Chile Con Karen: Chile con Karen y Matt

Matt and I have moved to Santiago, Chile! We're reviving this blog, hopefully with more pictures in future posts. This first post is written by Matt (and approved by Karen). Ping us if you want to say "hi"- we'd love to hear from you!

Tuesday Night and Wednesday:

Worried about security and dutifully heeding the “3 hour rule”, we arrived at SFO for our 10:56PM flight just after 7PM. And a good thing too, because security took a whopping 20 minutes! We got to our gate with only hours to spare, and used that time to review some new materials from Start Up Chile.

The first leg of our flight passed without incident. We ate seaweed snacks, slept, and watched the Fantastic Beasts movies. We had a cushy 3 hour layover in Miami, but we ended up needing nearly all of it, since getting to our next flight involved exiting the terminal and reentering another terminal through security. Everyone in Miami speaks Spanish. In fact, it seems like some airport employees don’t actually speak English. So, we decided to just stay there. Greetings from Miami!

Just kidding. On our second flight, Karen sat next to a famous Instagram Influencer. At least, we assume that’s what she was, because she took ~50 pouty selfies of herself during the safety instructions video. Karen entertained herself by disassembling her headphones to look at the speaker.

Upon landing, we made it through customs and took a shared van to our AirBnB. We met our host, who has been very welcoming and friendly, and promptly passed out. Or DID WE? Plot twist! Despite getting less than 4 hours of sleep in over 24 hours, we tossed and turned until we took melatonin and finally managed to sleep.

Karen and her Ergonomic Neck Pillow, Background: Selfie Queen

Thursday:

Thursday was a day of tramites (errands). First on the list: get our metro cards, onomatopoeically named “tarjeta BIP” for the BIP sound it makes when you use it. We used our new cards to take the metro to Karen’s old stomping grounds, where the Stanford center used to be located (it’s now moved to the same block as our AirBnB). We got sandwiches at one of her favorite sandwich places called Elkika. They were huge creations containing thinly-sliced beef, sauerkraut, palta (avocado), tomato, onion, and a colossal amount of mayonnaise, whose only purpose seemed to be to slide out of the sandwich when you pick it up- a roll it fulfilled flawlessly.

Note the white stuff is MAYO not cheese.

We swung by the office where I will be starting, and on our way into the building ran into an employee that I had talked to on a video call weeks ago. Up in the cowork space that is shared with some other startups, I finally met the other engineer!

Having obtained our Bip, it was now time to get Karen a chip. A sim card chip for her phone, that is. We found a store and they helped set her up with a Chilean phone number and plan. Interestingly, none of the plans include SMS (text) messages, but they do include unlimited social network usage (twitter, facebook, WhatsApp, etc) for free! Pretty much nobody in Chile texts- these apps have completely taken over that niche. The 60 year old phone tech was more smart-phone-savvy than Karen, and judged her a bit for her old iPhone model. While her phone was getting set up, another employee saw the bag of tupperware containers we had just bought and excitedly asked me if we were selling them. I said no, but when she learned we’d bought them only a few blocks away, she couldn’t wait to get them for herself. Now we're thinking we're fools for working in tech, and might have more luck in the tupperware industry here.

These things sell themselves.

We made a batch of stir fry later, and in our tired state, combined Spanish chorizo with an otherwise largely asian flavor profile- but it was pretty tasty.

Friday:

First stop- physical therapy. The hospital is only a few blocks from our AirBnB. It was reassuringly large and modern-looking. Although it seemed crowded, the wait for PT (kinesiologia) was pretty short. We arrived well before Karen’s appointment, expecting some kind of confusion, and were not disappointed. They had no record of her appointment. But they were able to schedule one and found a kinesiologo who speaks English- although most of the appointment ended up happening in Spanish.

We picked up some more groceries, including roasted nuts called avellanas. We do not care for them. I saw an avellanas-flavored ice cream though, so they must be popular. We also spent some time out in the Bellavista neighborhood, getting lunch, walking past one of Pablo Neruda’s houses, and scoping out the base of a large municipal park called Cerro San Cristobal. Later, on our way to Karen’s host mom’s (Alejandra) house for dinner, a Dia de la Mujer march was in full swing- and we had to walk in the opposite direction as the March. Hopefully nobody interpreted our upstream struggle as a form of antifeminist protest.

At Alejandra’s house, we met her fiancé, her dog Happy, and her current foreign student. Later, Alejandra’s daughter got home from her first job, which was the topic of a lot of very fast, very hard to understand conversation.

Saturday:

We spent Saturday doing the world’s most mundane scavenger hunt, including items such as: a yoga mat, an exercise ball, milk, power adapters/converters, slippers, and a small cart to take to farmers’ markets. We spent a long time visiting multiple stores in one of Santiago’s largest malls. Then we came back home and spent a while chatting with our AirBnB host over lunch. His fiancee lives in Lima, Peru, and has a very interesting job. Imagine, if you will, that you are a mining company or refinery and you employ workers. You give those workers shifts- they spend 5 days at a refinery or mining site, and then have 7 days free in the nearest city. But that city might not be where they are from- so since they have to travel for a day to reach their families, they only have 5 days free. Your workers aren’t happy with only 5 days with their families, so sometimes they refuse to come back to work. So you hire people to talk to these workers, interview them, and figure out how to incentivize them to come back to work. But those people have to interview maybe dozens of people a day. It’s hard to figure our what every individual worker wants! That’s where the fiancee comes in- she tries to create corporate incentives to improve employee retention.

A previous Start Up Chile founder, who Matt met during his job search, had invited us to dinner Saturday night. So we spent the first half of the evening practicing Spanish with him and his wife (and their 5 month old baby), and the second half hanging out in English.

Sunday:

Sunday we caught a free tour of Cerro Santa Lucia, which was packed with information and great views. During the tour, we indulged in Mote con Huesillo, Chile's analog to Boba. It's a summery mix of peach juice, peach chunks (still clinging to the peach seed), and cooked wheat grains. After, we got a typical Chilean lunch of fried merluza fish and pastel de choclo (corn-based shepherd's pie), and meandered through the Plaza de Armas (packed with people) and the Plaza de la Constitucion (deserted). As we write this we are having a relaxing afternoon, calling family and cooking dinner.

Drinking Mote con Huesillo at Cerro Santa Lucia