Tripped

Looks Like We Chose the Right Year to Go, Pt. II

Exactly a year ago at this time we were picking up a car in Santiago to drive to Valparaiso for the weekend, then south for a week of wine touring. Now thanks to the 8.8 earthquake destruction has been wrought in many of the places we visited. Our thoughts are with the people of Chile.

Those Global Distribution Gaps

It's the soap that's the odd one: we found Neutrogena, unscented formula, available in Chile, in Peru, in Ecuador. In Argentina, it's nowhere to be seen - even while the original formula bars and a range of other Neutrogena products fill the shelves in the Farmacity. Now that we're on our fourth country and our third extended stay, what we've learned about global distribution of consumer goods is that plenty of the major brands we're all familiar with back in the States have penetrated these markets. But as expats everywhere seeking the comforts of home have long documented, it's impossible to predict which ones make it across which border. I

Take that Neutrogena soap in Latin America: it appears to have an oddly antagonistic relationship with Neutrogena shampoo. The latter was impossible to find anywhere for ten weeks, from the moment our initial flight landed in Lima, through Peru and Ecuador and Chile, until we arrived here. Now it's in every Farmacity in Buenos Aires even while the unscented bars have disappeared. Multiple other American shampoo brands, however, have been ubiquitous across the continent, especially Head & Shoulders in its many different formulations.

Our old standby Tom's of Maine toothpaste has been a no-show on shelves throughout, so if they're getting a marketing boost or improved retail channel access via their acquisition by Colgate-Palmolive, it's not internationally. And there's been plenty of Colgate around everywhere we've gone - that and Aquafresh seem to be the most popular American toothpaste brands, in their full range of flavors and types.

Atra razor blades, still widely available as replacement cartridges to the installed base of handle owners in the States? Forget it - in Argentina, they've already been phased out. If you're a Gillette customer you're either a Sensor Excel, Mach 3, or Fusion user.

Peanut butter had been everywhere, until Argentina.

The pervasiveness of Coke and McDonald's are well documented and railed against, although no one in any of the countries we've visited appears to be railing - they're enormously popular. But Oreos have been just as pervasive.

Those are off the top of my head, I'm sure Eileen will now remind me of some more and I'll append them here.

View From Our Current Window

Stealing shamelessly from Andrew Sullivan, who posts "The View From Your Window" photos submitted by his readers, this is part of what we see from the terrace at our current apartment in Las Condes.

 

Photos That Deserve Further Explanation

I shot this picture from the terrace of our second-floor apartment on Huerfanos in Barrio Brasil, Santiago. The guy on the left is one of the "parking attendants" you see everywhere in the city. Many of them wear orange vests and/or pseudo-official looking laminated IDs, collect tips for gesticulating at drivers while they parallel park their cars into public street spaces, and offer to wash your parked vehicle for an extra fee. One can only imagine what they do if you refuse to pay them for their help.

The guy in the middle appeared to be one of the local homeless hanging out on the park benches during the day.

The old man on the right lived in the building across the street. He came out of the building carrying the half watermelon in his hand, eventually handing it to the homeless guy. When the attendant arrived shortly after this, the homeless guy handed the melon to him. This very friendly, very animated conversation went on for sometime - they were too far away and my Spanish was too weak for me to pick up what it was all about, although you might assume from the exchange that the old man was offering a bonus for keeping an eye on his car. The "parking attendant" left and these two kept at it for awhile, although the old man was doing most of the talking.

Wine Touring

Our Internet access has been pretty flakey the last few days - lots of timeouts that make it difficult to do things like upload photos, either to Typepad or to my MobileMe backup - so I haven't been able to provide a more complete picture of Santiago. The other day we spent some time in Las Condes, one of the most upscale neighborhoods in the city, in part to look for information to help us plan a tour of the wine regions. Sitting at our late lunch in a sidewalk cafe, you could have easily thought you were in any post-60s American Sun Belt cityscape: wide avenues, mostly indistinct office and apartment towers, nearly all of it built in the last 30 years. There were even (unfortunately) American restaurant franchise locations, not only McDonald's but TGI Friday's and Ruby Tuesday's. I joked on my Facebook page that it was like Century City, but with people.

Earlier in the day we visited the Mercado Central, the city fish market that looked a lot like the Pike's Place Market in Seattle or Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia, including being overrun with restaurants trying to snag the tourist trade. The only difference is that these restaurants were INCREDIBLY aggressive in trying to land your business, sending wave upon wave of greeters at you to chat you up and steer you into a seat.

We're off today to pick up a car rental and begin our wine week, including a weekend near the coast in Valparaiso and Vina Del Mar, where we'll also have a chance to check out the Chilean summer beach scene.
 

The Two Meal Plan

We've been on a weird schedule the last few days, since we've jumped ahead three time zones from the Galapagos: staying up late, sleeping late, but not going out for dinner late at night even though everyone here seems to be on a very late dinner schedule. So we've been eating basically two meals a day - a very late breakfast, and a very late but big lunch/early dinner, and then snacking after our return to the apartment, dragged out from all the walking we've done. Today we toured the very impressive Museum of Pre-Columbian Art near the Plaza de Armas - it's small, but has an amazing collection of works from most if not all of significant cultures that developed in this hemisphere, from Mexico to Patagonia. I was particularly attracted to the pottery, figurines, and jewelry of the Wari, as well as the works of the Chavin culture, both of which pre-dated the Incas.

After that we went searching for English language books. We've been dropping books as we've gone along, so we don't have to carry a huge stash in our limited luggage, and Eileen was due for a top-up. But it's been very, very difficult to find anyplace that carries anything other than ESL materials. We stopped in a libreria near the museum, for example, but despite being as big as any U.S. superstore they had about as limited selection of English titles as you'd find titles in Spanish in a typical U.S. Barnes & Noble. Yesterday we had struck out completely on the stores recommended by Lonely Planet.

A bit of Internet searching had turned up a store near the Irarrazabal Metro stop that claimed to have 20K titles, so we dutifully took a train out there to find it - which we did, but only with some luck! It was located in a little alley on a street in a neighborhood filled with car dealerships, warehouses, and offices for construction companies, and it turned out that it was, in fact, a construction supply office - which I had sort of figured out from what turned up on the web searches, but didn't quite believe. Here's what the building looked like:

And here's what the tiny little sign on the locked gate said when you walked up closer to it:

We dutifully rang the bell, and 30 seconds later were cheerfully admitted. Upstairs, it was as if we had walked into the private library of a contractor who had died and left all his English-language books to the company. In a little warren of offices decorated with fading posters of past projects they had worked on, there were two completely indifferent 30-something guys working on PCs in one room. Beyond them in the hallway to the office kitchen, in a much bigger executive office, and in a little room that must have once been a closet were thousands upon thousands of mostly used paperbacks, mostly from America, with a few hardbacks scattered throughout. There was no real rhyme or reason to the organization - novels were next to history were next to cookbooks - and no particular focus in the collection: we saw everything from Dianetics to wine encyclopedias to Shakespeare to Danielle Steele. I would have asked for an explanation but their English was worse than our Spanish. After picking through as best we could to find something we hadn't read before, Eileen selected a couple and we departed. I should have taken more pictures inside, but my I didn't think my iPhone would handle the poor lighting conditions very well.

In Santiago de Chile

Well, the apartment isn't quite what we were promised - we reserved a one-bedroom with a balcony, we got a two-bedroom without one - but otherwise our arrival here went just fine. First reaction with the little we've seen is that the town is incredibly modern compared to anything we encountered in Ecuador or Peru, starting with the big freeway from the airport to downtown.