About ryan

My name is Ryan Fuller and I was a consultant. Now I'm in rehab in South America. It's better.

Beaches and mountains and wineries, oh my!: More reasons why Santiago rocks

Posted on August 9, 2010 by ryan

While Santiago is a great city in and of itself, possibly its most compelling feature is its proximity to an amazing variety of incredible day-trips, ranging from beaches to wineries to mountains and more. This is a tale of some of those day-trips.

Context

I thoroughly enjoyed writing about career related topics (e.g., Career Option-value) and will absolutely be writing a lot more involving evil mongeese in the near future, but I didn’t want to go too long without offering a little travel-related inspiration…

We’ve been in Santiago, Chile for a couple of weeks now and we continue to like it more and more (see our original post on Santiago). So much so in fact that we are now seriously considering getting jobs and living here for the foreseeable future. Anyone have any good leads? 🙂

We may sound crazy. You may be wondering why we would consider living so far away from home. There are many reasons. In this post, I’ll discuss 3 of them: beaches, mountains and wineries. Oh my.

Santiago day trip 1: Beaches

About a week ago we made plans with some friends to go skiing in some of the gigantic mountains hovering just outside/over the city. We headed over to their house at around 9am to meet up. When we got there, they told us that they had heard the weather was rough and it might be snowing too hard in the mountains for skiing to be much fun. We are fair weather skiers, so skipping the slopes for the day was fine with us. After some discussion about possible alternate destinations, we decided to drive to the coast for the day. It was drizzling for most of the ~1 hour drive, so initially we weren’t all that optimistic about the beach. We were in for a surprise.

We started at Isla Negra, which is a small beach town a bit south of Valparaiso and the site of one of Pablo Neruda’s houses (he’s kind of a big deal here). The tour of the house was very worthwhile (this guy collected all kinds of crazy stuff, including a narwhal tusk!). Beyond the house, the beach was fantastic which was helped by the fact that the rain stopped..

This was Pablo Neruda's backyard. I wish it were my backyard.

After our tour, we decided to drive a bit further up the coast to Viña del Mar. Viña is a popular beach destination for a good reason.

It's always a beautiful day in Viña del Mar

The weather was significantly better at Viña. We had an awesome lunch on an outdoor patio (keep in mind that it’s the dead of winter here) and then took to the beach…

Everyone out enjoying this beautiful winter day

Also, there were some very cool sand sculptures.

Such as this crazy dragon thing

We got some ice cream, hung out on the beach for a few hours and eventually headed back to the city.

Let’s recap:

We woke up in the morning ready to go skiing.
We determined that it was snowing too hard to go skiing
Rather than driving an hour east for skiing, we drove an hour west to the coast
We spent the day enjoying a sunny, warm and beautiful day at the beach and eating ice cream (because it was snowing too hard to ski).

Does this seem strange to anyone? Is this sequence of events possible anywhere else in the world? If so, let us know! If not, join us in basking in the awesomeness that is Chile.

Santiago day trip 2: Mountains

This weekend it wasn’t snowing too hard. With our friends at the wheel, we managed to make the ~1 hour drive east (though ‘up’ is the more accurate direction) and hit the slopes at Valle Nevado. It was our first time skiing in the Andes and it was unlike any skiing we had ever done before (in a good way).

This is the lodge down at the base (yep, that's the bottom...)

Aside from the incredible views and massive amounts of snow in every direction, there is something quite unique about skiing in the Andes…

Hmmm... what's missing from this picture?

Trees. There are no trees. I’ve never skied without trees before. They pretend that there are separate runs, but really it’s more of a free-for-all where you can pretty much go anywhere–there is nothing but snow and mountains for miles and miles and miles. At the lodge, you can conveniently pay for a helicopter to drop you off further out if you’re crazy (we saw it go back and forth more than a few times), or some people apparently take a lift up and just head off in a different direction and have a friend pick them up near the side of the road somewhere down the mountain (or just hitchhike from there).

I’ve skied all over the US, but I’ve never seen this much fresh powder–certainly none that is this light and fluffy. Also, it doesn’t get that cold (rarely below freezing) and apparently the day we were there was the most crowded our friends have ever seen it–sometimes we waited in lift lines for up to 2 minutes.

This is the 'most' crowded it's ever been...

And another thing…

Echaurren glacier at the top of Valle Nevada image

At the top of one of the lifts you get an incredible view of the Echaurren glacier (top left) which is hanging out at around 17k feet

If glaciers aren’t your thing, there are also some spectacular views of the city way down below.

That's Santiago city down there in that valley. If you look closely you can see the buildings... completely surrounded by mountains

Not only that, but the drive home offered some pretty spectacular sunset views.

Sunset on road to Santiago from the Andes image

Sunsets in Chile do not mess around

Let’s recap:

1 – 1.5 hour drive from city
Amazing powder skiing, wide-open runs, not crowded, warm
Incredible glacier views
Incredible city views
Incredible sunset
If we were feeling lazy, we could have gone to the beach instead

Convinced yet? If you still don’t agree with us that Chile is awesome, that’s fine. There’s plenty more…

Santiago day trip 3: Wineries

On another day, with some other friends (people are friendly here), we headed north to the small town of Los Andes. It’s about an hour, maybe 1.5 hours north, nestled in between the Andes and the Coastal Range (more mountains) and more or less surrounded by the vineyards of the Aconcagua Valley (you have to be specific because there are like 7 wine valleys within an hour or so of the city).

The views were ok

Frankly, there wasn’t really any need to have a particular destination in mind, you can basically just start driving and stare in awe out the window at the amazing scenery beyond every turn.

We had been pretty fixated by the Andes, but we learned about a whole new mountain range on this trip.

Those are part of the Coastal Range. Also awesome.

We stopped at one point and did a little hiking through vineyards to get to the top of a hill (which happened to be the site of some very interesting petroglyphs).

This is what we saw

After we managed to tear ourselves away from these incredible views (and of course buy as many bottles of wine as we could carry after some wine tasting) we headed to our friends’ favorite lunch destination in the area…

Decent place to have lunch -- try the drunken chicken

As if the above wasn’t enough, we also were treated to a brief performance by these guys:

Huasos - Like guachos, but Chilean

Once again, let’s recap:

1 hour drive
Spectacular scenery along the way
Not one, but 2 mountain ranges (Coastal Range and Andes)
Cool wineries that make great wine in unbelievable settings
Drunken chicken for lunch
Chilean cowboys

What more could you want?

In Summary

We used to live in San Francisco. San Francisco is known for having lots of incredible day trips you can do near the city. While we are big fans of San Francisco, the day trip possibilities around Santiago make San Francisco day trips look a little silly (in diversity, intensity and proximity). We’ve only just begun exploring this city/country and so far we are blown away.

Where else can you do all of this and more so close to a major city? Why doesn’t everyone live here?? 🙂

Check out more photos in our gallery:

Beach day photos

Ski day photos

Winery day photos

We got featured on BudgetYourTrip.com

Posted on August 8, 2010 by ryan

BudgetYourTrip.com is a very cool site. They would be cool even if they didn’t post an interview of us. That said, they did post an interview of us and you should check it out.

If you aren’t familiar with the new site Budget Your Trip, there are at least three reasons why you should be:

It offers great resources to help you budget any upcoming trip you might have ranging from categorized cost benchmarks to planning tools
The people behind it are very cool corporate America run-aways that have created a new life for themselves allowing them to pursue their passions
They featured us in an interview on their site! You should check it out: Consulting Rehab feature on Budget Your Trip

Seriously, their site can really help simplify the planning for your next trip. Check it out. Tell your friends.

Enjoy!

If I were to write a management book about career “option value” . . .

Posted on August 5, 2010 by ryan

I know a lot of people that are working very, very hard in jobs that they don’t have any particular passion for (and in many cases dislike quite a bit) in order to have greater “option value.” I was one of them; I spent the majority of the last 10 years building option value.

As we come closer to the time we originally thought we’d end this Career Break, I’ve started to think about the future and my career again. I’ve started to think about “option value” – how much I’ve accumulated and what I should do with it. If I were to write a management book about option value it would look something like the following.

It will not apply to everyone.

Sometimes “option value” is about building a great resume…

It starts young. You don’t even know it’s happening. All you know is that you have to work very hard in high school to get into the right university. You don’t question it, you just know it’s what you’re supposed to do. Everyone knows it–and those that disagree just have wrong-minded priorities (e.g., fun). You know better.

Once in college, you have to make sure you choose the right major, get the right grades, do the right internships and demonstrate the right leadership qualities in order to get the right job after graduation. If you are in pursuit of option value, determining which job is the “right” one involves very little reflection upon what you enjoy doing or what makes you happy; instead, it requires seeking out the jobs that are hardest to get, the hardest to do and the most likely to consume the vast majority of your waking hours. This is obvious.

Of course, this job is just the first such job; the whole reason you worked so hard to get it is so that you would be qualified for the next job. That’s the “option value.” There is always a next job/accomplishment/promotion/whatever–otherwise, why would you be working so hard at the current job which you barely even like? If you weren’t doing it in order to get the next job, it would be a little crazy, wouldn’t it?

Each new job will likely be harder than the last. If you’re focused on pursuing “option value,” you will likely inadvertently have become convinced that any job that would be hard and/or painful is automatically worthwhile and important; also, you’ll likely believe that any job that looks easy and/or fun is almost certainly frivolous and a waste of time. Obviously, this makes sense, even though it is sometimes hard to explain to others in a way that they can understand–fear not, this is likely due to their wrong-minded priorities (e.g., happiness).

This logic will force you to continually seek out the path of greatest resistance and push yourself as hard as you can to get “there.” The destination is irrelevant; it’s the very fact that there is resistance that makes it seem worthwhile. In other categories of your life you likely don’t have the same confusion–for example, you may fully agree that walking through an open doorway is a much better idea than trying to walk through a brick wall–but for some reason this logic gets reversed in regards to your career. We’ll refer to this as “Brick Wall Syndrome, ” or simply BWS.

Watch out for "Irritable Brick Wall Syndrome", that's even worse.

Most people fail or drop out at some point in this process–which is understandable, as it requires near-perfection as well as a fair degree of luck to navigate the course. The longer you go without a failure, the greater the pressure to be perfect all the time and the more (it feels) you have to lose. Unfortunately, being perfect gets harder and harder. The further up this ladder you climb, the more years and vitality it extracts from you and the harder it is to remember what you were doing it for to begin with. On a positive note, with each new accomplishment you earn an entirely new set of options for the future. After 5 years of this intensity you have quite a bit of “option value;” after 10 you could do almost anything. Imagine if you did it for 20 years – someday you’ll be able to do all of those things you always wanted to do – not today, but someday . . .

Sometimes it’s about accumulating money and/or stuff…

This often looks similar to the scenario above. It often layers on top of the scenario above. Having money has real benefits:

You can afford to buy products and services that free up time (e.g., car, take-out dinners, Roomba). There are lots of things you can do with more time. Things like looking for more brick walls.
You can spend money on stuff to reward yourself for your accomplishments and to prove to others that you are “succeeding” (e.g., houses, watches, monster trucks). Unfortunately, spending it on these things along the way requires earning even more to pay for them. That said, the value of owning a monster truck should not be underestimated.
You can even save money so that someday you won’t have to work so hard and you can finally afford to go out and do all of those things you always wanted to do. I guess.

While it is not entirely the same thing, there is no denying that more money = more “option value.” And, you can always have more; someone else always does (we refer to them as “jerks”).

Options don’t kill people, people kill people…

There is absolutely a place for pursuing “option value” and many benefits can come from it. It can indeed get you where you want to go. . . as long as you know where that is. The thing is, you don’t really need 1,000 options, you probably only really want 5. And if you only really want 5, why spend so much time building the other 995? The trick is figuring out which 5 you want and minimizing the amount of time spent accumulating those you don’t care about.

For example, let’s say I want to go on an island vacation. It would probably make sense for me to figure out which island I want to go to, buy a ticket and go. Right? Alternatively, I could put off reflecting on where exactly to go and instead work really hard for several years to save up enough money to buy tickets to 20 different island destinations (just in case the first one doesn’t turn out to be perfect). I still won’t have gone to any islands over these years, but I will now have several to choose from and at least I won’t be sunburnt. Note: I tried really hard to come up with a funnier example for this analogy. I failed (see below, failure can be a good thing).

Pursuing options merely for the sake of having more options is not often a recipe for long-term happiness. It’s all too easy to get caught up in this cycle–especially when you are working so hard to get to the next set of options that you don’t allow yourself time to reflect upon where you are headed or what is on top of the particular ladder you are climbing–be careful, it could be an angry mongoose.

Worse, it could be a giant mongoose. BWS sucks.

One way to break the cycle…

Seek out failure. Failing early is better. Anything is better than running into an angry mongoose on top of a ladder. It’s much easier to succeed if you’re already a failure–and much harder to avoid failing if you are exclusively a succeeder. Most happy people I know have had significant failures. Few happy people that I know are pursuing options for the sake of options (though, they may have monster trucks someday so you should still be friends with them just in case).

Failure teaches you that it’s ok to fail (if this seems obvious, great–if not, be careful, you may be suffering from BWS). Failure often leads to new perspective and a more open mind regarding what “success” can look like. Indeed, failing at what you think you are “supposed to” do may open the door to pursuing what you actually “want to” do. Weird.

Don’t spend all of your time and energy getting stressed about avoiding/fearing failure (a prime symptom of BWS). Instead, embrace it–it can be more fun that you might think.

Now what?

If you’re working hard on something you don’t love in order to build “option value,” always know why you are doing it and how you plan to “cash in” on those options. You get to choose why and how, but choose. Choose something that inspires you and work specifically towards it. It doesn’t matter what you pick (e.g., travel, time with family, volunteering, ninja training course, etc.). There is no right answer and you can (and should) change it as many times as you want. The important thing is picking something specific rather than just marching forward without a destination–if you don’t choose, the angry mongeese will choose for you and you definitely aren’t going to like what they choose (it will probably be something scary, they eat snakes).

With them in charge, what could go wrong?? (Note: I am fairly confident that the $2 I paid for this photo is the best $2 I have ever spent)

Once you pick something that inspires you, it’s time to ask yourself when. How much ‘option value’ and which options do you need to pull it off? How much money? Be specific. You might be surprised. You might have more than you need already. It might be time to cash in–you can always create more options later. Plus, who knows what new ones you’ll find along the way…

Maybe you'll be able to pull this off

Wasn’t that a nice inspirational note to end on?

Note: The author makes no claim whatsoever to have figured anything important out or to have anything worthwhile to say about this or any other topic. He writes things like this merely for entertainment purposes–mostly his own. You should definitely not construe this as advice or take action based on it–you could end up unemployed in Chile.

Update: If you liked this, you may enjoy Chapter 2: Perfectionists should kick themselves in the head (perfectly)

A graffiti photo-tour of Valparaiso, Chile

Posted on August 2, 2010 by ryan

There is graffiti everywhere in the coastal Chilean town of Valparaiso and it is incredible. It’s always changing, but below are some of our favorites from July of 2010 (click on one for a slide show with larger images)

Pretty crazy isn’t it? Even more in our Valparaiso graffiti photo gallery

Graffiti–art or vandalism? Please discuss…

Kayak.com does more than you might think

Posted on August 2, 2010 by ryan

You may have noticed that in the last couple of weeks we added a Kayak.com flight search box to our sidebar (over on the right). You may have wondered why. “Why would they do this?” you might have said to yourself. You may be saying it to yourself even now. Fear not, I am here to answer that question for you.

We decided to become affiliate advertisers for Kayak.com for 3 reasons:

1) Travel is awesome. Everyone should do it more often.

2) Kayak.com is one of the very best tools out there for finding ways to travel cheaply (if anyone out there doesn’t already know about Kayak.com, it compares fares against virtually every airline and aggregator (e.g., Expedia, Travelocity, etc.) and helps you find the very cheapest/fastest/best way to travel.

3) We don’t want to have to get real jobs anytime soon. Someday we’re hoping to make some money off of this blog, and if you access Kayak.com through us, we will! Wouldn’t that be great? To be sure, we won’t make much money, but empanadas are cheap (another reason why everyone should travel).

But wait, there’s more!!

I only recently learned about this feature and it blew my mind. It may blow your mind too. You should sit down.

Have you ever been sitting around thinking to yourself:

“I really need a vacation… I wonder where I should go?”

“I finally have a free weekend, maybe I can plan a trip!”

“I only have $300 to spend, I wonder if there is anywhere I could go for that much…”

Kayak.com can answer these questions very quickly for you. Check out this link: Kayak: Where can I go from San Francisco in Fall of 2010 for under $1200?

This feature allows you to tell it your origin city, your price range and your time of the year and it will tell you on average what it would cost you to go anywhere in the world within that price range at that time of year. If you want to, you can even include activities (e.g.,where can I go skiing from Chicago in Jan for <$500). Instead of skiing, you could also tell it beach or a temperature range or a few other things. Seriously, this is cool.

In my opinion, this feature is under-marketed… I had never heard of it before I randomly stumbled upon it. It’s extremely useful for preliminary trip planning to spur ideas when you know you have some time off at some point, but aren’t sure where to go AND also very useful for last minute travel when you suddenly have a few days and just want to get away.

Let’s review what we’ve learned

1) Kayak.com is awesome

2) Kayak.com is even awesomer than you may have thought

3) You don’t want Ryan and Jen to have to get jobs; you want them to eat more empanadas. To enable this goal, when planning or booking travel you should consider starting with the Kayak.com flight search box here on Consulting Rehab.

Word?

Cafe con piernas = Coffee, with legs

Posted on July 30, 2010 by ryan

Buckle up, this one is going to be interesting…

Cafe con piernas: The background

So I was in Santiago for a few days back in 2002 and I vaguely remember going on a city tour with a tour guide that told us that there are topless coffee shops here–e.g., coffee shops in which the women serving the coffee are topless. After telling us this he kind of laughed, so I laughed and assumed he was either making it up or that there was like one shop in the entire city and it was a complete oddity similar to this one in Maine (which sadly burnt down a few months after opening). I was wrong.

What we’ve learned over the past week or so is that this is actually a bit of a cultural phenomenon here in Chile and has been for almost 50 years. It’s called ‘cafe con piernas’ which means ‘coffee with legs’ and does not refer to an extra caffeine boost. It started with a place called Haiti (which still has many locations around downtown). At the time, the downtown area was full of almost entirely men coming to work (apparently the women usually stayed home) and the idea was to provide them some entertainment during the work day. So, Haiti opened some coffee bars and had the women wear provocative clothing. Unsurprisingly, this worked out pretty well and more and more similar shops kept opening.

In the mid/late 90s another coffee shop decided to differentiate itself by featuring what they called the “Millionaire Minute” which was a 60-second period during which all of the women would fully remove their tops. Again, unsurprisingly, this innovation was largely well received by the clientele and was the catalyst for a whole new level of cafe con piernas experiences. As you will see in a few paragraphs, I do not use the phrase ‘a whole new level’ lightly…

Cafe con piernas: The news report/video

I think that before I give you the details of our personal experience with cafe con piernas….

…

(sorry, just had a flashback)

Right, before I give you the details of our personal experience with cafe con piernas, it might be best if you watched the following video about it produced by a news agency in London in 2007 (it was aired on network TV, so should be safe for work):

Cafe con piernas news report (sadly, they have disabled embedding, so you will have to watch it on YouTube)

Ok, can’t put it off any longer. On to our personal experiences…

The misadventures of Ryan and Jen – Chapter 1: The beginning

As we were exploring our new neighborhood over the last week, we noticed a very large number storefronts with big signs stating that they were ‘cafes.’ We were like, “Jackpot, so many cool looking places to get coffee!” As we continued to explore, we noticed that many of them had either blacked out or, more commonly, mirrored windows (meaning, the kind that you only see your reflection if you try to look in)–this seemed odd…

Looks pretty normal... except for the mirrored glass and the small sign that says "se necesita señorita" which other than being a neat rhyme, means something like "we need chicks" (all of them have this sign, which for awhile seemed like a solid job prospect for Jen...)

Later, we were walking around downtown and ran into a couple of other coffee shops called Haiti (the aforementioned original cafe con piernas institution) and Caribe. These have normal windows and are usually pretty crowded.

Cafe con piernas -- Cafe Caribe storefront image

Looks perfectly normal from the outside

Unfortunately, this picture doesn’t capture it, but you can usually see the serving women from the street and they are all wearing very short, very tight dresses. Also, the area behind the coffee bar is raised up about a foot in order to maximize the view. Seeing this triggered the memory of the ‘topless coffee bar’ comment from the tour guide during my first trip here back in 2002, so we started doing some Google research and began to learn all about cafe con piernas (including the video above and some links below).

Upon reading about these shops, you may be surprised to hear (I certainly was) how excited my lovely wife Jen became about investigating them first-hand. After watching the video, she was all excited to go check one out first thing the next morning, saying it was “a cultural experience”. If you haven’t yet watched the video (seriously, watch it) an important and likely somewhat obvious fact to know is that the shops with mirrored glass are a bit more… shall we say, progressive than Haiti and Caribe–these two are considered to be the tamest of them. Another fact you should know before I proceed is that all of these shops offer standing room only–no chairs, you drink your coffee while standing at the bar.

I suggested that we go to one of the tame ones, but Jen was having none of that. Here is a direct quote from her: “if I’m going to have to stand up to drink my coffee, I better get some ‘boob-age’.” Seriously, that’s what she said. There were other choice quotes from her as well, but I’ll save them for later; suffice to say, she was very excited–even more so than usual. I think that now, in retrospect, she deeply, deeply regrets taking this stance…

The misadventures of Ryan and Jen – Chapter 2: First attempt

There are literally 5-10 of the mirrored glass-type establishments within a few blocks of our apartment (I told you it was a good neighborhood!), and given that you can’t see inside, we weren’t sure how to go about choosing one. Luckily, my Harvard-educated wife concocted a plan; the plan was to loiter across the street from a few of them and choose the one had the most in/out traffic (we certainly did not want to be the only ones in there). It was a reasonable plan, but as we were camped out across the street from a few trying to look inconspicuous, Jen’s excitement turned into nervousness that she would be rejected because she is female. Then after 5 minutes of not seeing anyone go in or out, the nervousness escalated. We decided that we would wait until we talked to some locals and got some advice on where to go. If one wanted to say this in another way, one would say that we chickened out.

That afternoon we went on a bicycle tour of the city (which was cool), and Jen excitedly asked our guide about cafe con piernas. Understandably, he laughed. Then, he explained that there are PG, R and X rated ones and that if we wanted to learn more about them (including how to tell which was which), we should go on one of their other tours–seriously, this is a big enough thing here that it is included in city tour itineraries. He explained that here in Santiago it is often somewhat cold, so everyone wears layers and is completely covered up most of the time; in his opinion, the girls in cafe con piernas venues are merely wearing the sorts of things that women might wear on the street in a place like Rio de Janiero and that it is very popular here because it’s so rarely seen. Makes sense. The other thing he told us was that it should be completely fine for her to go into them–I later learned that that was all she needed to hear…

The misadventures of Ryan and Jen – Chapter 3: Oops!

The following day I assumed that Jen’s excitement would have blown over. Again, I was wrong. We got out of bed and she was almost jumping up and down when she said, “Wanna go get some coffee???” I said, “Really? Still?”

Her: “Yes! He said I could go!!”

Me: “Ok…”

We decided to attempt the same plan. We first camped outside of this fine looking venue for ~5 minutes:

We couldn't tell for sure what those pictures were on either end of the sign, but we were pretty sure this place was classy

We saw one person go in, but in general we didn’t love the vibe, so we ultimately decided to keep walking. About a block away we encountered this place:

Cafe con Piernas, Santiago - Cafe Rio image

We have a winner

We stood outside, casing the place, for 5 minutes or so while I repeatedly asked Jen if she was sure she wanted to do this and she repeatedly answered in the affirmative. Eventually we saw a few men go in so we sucked it up and went for it.

Oh boy.

Seriously, this is challenging to write. Taking pictures was the furthest thing from our mind (and likely would have resulted in us being beaten out back by a guy named whatever the Chilean equivalent of Biff is), so I’ll do my best to detail the experience in words (which will force me to relive this highly traumatic experience quite vividly–hope you appreciate this!)

The room was about the size of a bedroom. The coffee machines/baristas were off in the back. There was a narrow standing bar in the middle and then a counter along the walls where you could put your coffee; otherwise, wide open space. There was fairly loud techno music playing and it was dark-ish, but certainly light enough to see the staff… Also, all of the walls were mirrored (and possibly the floor/ceiling too, though I don’t remember). Equally weird was how easy it was to see out the front windows to the people on the street.

We were immediately greeted by a woman wearing the standardized uniform–5 inch heels, g-string/thong and very revealing bra; that’s all. She kissed us both on the cheek somewhat provocatively and then asked what we would like. She did not seem at all disturbed by Jen’s presence–nor did the other patrons despite what they were doing. We ordered 2 coffees. She told us that it would cost 2,000 pesos so I gave her 2,000 (this is more or less the normal price for coffee). Then she asked if we might want to give her a little something extra for her. Jen gave her another 2,000.

She went off to retrieve our coffee and we nervously looked around–which was pretty easy given all of the mirrors and the fact that we had situated ourselves at the stand-up bar in the middle. This few minutes that we had to ourselves taking in the scenery and wondering what would happen to us when she returned with our coffee was a special time for us. It probably always will be. Whether we want it to be or not.

At the time we were there (~11am) the staff consisted of ~5 girls all dressed the same and there were maybe 3 male customers–each there on their own, and each ‘enjoying’ his time with one of the staff. We had read a few accounts of other experiences at such places and had heard of one which said that the girls were unattractive, overweight and groped the customers left and right. We heard another account in which the people said that the girls were very attractive but seemed completely disinterested in the customers. In the 2 by 2 of x-rated cafe con piernas venues, Cafe Rio is definitely in the “winning” quadrant–very attractive girls, lots and lots of groping.

Note: Consulting Rehab does not necessarily condone or endorse the views of this 2by2

In fact, the word ‘groping’ really doesn’t describe the kinds of things that we saw reflected in the mirrors. The other girls were definitely ‘dancing’ with the other customers–keep in mind, there are no chairs, so it was sort of a standing lap dance. Some of the customers definitely had their hands all over (and under) the skimpy outfits of their dedicated girl. And, we also saw one girl kneeling down in front of a guy for a couple of minutes appearing to provide a special service. Truly, experiencing things like this with your wife is the bedrock of a strong marriage.

Soon, our señorita came back with our coffee and stood about 2 inches away from Jen, making it clear that she would be our companion until we left. I’m not a religious person, but I have thanked god more than once in the last couple of days that she chose to stand next to Jen and not me. Not really having a roadmap for situations like this, Jen struck up a conversation with her. We learned that she moved here 2 years ago from Peru and her 6-year-old son lives back in Peru with her mother. She’s worked at the bar the whole time and makes money to send home and to be able to go visit. She also told us that the most crowded time of day was at 1pm, right around lunch break (keep in mind, these places are closed at night and don’t serve alcohol). It was actually a very nice conversation and we would have truly enjoyed getting to know her if not for the dry humping (and more) happening a few feet away.

I don’t think I’ve ever drunk a coffee so quickly. We were out within 10 minutes. Jen was no longer excited. We’re pretty sure we had stumbled into one of the hardest core ones based on what we’ve read and it felt more like being in a brothel or extremely hands-on strip club than a coffee shop. Suffice to say that we were a bit messed up for the next few hours.

Cafe con Piernas, Santiago - Cafe Rio 2 image

2 hours later we walked by again to get a picture of the front -- Jen's face looked like this for most of the day

It was about 1pm when we walked by the second time and we saw 7+ men walk in within 2 minutes… curious how it works when the clients outnumber the staff… not curious enough to go back. Interestingly, there definitely does not seem to be any sort of social stigma associated with walking in and out of these places… many of them are on busy pedestrian streets and we’ve seen people coming in and out of them quite a bit.

After this experience, despite our need to find an income, we decided that it was no longer a viable option for Jen to become one of the señoritas that they necesita.

The misadventures of Ryan and Jen – Chapter 4: Our tamer experience at Cafe Caribe

Because we had already done the hard part and gone into a hardcore one, we decided to try one of the tamer ones the next day to complete our research. It was a world of difference. There were men there, but also women and while the servers were definitely wearing tight dresses, it wasn’t that big of a deal.

Cafe con piernas, santiago - Cafe Caribe image

I fake tried to take a picture of Jen to get one of the staff, but she was wise to us and mostly escaped. There are better pictures in the links below

This was basically just a normal coffee shop. In fact, I’d argue that the fact that you had to stand up to drink your coffee was weirder than the outfits the staff were wearing. This was actually kind of a fun and different cultural experience–night and day from our Cafe Rio experience.

The misadventures of Ryan and Jen – Epilogue

It’s been a few days now and we’ve mostly recovered from our experience, but as I said, our 10 minutes in Cafe Rio will always be a special time for us. Writing this has been cathartic. Let us never speak of it again.

Cafe con piernas: Our advice

If you are a tourist here in Santiago and want to be able to say you went to cafe con piernas (and it is worth checking out), go to Cafe Caribe or Haiti. If you are looking for a coffee and some dry humping (or more, did I mention there was a staircase in the back that likely lead to someplace a little quieter…), try Cafe Rio. Beware of the other mirrored glass establishments, you certainly wouldn’t want to end up in the unattractive/aggressive groping quadrant of the cafe con piernas 2 by 2.

Cafe con piernas: Other interesting links

A female expat’s experience and perspective on cafe con piernas: http://eatwineblog.com/2010/03/26/coffee-with-legs-santiago-style/
Another blog with some interesting thoughts on the sexism of it as well as some conversations with an owner and a bit on the economics: http://www.chipsites.com/chile-travel/fun-activities-cafe-con-piernas.html
A food blog’s perspective: http://www.seriouseats.com/2008/04/snapshots-from-chile-cafe-con-piernas.html
Additional perspective from the Travel Tart: http://www.thetraveltart.com/starbucks-coffee/

We’re settled in Santiago; it’s still awesome (and getting awesomer)

Posted on July 28, 2010 by ryan

We arrived in Santiago from Buenos Aires on Friday, just in time for a cold and somewhat rainy weekend (yay winter in the southern hemisphere!). We were a little nervous to finally see the apartment that we had committed to sight-unseen for the next month (especially after seeing a different one last week that did not quite live up to the pictures); when we saw it, we were quite surprised–in a good way.

We’ll write more about how to rent an apartment in Santiago in the future–it seems to be quite a bit easier than Buenos Aires. There are less places for rent, but laws are more enforced here and people tend to obey them so there are significantly fewer ways that things can go badly for you. We found this place through Craigslist from a company called CerroUrbano run by a very nice Argentine couple who has been living in Chile for 5+ years.

Santiago rental apartment living room image

This is our living room. There is a tiny patio at the end<--remember this, it will come in handy in a few paragraphs

The place is only 36 square meters (~390 square feet), so it’s tiny, but it’s very well designed and furnished to make it comfortable and livable.

We miss the king sized bed we had in BA. It's a good thing we like each other...

While the kitchen is smaller than what we had in BA, it’s much better laid out and quite functional:

I bet your kitchen counter doesn't glow...

All of the above is great… modern, comfortable, nice building, etc. BUT, by far, the best part is the views…. Remember that tiny patio I mentioned earlier?

Santiago rental apartment, patio view image

We are on the 20th floor. This is what is outside the patio.

In case you are having trouble distinguishing what is out there, here are a couple of shots with the door open:

Santiago rental apartment, patio view 2 image

Yeah...

Or, if you look a little to the right:

Santiago rental apartment, patio view 3 image

It's a decent view; that hill is Cerro Santa Lucia, we climb it daily for exercise

How about a zoom in just for kicks:

Santiago rental apartment, patio view 4 image

Mother F#$**r

Keep in mind from our previous post on Santiago, those mountains are ~4 miles higher than the city.

The apartment is in Bellas Artes–perfectly located right in the middle of tons of cafes and restaurants (including a number of very special cafes which we’ll tell you all about out later this week…), very close to multiple subway stops, 4 blocks from Plaza de Armas and basically perfect in every way as far as we can tell. More on our impressions of Santiago later, but we like it more and more every day. We are paying ~US$800/month for this fully furnished place including all utilities; we heard that buying such a unit would cost ~US$50k, intriguing…

So yeah, things look like they are going to work out just fine here in Santiago 🙂

Here are some more crazy mountain pictures for your enjoyment from our rooftop pool deck and the hill near our apartment: (click on them to enlarge)

: Crazy mountains

: More crazy mountains

: Jen with crazy mountains

: Seriously

: They are everywhere

: more

We got interviewed by Quitter to Winner!

Posted on July 26, 2010 by ryan

And you should read it! : Consulting Rehab interview on Quitter to Winner

Quitter to Winner is a relatively new interview-based blog dedicated to “providing a resource for those quitting their job for a career break, sabbatical, entrepreneurial venture or new gig.” There are some very interesting interviews on there providing inspiration for exploring some less conventional paths in life and I have no doubt the site will only grow.

Thanks to Michael at Quitter to Winner for including us!

Santiago, Chile is awesome; let’s live there!

Posted on July 21, 2010 by ryan

We like Chile a lot!!

So much so, in fact, that we have added a new “Chilean Adventure” category to the blog and are going to go live there for a month starting on Friday (2 days from now).

I was there for a few days in ~2002 and remember absolutely loving Santiago. Back then, I was shocked at how modern and sophisticated it was and just loved the energy. Jen and I had always planned to get over there and check it out while down here in South America, but over the last 4 months of living in Buenos Aires and constantly hearing from everyone here how dull and boring Santiago is, we almost didn’t go (seriously, people in BA tend to really talk smack about Santiago–we are beginning to develop an understanding of why and will explore further in future posts). We are so glad that my sister coming to visit provided us with a compelling reason to make the trip!

As you may know, we had been trying to figure out what to do with ourselves for the next month and been tentatively planning to fly up and check out Ecuador and Columbia, but the pricing is crazy–the last straw was when we realized it would actually be cheaper to fly back to San Francisco first and then buy flights to Quito/Bogota/Cartagena from there than it would be to buy them from Buenos Aires (by the way… did you know that you can often get tickets from Miami to Columbia for under $100??) So, we were left unsure what to do next that would be feasible with our budget (like a fine wine, unemployment becomes more complex over time), but lucky for us, Chile is awesome! Santiago seems extremely live-able, refreshingly different than Buenos Aires, affordable, a good base for some travel and exciting–sign us up!

So what makes Santiago so awesome?

Thing 1: The insanely ridiculous mountains

Seriously, if you haven’t been there, you can’t understand how crazy this is. The photos don’t even come close to doing it justice, but I’ll try…

Andes mountains around Santiago, Chile image

We literally didn't see the mountains for our first few hours in town because we weren't looking high enough. You have to crane your neck back. Seriously.

The city itself is at an altitude of only ~1,600 feet above sea level, the mountains that surround it on ~3 sides and are extremely close get up to 21,555 feet – that is a difference of ~20,000 feet in altitude (~4 miles straight up) that takes place just outside the city. For comparison, if you have been to Denver and thought that the Rockies looked impressive from there, know this: The city of Denver is already at an altitude of ~5,200 feet and the very highest peaks in the Rockies (not really visible from the city) are around 14,000 feet – only a difference in altitude of ~9,000 feet.

So basically, imagine the view of the mountains from Denver and then move the mountains closer and add ~2 vertical MILES to them and you’ll have something similar to the view of the Andes from Santiago. Crazy? Yes.

That is a pretty tall building. Looks pretty small compared to the 4 miles of vertical mountain behind it...

Seriously, look higher--those aren't clouds

Thing 2: The culture and people

The culture of Santiago is very different from Buenos Aires in many ways. I’ll write more about this in the future after we’ve spent more time there, but there are several things that jumped out at us right away:

Safety: The first night we were there, we saw people all over the streets walking around in business clothes carrying laptop bags. This would never happen in Buenos Aires, even during the day. If the locals have a backpack in BA, they leave it unzipped so that it’s obvious they don’t have a laptop in it. This alone gave us an immediate impression that the city is significantly safer–this perception only grew over time.
Police presence (related to safety): There are Carabineros (Chilean police) everywhere and the people seem to enjoy talking with them. We asked around and were told that not only are they NOT corrupt, but they are consistently rated as the most trusted and respected institution in the country. Suffice to say that the police are generally held in a slightly different regard in Buenos Aires.
Friendliness: People were SO friendly! Virtually every person we met went out of their way to be nice to us and chat with us for awhile. They seemed genuinely curious about us and proud to share their country with us.
Cleanliness: The city is unbelievably clean! The sidewalks don’t have holes in them, the subways are super modern, the buses are quiet and don’t have huge trails of black smoke billowing out of them. It’s very impressive; and it’s not generic either… they definitely have a style all their own, they just like it clean.
Efficiency: Things just work well. They have good systems in place and clearly seem to value efficiency–this is exceptionally rare in Latin America and, while there may be pros and cons associated with valuing efficiency, it certainly was a refreshing change of pace for us.
This sign basically means something like: " For a nicer subway, please stay to the right to make it easier for everyone." In Argentina, walking is more like playing a game of chicken at all times.

All of the above and other things left us feeling that Santiago is a place where we could really enjoy living. It’s likely less of a tourist destination than Buenos Aires is (as BA is very much geared towards leisure activities), but it felt more the kind of place where you could have a real life. Obviously, nowhere is perfect though, and it will be interesting to see how our perspectives of it change over time.

Thing 3: The seafood

That's what I'm talking about

Chile has a lot of coast line. That means a lot of fish. While we’ll likely miss the Argentine beef, we are very excited to diversify our diets a bit.

Lots and lots of fish, and some other stuff...

This is Chilean King Crab. It will F you up.

Thing 4: Proximity to amazing coastline

We’ll write a separate post detailing our trip to Valparaiso on the coast and will certainly be visiting more coastal cities in the month to come. Just know that within a ~1 hour drive from Santiago, there are views like this:

This is from a patio in Valparaiso--not a bad view if you're into oceans and stuff

Off in the distance is Vina del Mar, a very popular beach vacation destination

Thing 5: The fantastic artwork

We are big fans of trying to buy local artwork when we travel–especially paintings. We have had trouble finding much that we liked over the last several months, but Chile really delivered. In Plaza de Armas (a big plaza in the middle of Santiago), every day there is a large group of local painters selling their wares (and in many cases painting new ones as well).

See, lots of painters. Why don't you ever believe me??

We splurged a bit and ended up buying 4 spectacular paintings to send home with my sister (they were ~$40 each!).

Plaza de Armas Santiago painting 1 image

Yeah, he painted that, we bought it 🙂 He actually wasn't finished with it yet when we bought it, so we watched him put all of the finishing touches on it. Also bought another one that goes well with it. Great paintings and really cool guy--he gave us his home phone number (I told you they were friendly!)

Plaza de Armas Santiago painting 2 image

We bought the one on the bottom, Ashley got the one on the top. We'll match! The guy in the middle is the artist--everything of his was gorgeous... we're lucky that one of his others wasn't dry yet otherwise we would have spent another $100. (he also gave us his home phone number)

Plaza de Armas Santiago painting 3 image

Got that one in the middle... Had to wait until the next day for it to dry. Very excited about it. Now that we own 4 paintings, I think we have officially become Chilean art collectors--we should get business cards...

Thing 6+: ??

I’m sure we’ll keep finding more exciting things over the next month as we begin our Chilean adventure, stay tuned…

Thank you!!! Also, we wanted to offer up a special thanks to our new best friends in Chile who we met through Trip Advisor and this blog (we’ll leave out their names to protect the innocent). Their suggestions for places to stay, things to do, etc. were invaluable and we loved meeting them and exploring a bit of Santiago off the beaten track together. Thanks so much, we look forward to another round of Pisco Sours and some good Chilean empanadas! 🙂

Lots more pictures in our Santiago album: Santiago photo album

So many posts to catch up on! (but still no time…)

Posted on July 17, 2010 by ryan

We’ve been too busy traveling, exploring and trying not to freeze to death (it’s VERY cold in Chile) over the last week to be able to post at all. I only have a few minutes now, but there are SO many things for us to catch up on, por ejemplo:

Wine tasting in Buenos Aires with Anuva — Awesome!
Wine tour with Trout and Wine in Mendoza — Awesome!
Mendoza overall
Santiago, Chile — Aside from it being extremely cold, we really like it here and think we might come back and spend a few weeks
Walking tour in Valparaiso, Chile with Michael the German pirate (that’s what he goes by)
Argentine wine vs. Chilean
Argentine food vs. Chilean
Special thanks to those of you that have sent us so many fantastic suggestions for these cities!
And probably other stuff too.

No time now, but should be able to start pulling this stuff together over the next week and we have tons of great pictures.

Aight, gotta run, just didn’t want anyone to think we had disappeared.