Submitted by Pat

Travel day. Easy flight from Hartford, CT to Atlanta. Ate dinner at On the Border - Mexican chain restaurant - then boarded a full flight to Chile. They were having trouble with the reading lights after we took off, so we were sitting in the dark for the most part. Nancy and Don were in the row ahead of me. I sat at the window next to a quiet young man named Evan. When they finally got the reading lights working, I turned mine on but instead of shining on my lap, both of them shone on Evan's lap so I was basically out of luck. It was close to 11 pm so I just tucked myself in and tried to go to sleep. The Bee Movie was the feature film. I fell asleep for a few hours and then woke up during the second showing, fell asleep again, then woke up around 2 am and 3 am. The flight took a little over 9 hours and they had a visual on the TV when the movie wasn't playing showing the track of the plane as it flew south over Cuba, Panama, skimmed the coast of Ecuador, then Peru and finally Chile. Don and I were both anxious about the length of the flight, but it wasn't as bad as we feared and both of us got at least a few hours of sleep. Nancy slept almost the entire flight. Lucky. The time in Chile was 2 hours ahead.

We landed at the Santiago airport and paid $131 to enter the country. The web site had said we had to pay in cash so I handed the clerk a bunch of twenty dollar bills. She looked at each one and handed back two - one that had a torn corner and one that had a minuscule rip. What's up with that? I guess they need absolutely perfect bills - Luckily I had them. What would have happened if I didn't? Would I be sent back to the States? After we picked up our bags and started to try and figure out where to go to check in for our next flight on LAN, the Chilean airline, we were accosted by a couple of skycaps in suits and they whisked us and our baggage up stairs to the check-in area. They spoke so fast that I couldn't keep up with them and basically I tipped them what they asked for and I got swindled. What a racket. Never again. Waited in line to check in and off to the gate. The flight to Puerto Montt lasted around an hour and a half. We took a taxi, crammed in with suitcases that wouldn't fit in the trunk, to the Gran Pacifico Hotel - four stars is what it is rated. Nice accommodations but my Spanish came in handy when the guy registering us was going to give us one room with a single and a double bed. That got fixed, but my room had a king bed and a view of the bay and theirs had two small double beds. I offered to change rooms and after some convincing we did.

We decided to eat some lunch in the hotel. Well, friends, my Spanish is good, but you have to understand that every Spanish-speaking culture has different foods and different names for foods so looking at the menu was like reading Russian. I had no idea what anything was and the waitress was impatient and not really interested in helping explain anything. We all ordered an American hamburger which really was some kind of mystery meat on toasted white bread, with tomato, lettuce, and a ton of mayo served club sandwich style. Don couldn't choke it down. I finished half of it. Ok, so this is going to be really fun...

We decided to walk down along the Malecon or waterfront walkway. We walked, sat on the wall and looked out across the bay, sat on a bench in the sun, listened to a group of indigenous musicians from Ecuador playing in a park. A hotel guest we had met in the elevator recommended a restaurant called Club Aleman (The German Club) so we found the restaurant and checked the menu. Again my Spanish and the unique names for food in Chile had me stymied. We walked back, bought some water, and took a break for an hour before meeting to walk down to the restaurant. Mineral water, by the way, came in three flavors - with gas (red label), without gas (blue label) and light gas (green label), gas being carbonation.

We were seated at a window table in the empty restaurant - no one eats down there before 9 pm so we were the only ones in the place. Music was playing and Don immediately went into a rapture of memory of his childhood when he heard a song by Bert Kaempfert called Swingin' Safari. He was so tickled that he got up and went out into the lobby, and without knowing any Spanish, asked someone what the CD was that was playing and told him that the songs on it were reminding him of watching the Sandy Becker Show, a children's TV show that aired in the 60's.

Our waiter had piercing eyes and wavy stylized hair, very interested in pleasing us, but did not know any English. I was on the bubble again and he helped as best he could to describe dishes using words that were specific to Chile so it was kind of like a circle that never ended. I ordered a filet of beef, Don pasta and seafood, and Nancy some onion soup. My beef was tender and delicious, cooked to perfection. Don ate what he could, but the seafood that was unidentifiable was left behind. It was a huge portion and Don isn't a big one-sitting eater, more of a grazer, so a lot was left. The waiter was mortified and the owner of the restaurant came out to ask if there was a problem with the food. I tried my best to explain that it was delicious and to tactfully say that Don wasn't really fond of squid or mussels. They decided to give him the meal at half price. After the owner left, two men came over to our table, one interpreting for the other, and gave Don a copy of the CD that had been playing during our meal. That was sooo cool.

I paid with my credit card - in the States you can add $$ for the tip, well, in Chile you have to either state an amount or a percentage to the waiter to add on. That sucks - but I didn't have any Chilean pesos so the three of us tried our best to calculate a decent tip. After thinking more about it we realized we had undertipped him so I went to him and asked if he would accept American dollars and gave him a $10 for his efforts. His pretty blue eyes lit up and he smiled and bowed and thanked us profusely. Despite the different tastes and the language barrier and the undertipping, we had a great experience in the Club Aleman.

Lighthearted, we walked back to the hotel into a bright western sun - 9 pm and still light out. We were beat, closed the shades in our hotel rooms, and got into bed, dreaming of tomorrow's adventures to come.