El Club De Jazz!

Friday was another engaging economics lecture, presented by the person in charge of assembling financial statistics for all Latin American countries in comparison to Chile. He showed us graphs and numbers that had not even been released to the press yet, as an example of how new they were and what an insider's perspective we were getting...After the lecture, we were told that lunch was covered by NU, so we walked along a busy road looking for restaraunts...

Sushi Now! was where we ended up, a local sushi chain in Chile that seemed reasonably cheap. Me being the picky eater I am, I had never eaten sushi before in my life, but am making an effort to try new things on this trip. I enjoyed my meal to a varied degree, the initial shrimp dumplings I ordered were extremely tasty whilst I was not as keen on the miso soup and shrimp/chive rolls that followed, which is a bad sign apparently as those were more authentic. No matter, we can't all love sushi I guess...

Afterwards was another vague dissapointment, as myself and Kelly explored several options in terms of air travel after hearing of 50 dollar flights to the South of Chile. However, due to the short notice and other factors, we were unable to find any round-trip prices less then 250 USD, which was way more then we were hoping. Therefore renting a car for the spare weekend, or merely snowboarding was settled upon as an agreeable course of action.

It was a girl in my group's birthday, Naris, but I could not stay to celebrate with her and the others. Friday night was reserved for the jazz club that my amigo Gonzalo had agreed to show me, a friendly Chilean kid who lived in my building in Boston and who I had jammed with before. I was obviously pretty excited, getting driven to a local jazz club seemed a pretty awesome way to spend my time. Sure enough, "El Club de Jazz" was a fantastic local place, where I was privileged to see the Nicolas Vera Quinteto perform songs from his new CD release "Bellavista". Gonzo's friends were also very fun to hang with, a diverse group of upper-class kids, some of whom had foreign educations and all were exceedlingly friendly and well-spoken.

I ended up hanging out with Martin, a local student, Nick, who was a DJ in Miami, and Ben (i think), a Venezuelan at school in Canada, after the jazz club. We absconded for Martin's house/barrio to drop another of his friends off and hang out for a second at his house (obviously a member of the upper class upon visiting), before racing back to Bellavista to try to hit up a few nightclubs. It was great, rocketing around the city with some locals, blasting Mars Volta and the Doors, for once not feeling like such a tourist...

The electro/indie/scenester club we tried to get into was packed and not letting people in, so we eventually wandered over to the Bellavista center, stopping in an bar overlooking the Patio Bellavista, where I had eaten lunch with the group a few days ago. The crowd was dead here too, but we had been looking for a place for so long we gave up and just got a round of piscola, pisco with coke (Nick convinced me that this was the drink I should be getting all the time, and I convinced myself after my first, a sweet yet potent blend of alcohol and Coca Cola) They kept apologizing for not showing me a better time, which was ludicrous since I was just so happy to not feel like a tourist and be hanging out with people that knew the city. When we parted ways, I made sure to grab Nick's number as he promised that Santiago was at it's best during the week, with Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays apparently the best nights to party. Overall great night, as well as a late one, but I got to sleep in on Saturday at least...