Seth Kugel for The New York Times
Clockwise from left: the Plaza de Armas, a see of the metropolis from Metropolitan Park, pig’s foot soup at Eben-Ezer and strawberries at La Vega Central market place.
“My couch is quite comfy,” boasted Marcos, the pony-tailed, Iron Maiden-loving Chilean who experienced met me at the centrally situated Parque O’Higgins metro stop in the Chilean capital of Santiago and was strolling me to his spot. “I often slumber on it myself.” When you have just $ 100 to commit all weekend, any spot will do — but his worn-in black leather-based couch, paired with a thick comforter for heat and a snow-white cat named Ixi (named for Itchy, the “Simpsons” cartoon mouse) for company, turned out to be a desire.
Until it wasn’t: My host ended up obtaining an impromptu Friday night celebration in his thin-walled bedroom for heavy-steel-loving pals that lasted right up until almost 6 a.m. But such is the give and get of hospitality trade internet sites like Couchsurfing.org: Make a good friend, lose some snooze.
I slept well on Saturday, even though, and the city’s charms produced up for a handful of less winks: From cost-free markets and museums to Pablo Neruda and pisco sours, all accessible through a very serviceable subway, Santiago turned out to be maybe the gentlest of the 8 cities I have frequented on my $ a hundred weekend sequence. At the time of my October pay a visit to, the dollar was well worth 486.fifty Chilean pesos, offering me a deceivingly opulent-sounding 48,650 pesos to operate with.
FRIDAY
Friday afternoon was dreary, as have been the monumental federal government buildings downtown. But I was before long cheered up at the Plaza de Armas, which was bustling with men and women and cost-free entertainment galore: an elderly musician performing a quite excellent egg-disappearing trick makeup artists turning small ladies into cats and a comedian who asked me the place I was from and then created a joke that everyone laughed at but I didn’t realize.
I also sampled a need to-attempt avenue food: close by, five hundred pesos, acquired me a small mote con huesillo, cooked wheat kernels in chilled peach nectar juice with tasty hunks of dried peach. A gentleman in front of me experienced just purchased a big, which appeared more like “a massive” to me. “It’s the very best there is, one hundred percent organic,” he explained. “It’s excellent for starvation, good for thirst, great for you.”
I invited Marcos to dinner, and we took the subway to La Fuente Alemana, a legendary sandwich shop in a town obsessed with sandwiches. At the jammed U-formed counter, customers were wolfing down the traditional sandwiches, chacarero (beef and inexperienced bean) and lomito (pork loin), almost as quickly as the ladies driving the counter could assemble them. Two sandwiches and two beers expense me 13,300 pesos, which is less painful if you look at it as both a meal and a thank you for two nights’ lodging.
I left Marcos and established out to fulfill Rodrigo Cea, a Chilean travel author I have been in contact with more than the several years, at a stylish wine bar referred to as Bocanáriz (bocanariz.cl) in the upscale Lastarria neighborhood. He had promised wine flights for underneath $ 10, and it delivered: I tasted three abnormal varietals located in Chile (like mourvèdre!) for 4,two hundred pesos, and referred to as it a night time.
Complete spent: 22,020 pesos ($ forty five.26)
SATURDAY
La Vega Central (lavega.cl) is 1 of those raucous food markets of unfathomable scope that can preserve a price range traveler entertained for a early morning, fed for a working day and depressed about American supermarkets for lifestyle. Sellers announce the arrival of exotic fruits (“The lúcumas are below!”), and carts loaded down with artichokes and avocados are rolled by. At a seafood stand, live picorocos — Chilean giant barnacles — share ice area with octopuses, and butchers sell things the two common (“nuggets”) and probably alarming (horse meat). At a location called Eben-Ezer I went neighborhood and purchased a pig’s foot soup for 1,two hundred pesos, subsequent it with a 1,000-peso suspiro limeño (meringue atop dulce de leche) from Pasteles Normita (pastelesnormita.cl), one particular of numerous Peruvian organizations in the marketplace.
It was time for some typical sightseeing. At La Chascona, the home Pablo Neruda developed for his lover (and later on spouse) Matilde Urrutia, I compensated four,000 pesos to see secret passages and fanciful furniture (such as a dining table made extremely-slender for intimacy). Then it was up San Cristóbal Hill to the amazing Metropolitan Park, in which it appeared half of Santiago was riding a bike, browsing the zoo, strolling the gardens or (in a single instance) filming a audio online video.
Santiago is beside itself with pride at the new Costanera Center Mall, an appalling 6-story shrine to globalized materialism. What it should be boasting about was my subsequent cease: Persa Biobio, a every day industry that on weekends blankets an total community. In warehouse soon after warehouse, suppliers market just about every thing tourists would never want (antique lamps, arcade recreation joystick panels) and the occasional thing they may possibly (a 1,five hundred-peso duplicate of Neruda’s “Twenty Really like Poems and a Song of Despair,” which was inconveniently out of stock at La Chascona).
Nearby streets are equally entertaining: I handed a band actively playing Led Zeppelin handles, stepped apart for a line of tummy dancers, had a lomito sandwich (2,000 pesos) at a chaotic meals counter named La Picá de Jaime and a draft beer (1,five hundred pesos) at a relatively seedy bar-cafe referred to as Las Pipas. (When I pointed out a cloud of gnats to a fellow beer drinker, he mentioned, “Drinking here is wonderful taking in listed here is not recommended.”)
Chile and Peru have an ongoing discussion more than whose edition of the grape brandy named pisco is best, so that night I slipped into a sidewalk table at a bar named Mamboleta and sheepishly requested the cheapest consume on the menu: the basic two,000-peso pisco bitter. The consume arrived, and I well prepared myself to detect the big difference in between it and the Peruvian model I was familiar with. The foamed egg white with a sprint of bitters on prime looked the identical. I strained to tease out divergences. Then I obtained the check out: I experienced truly ordered a Peruvian pisco sour. (A Chilean pisco sour, it turns out, does not usually incorporate egg white.)
I was going for walks toward the bridge to Bella Vista, the celebrated night-lifestyle location across the Mapocho River, when I arrived throughout a curious sight: hundreds of men and women in the Parque Florestal, a park by the river, dancing salsa to Celia Cruz’s “La Vida Es un Carnaval.” I had happened upon a cost-free month-to-month function known as “Encuentro Ciudadano en Luna Llena” (“Civic Gathering on a Total Moon”). Though I located the lifestyle-affirming speeches that broke up the audio a shade too goofy, the cost was appropriate.
Total so considerably: forty five,120 pesos ($ ninety two.seventy four)
SUNDAY
I experienced a two-pronged plan of assault for Sunday: sopaipillas and museums. All weekend I had resisted the temptation of the disks of dough mixed with squash and deep-fried, sold for one hundred pesos apiece by avenue sellers all over the place. That was a mistake: I could not find one particular on Sunday. Irritated, I blew three,000 pesos on a Peruvian tamal and juice. Then it was off to a collection of free of charge-on-Sunday museums, beginning at the National Museum of Fine Arts and ending at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights (often cost-free), which documents the 1973 coup and murderous Pinochet dictatorship that followed. I lingered for hrs, sopaipillas prolonged forgotten.
Complete put in: 48,940 pesos ($ 100.fifty nine)