When you're at the grocery store sober, make green mayonaise.

All I wanted was a simple, healthy and Paleo Sunday dinner. I'm not sure what was hurting me most in accomplishing this: Santiago, it being Sunday, my desire for something lacking in difficulty, or my sobriety. Although I will admit at this point that I think walking outside of my apartment sober is a hindrance to my sanity.

But you know, there are a lot of things in my life vying for being the straw to break that camel's back, like my SLOOOWWWWW tablet and/or wifi. Just trying to type what I'm looking for into google can take a minute or more. But this is a constant, and it only bears repeating because I am incurably impatient.

I found a recipe, and planned out my shopping list accordingly. While I'd love to go to my sweet little green grocer lady (who gave me a little Nativity scene ornament for Christmas, because GOD are Chileans NICE!), I have hardly any cash, and I doubt she accepts credit cards, plus it's a tiny shop, and I needed more than just a few veggies she may very well be out of. Which brought me to the Santa Isabel grocery store right around the corner.

It's a small grocery store, so it won't always have the selection one would like. But I was (naively) confident it would have all I needed for these spicy mayo burgers.

I was doing ok until I, as usual, went to read the ingredient list on the surprising selection of mayo they have, because if there's one thing Chileans love besides avocado and bread, it's mayonaise. I wasn't hoping to find a real mayo like it might be possible to find in, say, Whole Foods (and I say MIGHT!), but one with minimal ingredients. Which quickly turned into one without soy oil as the first or second ingredient. To (over?)simplify, soy is bad for the thyroid, so I avoid it when possible, or just use it sparingly. Which was not the case with my wall of mayo. I was pacing in front of them, telling the bottles and bags that this country is unbelievable in English, which is my custom in the grocery store. Really, my talking aloud in frustration to the products in Chilean grocery stores is as normal to me as standing in line at the register to pay, staring in disgust at the fucking weird braided mullet the male cashier paid someone to do to his hair. In essense, food is my therapist.

While thus pacing and griping, the thought of just making the mayonaise myself occurred to me, particularly because I have the ingredients necessary to do so. So I decided that once I got home, I'd force myself to finally do what so many others before me have done (and I always think of Mercedes when we were in college who did this BY HAND), and make my own damned mayonaise.

Of course, first I had to go home with all of the other ingredients I needed for the burgers. It was toward the end of my list when I had to decide if "salsa" is the same as "limon" here, meaning it stands for at least 2 different things. Lemons and limes are both limons. I wasn't sure if the tomato sauce section included both sauce and paste, but one thing they ALL included was tomato juice from concentrate, plus additional sugar and salt, and any other number of questionable ingredients, by which I mean questionable regardless of being in Spanish or English. Naturally, this pissed me off more, because while I know that premade isn't ideal, sometimes you don't want to make this stuff yourself.

And that's the rub, really. I often made my own chicken soup/broth, but sometimes I'd run out and still have a recipe I needed it for. In the US, you go to almost any grocery store and you can get SOME soup/broth in a can at least, though your larger stores will have better options in a carton. They don't have canned soup or liquid soup, actually,  ready-made in Chile. The soup section of every store I've been to has been a wall of small packets. It's one thing to make soup using boullion; it's another to make soup out of mainly chemicals and wheat. Every last packet of soup, even if it was just supposed to be vegetable broth, contains wheat. It's actually one of the first 3 ingredients in all of them. Which, if you've been following along at home, you'll know that I'm supposed to avoid THAT shit as well. It's getting to the point where you see wheat as an ingredient in so much shit here that doesn't need it, that I wouldn't be surprised to find that they're pumping it into the smog we're breathing.

In the end, I couldn't let myself buy tomato sauce with all the other stuff, especially as I still have a tomato at home. So I took my stuff up to pay.

Which was going fine until we got to the palta (can I just type this? I don't think in Spanish or say anything-po, but when I think of avocados, I think palta. And it's shorter). Most of the stuff I get in the produce section doesn't need to be weighed, but apparently the 2 paltas did. It should be immediately understood that the registers don't have scales, because that would make life a little bit faster and easier, and that is NOT what buying shit in Chile is all about. No, it's about waiting in various lines in one store and employing a person in different parts of the store to do separate things. So I had to take the avocados back to be weighed.

Which brings us to the other thing Chileans LOVE with all their might: plastic bags. They want everything in at least one plastic bag, but the more the better. And the cherry on top is to either tape that bag closed, or tie it in a tight knot that no human can again untie. I had 2 paltas; that was it. I surprised the scale girl by telling her I didn't need a plastic bag.

But it turns out, I did. Or at least the guy at the register did. When I gave him the avocados and the scale sticker, he looked confused and asked me about the plastic bag. I told him I didn't want one, so then he wanted to know why she hadn't given me one. Eventually i thought maybe he thought I'd only had 1 weighed, and only the plastic bag would give him the confidence he needed to know they'd both been weighed? I'm not sure; I only know that he began calling to people across the store to have a fucking pow-wow at his register over these 2 avocados, THE LAST TWO THINGS I WAS BUYING. I was unable to comprehend, never mind peacefully and beatifically just smile as 4 Chileans tried to find meaning when there wasn't a plastic bag to give them one.

Thankfully, it only took all four of them 2 minutes' discussion to allow him to finally total it all up and let me pay. The dude had one more surprise for me: he spoke some English. He said to me in English that it wasn't his fault-- the girl had weighed them with the wrong code, so it was her fault. His words. Naturally I didn't much care; I just wanted to take my groceries home and rectify my sober situation at once.

Which I will do, now that I have finally made my very first batch of mayonaise. And why is it green? Because I needed a refined vegetable oil without a strong flavor (so no EVOO), and a lot of it. The bottle of grapeseed oil fit the bill. Interesting note: when I was in Argentina at a winery, they asked if anyone had ever heard of grapeseed oil, and explained it like it's a rare secret we're getting a privileged preview of. Really? That stuff was the shit in like 1999, right? Yes, I've heard of it. And since Chile has lots of grapes due to wine, there is PLENTY of grapeseed oil, cheap. The oil is green, hence my mayo is a little green. But it's SUPPPPPPER smooth & tasty and creamy, and that's really all that matters. That, and enjoying it while restoring my calm and sanity, one drink at a time.

Let's continue to beat this dead horse, shall we?

S1.) You know how the Japanese thought the Europeans were devils because some had red hair, or that some cultures believe that if you take their photo, you'll take their soul? Apparently, in Chile, they believe that envelopes are extremely powerful, therefore they must be hidden. That, or Chile just doesn't think I drink enough. Only those pure of heart and willing to go on A FUCKING QUEST may hope to find them hidden throughout the city. (Pure of heart, but not pure of mouth, since if I'm not in class or sleeping, I am most likely swearing about something.) Envelopes are Santiago's horrocruxes, I guess. Or, because Chile seems to still so love the 80s, it's King's Quest, and you must keep talking to the locals you encounter and try to divine where one would get such a crazy, crazy thing as a plain ol' envelope. Naturally, the location of a thing so powerful isn't common knowledge, so the Santiguinos are as knowledgeable as the lost girl in King's Quest 3 or whichever it was, who just keeps wandering around the countryside looking for her cat or something.

Minimarts don't have them, though the post office said they do. You cannot buy them at grocery stores, at pharmacies, at Target-like superstores, NOR AT THE POST OFFICE. Not even if you are mailing something express. No, you have to go to a mall and find a STATIONARY STORE. The first woman I asked, at the minimart I was directed to go to by the post office, didn't know WHERE one could buy them. You know, in Las Condes, the Manhattan of Chile. I asked 7 fucking people. No, 8.  It took me 2.5 hours to mail a fucking 1 page letter to CA. That's not counting all the trips to all the stores since I arrived, confounded as to how I could be missing ALL THE FUCKING ENVELOPES. And just in case it wasn't clear before, asking about where one can find envelopes gets you lots of, "I don't knows."

2.) You know how you go to the website of a company to find its address? NOT HERE! We're talking Liberty Mutual, the big ol' insurance company. They list Chile as one of the countries where they have a location, but when you go to the location page, they only list the 2 Brazil offices for all of Latin America. I have a class at 8:15 tomorrow with a corporate guy. There are 3 locations listed... in my  nifty map app, NOT the website. Oh, and when I finally found a link to Liberty Seguros in Chile? Just their webpage. No addresses, etc. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, given how fucking insane the security is in offices here, and apparently how often people break into them.

After playing around with various arrangements and rearrangements of the words, I finally found a directory-type of page that listed only 1 of the 3 I had, so that's the one I'm going to. It will be SOOO awesome if it's not the right one! But then, it's 1/2 my fault: when they asked me to take this class 2 weeks ago, I said sure, thinking other information would be forthcoming, or that by giving me the company name, it would just be THAT EASY. I only remembered I didn't have an address when I checked the email, and didn't know I'd spend 45 minutes on this shit until I looked it up in 2GIS.

4. People, I still fucking hate the fucking pigeons.
(Wait, you skipped 3, you're saying. As did the Santiago metro system. There are 5 lines, numbers 1,2, 4, 4A, and 5. But then, in a place as chaotic as Santiago's metro, I guess it makes sense that logic will never be found.)

5. One does not simply walk ANYWHERE here. You are playing a live version of Frogger, only there are 10 people for every car in level 10 (honestly, I don't know Frogger that well), and they barely qualify as moving. So maybe it's like reverse Frogger? Sharks gotta swim, and bats gotta fly. I've gotta stand in this random spot until you cry.

6. I hate grocery stores. It's only remarkable because I could still get caught up in the excitement of, "Ooo, what's THIS? What's THIS?" at times in the US. Now, even though I remind myself before I go that I likely won't find one of the things the recipe I want to make calls for, I still get all bent out of shape. Also, I can't go into them after 5 PM, because that's when the lines start. The LOooooong lines. Plus the tomatoes are as bland in the stores as they are in the US. And green, unripened lemons are SUCH a thing here. Brazil isn't that far!!! You can IMPORT THAT SHIT! You know, like you EXPORT your grapes and wine? It's about a 50% chance any place will have limes at any given time. Especially when you need them.

Did you want chicken without additives and a solution? TOO BAD. Ground pork or BACON, GOD DAMN IT, FUCKING BACONNNNnnnnnn... No. Or, and get ready to LAUGH, fresh squeezed juice? The only way to get THAT is to buy it by the plastic cup during the morning rush from the girl on Teatinos or the top of the metro station selling them for breakfast. And only orange. So no Salty Dog cocktails for ME. And don't even get me started on the scotch.

7. Stranger danger! The city's past time is warning me that I will be robbed/mugged/whatever on a daily basis. But the Santiguino's distrust of fellow Santiguinos extends to living arrangements. My lease in my (too expensive for my pay) apartment is up at the end of February. Because I am FUCKING POOR (thanks to no more unemployment! But hey, it makes me more honest), I will stay in Santiago through about mid-April because classes will start up again so I can hopefully return to making at least as much in a month as my rent costs (hint: my January income was about 1/2 my rent). I decided it was high time I rented a room to live in, since it'll be cheaper. I have been looking on the roommate finder site here. And you know what's a deal breaker? Having guests over, never mind your pololo/a (boyfriend or girlfriend). No, you can't have your friend Tina over for drinks on Friday, because the other people don't know her, so she'll probably try to steal from them. And forget about overnight guests, should you have one! See, *I* thought that people made out on the subways because they all live with their families, and it's the only time they can be alone (aside from someone telling me about the rampant cheating that PDA is supposed to assure everyone that you're NOT cheating). But I think it's because couples can't have privacy ANYWHERE! The idea that you can pay your fair share of rent and NOT have friends over to your place is a new height of ridiculous. Just when I think you can't outdo yourself, Chile, you do!