Santiago, Chile
February 10, 2007
February 10, 2007
We woke up early on our first morning in Santiago to continue our quest for a Lavanderia. We have been carrying around two bags of stinky, sandy clothes since we left Montanita on Wednesday. Our plan was to take care of the laundry in Guayaquil, but after searching the city for several hours we gave up, completely defeated.
After deciphering the Santiago Yellow Pages we found three places fairly close and within walking distance. We wanted to get our laundry done and then spend rest of the afternoon exploring Santiago. We struck-out at the first place since it wasn’t open on Saturdays, headed to the second place, and were successful—finally! The only catch, it was an autoservicio lavanderia which means you leave it, they wash and fold it, and you pick come back to pick it up. This actually worked out better for us, giving us time to do other errands while our laundry was being tended to.
With the chores out of the way, we finally headed out on the town for a walking tour. We hit all the highlights in Santiago, including the Mercado Central, a seafood market similar to Pike’s Place in Seattle. We were told to get seafood here, towards the center of the market, most importantly, we were told to be adventurous.
We walked into the market, which looks like it used to be an old seafood processing center. Along the outskirts of the market are the fish purveyors selling calamari, sea urchin, sea snails, various types of fish, mussels, shrimp, clams, and other unidentifiable sea creatures. The purveyors weren’t tossing the salmon as you see at Pike’s Place; however, they were playing their own little jokes on the crowd by playing with some of the various fish for sale.
As we headed towards the center of the market the hosts from the various restaurants started vying for our business, telling us they had the perfect table for us. We did a few laps of the market before deciding on a restaurant, La Joya del Pacifico. The decision was easy because the suave host explained he knew exactly where San Francisco was and loved Gloria Gainer and Jefferson Airplane. After we sat down at the table, the waiter promptly brought us bread, butter and a very fresh looking salsa. There were no chips with the salsa but it tasted wonderful with the soft bread and was a nice alternative to butter.
We both decided to get a bowl of the mixed seafood soup in an attempt to be adventurous. The seafood soup arrived at the table in a scalding cast iron bowl, and I immediately decided we were very adventurous since many of the unidentifiable items sold by the purveyors were now in our soup. We each took a bite—fantastic!
The sauce consisted of standard ingredients such as garlic, onions, tomatoes, white wine, cilantro, pepper oil, and small chunks of ham. The mix of seafood included clams, mussels, calamari, shrimp, white fish, sea snails, abalone, oysters and sea urchin. The final touch on the soup was a bit of sand and a few broken shells…we decided it wouldn’t be seafood soup without these final ingredients.
We both ate as much of the seafood as possible, dipping some of the bread into the soup or into the salsa, and washing it down with a nice cold
Cristal beer. As we hit our limit, it appeared we barely made a dent in the dish, but our bellies were full and we were ready to explore some more.We took one final lap of the market before heading back on the street to see more of Santiago.
