--one girl, Cristina, is studying to be a math teacher, and the entire group has a pretty keen sense and interest in social justice.

(Interesting side note: Claudio was saying that the 90s were all about students' rights, and his generation came out of that, but the current generation has grown up immersed in its rights, but without a clear sense of its responsibilities. That certainly fits the WorldTeachers' experience of our students, but we don't have the history and cultural context to make that generalization.)

Karen and I did get some solo time to chat while retrieving french fries from the snack shop up the street, which were fantastic and exactly what the doctor ordered. I left the group at 11:30pm when they headed out to the nightclub.

Today I wound up having lunch with Joan, the math teacher who's also in charge of 1-G, whose Monday section is far and away my worst class. He's pretty cool, and also listens much better than the group of women teachers who adopted me. (They've gotten better, but still don't change their speech much to make communication easier.)

All of this makes me think I should drink cheap rum and Coke with my own age group a bit more often.

quiet night out

Last night Steve and I hung out with our fellow volunteer Lauren and her boyfriend Jorge. We went to Bar Kabala, one of the not-cheap, low-key little pub-cafes on Almirante Montt over on Cerro Bellavista. They had a couch, and a decent little cover band, and nice drinks and food. It was my first night out in Valparaíso, because, well, I don't like going out all that much.

(Jorge is from Argentina. He says that when he first moved here, he couldn't understand anything Chileans said either, so English-speakers are in good company.)

At lunch today (weekend lunches the family eats together) Oscar asked when we got back. I said, "Almost 2."

Aurora said, "Wow, so early."

It also turns out Oscar was about 100 meters from us (and got home about a half hour earlier), down at Restaurant Hamburg, which is a nice place with tablecloths and a bunch of naval memorabilia about Arturo Prat and the War of the Pacific, and something to do with Germans.

I was checking it out today, and a late-30s Chilean guy saw me, sort of smiled/smirked, and kept walking. He noticed we were going the same direction, looked at me and said, "Nazi bar."

Ooookay. I said, "Really? This many years after the war?"

With a reservoir of disgust, he said, "Fascists. During the dictatorship."

He smiled before he walked away.

"But the beer is very good."