Chile diverso – parte 2

The illegal immigrants try to keep their heads above water as street vendors. Therefore, in front of all the regular shops in Santiago, one finds countless street stalls. Something that, according to the Chileans, hardly existed a few years ago. The children of these mostly illegal immigrants are not allowed to go to school and receive no medical care. Therefore it is not surprising that the crime rate has risen sharply in recent years. 

This all sounds very negative, and honestly, we don't know how much we would have liked Santiago if we hadn't been lucky enough to explore the city with Lexi, who we know from our time together in the gymnasium. Although we only knew each other briefly beforehand, she took us to an art exhibition of young Chilean artists, to dinner with her friends, to a beer festival with Latin American music that we would never have heard of otherwise, and to the “local mountain” San Cristobal with a view over the entire city.
What we really liked about Santiago was that the city seemed open and tolerant. We encountered countless flashily dressed people, homosexual couples and perfectly styled drag queens. When we had dinner in a restaurant in Lastarria, we could even watch a drag queen show live, including impressive acrobatics. The local people totally freaked out, stood up, cheered and clapped. The atmosphere was terrific.

That same evening we also got to know Michelada and Pichelada, a Chilean drink with beer, lime juice and salt and optional chilli on the rim of the glass. It sounds strange, but it was very refreshing. In general, the choice of drinks in Chile is very diverse, with good wine, delicious lemonades, good cocktails and beer. Unfortunately, this doesn't apply on the food. Often the food tasted very bland to us, consisting of a piece of meat with rice or mashed potatoes without sauce. One of their “signature menus” is the “completo italiano”—a hot dog with avocado, tomatoes and mayonnaise. What this has in common with Italian food apart from the national colours we could not tell. Also a popular dish is Chorrillana,  chips with various pieces of meat, onions and garnished with a fried egg on top. 
People in Chile also love sweets. A dessert (“postre”) is part of every lunch menu. It is often a pudding with lots of gelatine and sugar. Instead of dinner, they often treat themselves to an oversized piece of cake or pie. You also see people of all ages walking around with a lollipop in their mouths. Because Chileans love sweets more than anything else you also find sweetener instead of sugar in every takeaway and whole shelves of different types of sweetener in the supermarket. We interpreted this as an action of the state, since Chile has the third highest diabetes rate in the world.
Price-wise, the food was costly, especially compared to Argentina. So you can imagine that we often cooked ourselves. When we went out to eat, it was essential to have a quick read of the reviews of each restaurant. As mentioned, while Chilean food tasted rather bland and boring to us, it was a treat for Chileans. As we all know, tastes are different. We could always rely on the French tourists, who are generally very strict and critical in their comments. As luck would have it, we lived in a district in Santiago with countless Asian and international restaurants. During the four days, we filled our bellies with Japanese, Thai, Indian but also Hawaiian food.