Sleeping Around Read online

  ‘There is a bottle shop on every other corner,’ said Mariano as we passed our sixth bottle shop in two blocks. ‘Chile is the fifth biggest drinking country in the world,’ Mariano said proudly. I was quite surprised that Chile is only fifth—after my day with Juan’s family, I would have thought Chileans would at least be on the podium (albeit in danger of losing their balance and toppling off).

  El Mercado Cardonal was on two floors. The bottom floor was all produce, then some rickety wooden stairs led up to a rough-and-tumble jumble of restaurants or cocinerías. It looked like a clichéd Hollywood movie-set version of jaunty seafood restaurants, with fishing nets strung up on the ceilings and filled with plastic lobsters, red-and-white- checked tablecloths and old men sitting around in striped shirts and captain’s hats.

  As soon as we sat down, we were given a bowl of pebre (a Chilean salsa dip made with tomato, chilli, coriander and chives) and bread.

  ‘Chile is the second biggest consumer of bread in the world,’ Mariano said with a mouthful of bread.

  Of course, it was no accident that I chose Mariano, a journalist, as a couch-surfing host. It was obvious, even to me, that a journalist would be an easy source of local knowledge. Mariano had worked as a political reporter for Chile’s largest national daily newspaper, La Tercera. I say had worked, because Mariano had given it away. ‘Most days I would work twelve hours and it was just too stressful,’ he said with a sigh. ‘I’d had enough of politics anyway. It’s all the same. We vote one fucker out then vote another fucker in.’

  Mariano was now studying part-time for his Masters and writing a thesis called ‘Untouchable Paradise in Valparaíso’. It may have sounded more like a novel of bohemian life, but it was actually philosophical in a more literal sense. He explained the argument to me, but I have trouble saying philosophical, let alone understanding it. Mariano was very passionate about the project and believed the thesis would be very well received.

  ‘What do you want to do when you finish?’ I asked.

  ‘I’d like to open a bar,’ he mused.

  Mariano recommended that I have a local dish called chupe de locos. ‘It means full of craziness,’ Mariano told me after I had ordered it. (It also means ‘suck like crazy’, as I discovered when I went to check the exact spelling on the net and was taken to a series of rather interesting photos on a Spanish gay porn site.)

  It may have been full of craziness, but it was also full of scrumptiousness. It was similar to a clam chowder and the massive bowl was chock-full of sizzling chunks of abalone, fish and shrimps and topped with cheese.

  Mariano had a meeting about a freelance journalism job (‘I do some jobs because I have to eat!’ he said), so I went to walk—or, more accurately, waddle—off my lunch. I headed down to the port because Mariano had made it sound mightily impressive. Valparaíso was, until the opening of the Panama Canal, the most important port in South America. In the space of less than a hundred years from the early 1800s, the population of the city rose from 5000 to more than 100 000. In the process it attracted wealthy foreign merchants who helped make Valparaíso Chile’s financial and cultural capital.

  I walked for ages next to a high cyclone-wire fence that separated the docks from the city. Although the area was certainly impressively large, I was largely unimpressed. The port, like most ports the world over, was grey and dirty and all I could see were lots of large ugly cranes, large ugly shipping containers and considerably larger ugly rusting ships. The entire bay was closed off for the docks, which meant that you had to leave the city to actually get near the water. I wish I’d known that before I’d walked for more than an hour looking for a break in the cyclone fence.

  I returned through the centre of town, which had the feel of a Mediterranean port city. The narrow, congested streets were lined with solid, classic buildings that had once been colourfully painted but were now faded and crumbling. Some of the buildings looked admirably grand, but I didn’t get much of a chance to admire them. I was too busy avoiding the large packs of roaming dogs. I had never in my life seen so many stray dogs. They were everywhere and they were loping through the city—and, curiously, stopping dutifully at traffic lights—as if they owned the place. Each gang seemed to have a leader, but it wasn’t necessarily the biggest pooch. One gang, which was mostly made up of large nasty-looking brutes, was being led by an extremely cocky cocker spaniel.

  I gave a wide berth to one mob that was milling about the front of a bottle shop as if they were waiting for someone to go in and buy them some beer. I was steering well clear of the packs because—and for the life of me I wish I knew why—whenever I make eye contact with a dog, it suddenly feels a pressing need to tear me into teeny-weeny bits. I spent most of the walk back with my shoulders hunched and my eyes fixed firmly on the ground. Just to prove my point, I accidentally glanced up at a lone dog sitting nonchalantly on the footpath. As soon as our eyes met, its muscles tightened, its eyes took on a satanic glow and it lunged at me as if it had been waiting patiently all day for me to turn up. I swung my bag at the beast while screaming every swear word I know and running backwards. When I got to the other side of the road, I stood and watched as hordes of people wandered past the dog without it giving so much as a slight grimace to a single one of them.

  I needed a drink, so I thought I’d stop at one of the bottle shops that are on every other corner. Only I happened to cross all the other corners that didn’t have bottle shops. After six blocks I finally found a supermarket instead. It was dark when I got back to the apartment, but I was still a little shaken by my meeting with the Mutt of Satan.

  ‘The dogs around here are fucking crazy!’ I barked to Mariano.

  ‘Oh no, they never bother anyone,’ said Mariano serenely. Mariano was looking very serene because he was lounging on the couch with Sebastian and Marcella sharing a whopping joint and listening to the soothing tones of Chilean jazz. I declined a puff (I’ve never been into marijuana because it just smells too much like incredibly whiffy socks) and opened the bottle of wine.

  To be honest I thought that the ensuing conversation might include lots of impenetrable hippy ramblings and prolonged bouts of helpless giggling, but we had an absorbing discussion about art (Marcella was, like myself, a big fan of the Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte), music (Mariano’s previous job as a journo involved interviewing musicians for a jazz magazine) and cinema (Sebastian only watched independent and art house movies, because Hollywood films were ‘full of much fucking shit’). I was really enjoying their company and everyone was so sweet that at one point they were talking amongst themselves about whose turn it was to clean the toilet (or some other domestic chore), and they all kept speaking in English for my benefit.

  My stomach was rumbling and it wasn’t because I had the munchies—suddenly it was ten o’clock and I hadn’t had any dinner. ‘It’s Sebastian’s turn to cook tonight,’ said Mariano, showing me the cooking roster. Each flat mate had a designated cooking night every week (with a cooking-free day on Sundays). By eleven o’clock, Sebastian’s dinner still wasn’t looking too forthcoming, so I helped Mariano make a stack of cheese rolls. We couldn’t find any clean plates, though. As in shared houses the world over, the sink was piled high with dirty dishes. And just as in shared houses the world over, everyone seemed to think they would be cleaned by some magic fairy.

  I had to move a guitar amp and a collection of foam puppets off the floor in the dining room to clear a space for my couch-cum-mattress. As I lay in bed I decided that I should rate the rest of the couches on my couch-surfing trip, starting with Mariano’s couch:

  Couch rating: 7/10

  Con: The couch was covered in dog hairs

  Pro: The dog hairs were extra insulation against the cold

  ‘Oh, my God!’ Mariano shrieked when he saw me in the morning.

  I shrieked as well when I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked like I had leprosy. My formerly red face was now peeling off in great big ugly grey chunks.

/>   Mariano must have felt sorry for me because he volunteered to take me on a tour of the city even though he had work to do. Our trek began in the dark empty side streets. Mariano assured me we were taking a ‘shortcut’, but I actually think he was worried my post-nuclear face might send the local populace running for the hills—or running away from the hills in this case, because that was where we were heading.

  At the end of one of those dark dead-end streets, we came across a lift built into a cliff face. This was one of Valparaíso’s famed ascensores, 38 ‘elevators’ that were built mostly in the nineteenth century to transport folk up to their mansions in the hills. The Ascensor El Peral, which was more of a funicular than an elevator, coughed and spluttered its way up through a jumbled maze of multicoloured weatherboard homes and weather-beaten Victorian mansions that clung to the sheer cliffs. I was not at all surprised when Mariano told me that in 2003 the entire area had been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

  Our first stop was the grand Palacio Baburizza, which I liked very much even if it was a rather odd mix of Art Nouveau, Tudor and Hogwarts with its green tiled spires. In front of the Palacio was a wide terrace with fabulous views of the city and bay—which really was all docks. We spent a couple of hours exploring the maze of narrow cobblestone alleyways and sinuous streets that snaked down ravines and around the hillsides. Every now and again we stopped for a rest in impossibly tiny parks. Each park had a massive tree in the middle, usually surrounded by canoodling couples and canoodling dogs.

  We stopped for lunch at the precariously perched Restaurant La Colombina, which used to be a private mansion, and were escorted to a table on the bougainvillea-adorned balcony overlooking the entire city. (I noted that the waiter, who was staring at my leprosy, seated us as far away from other diners as possible.)

  ‘Santiago is shit,’ Mariano said as we sipped our pisco sours. I had asked him if he would ever live in Santiago. ‘It is too cold in winter, too hot in summer and too polluted— Santiago is the third most polluted city in the world, you know.’ Mariano looked out across the city. ‘Valparaíso is my home, now.’ Mariano was born in Argentina, but when he was fourteen his parents separated and he moved to Valparaíso with his mother. His mother had recently moved back to Argentina, but Mariano had decided to stay because he said that he felt more Chilean than Argentinean now.

  Mariano recommended that I order the camarones frescos sobre lechuga, limon y mayonesa, which was a king-sized plate full of exquisitely zesty king-sized prawns. I raised my pisco sour and toasted couch surfing (and the restaurant which I would never have found if I hadn’t been staying with a local) and we both agreed that couch surfing really is quite a wonderful innovation in the way we travel. I told him that I had learnt more about Chile and its people in the past six days couch surfing than I would have if I’d stayed for six weeks in a hotel. I had been Mariano’s first couch guest and he was looking forward to hosting more people. ‘I’d do something about the dog’s hairs on your couch, though,’ I said. In the space of two days we had become friends and good friends should be honest with each other.

  Mariano and his flat mates must have really liked me because, even with my leprosy, they all gave me great big hugs when I left. I was back in Santiago by nightfall, but I had time for a quick bite before I headed to the airport. I found a little restaurant with a nice dark corner to hide in. I didn’t think it was very fair to send other diners screaming out in horror—my face was such a mess of peeling skin that I now looked like Freddy Krueger.

  As I was waiting for the airport bus I noticed an internet cafe across the road and I suddenly thought I should probably pop in and send an email to Pedro, my first couch-surfing host in Rio de Janeiro.

  Olá Pedro

  I’m looking forward to meeting you tomorrow, but I thought I’d better email you to tell you not to slam the door in my face when you see me. I don’t have leprosy or any other type of contagious skin disease. I just got badly sunburnt and my face is peeling.

  Oh, and you probably should warn the neighbours as well.

  See ya

  Brian

  BRAZIL

  6

  ‘Types of people I enjoy: Drunks and party crashers.’

  Pedro Conforti, 29, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

  CouchSurfing.com

  In my current state it was just as well I wasn’t planning to stay with Amado in Rio. He would definitely have slammed the door in my face. On his rather direct GlobalFreeloaders profile, he wrote:

  Small room with a comfortable single bed. The only people I would be reluctant to accommodate are angry, un-polite, dirty, or extremely fat people. Also I cannot accept people with serious dangerous illnesses as of the heart, skin, nervous, circulatory or digestive body systems, and all that can suffer sudden crisis requiring emergency professional attention. I like to drink a lot and I drink wine and beers with meals.

  I suppose all that worrying about rushing people to the emergency ward had driven him to drink. Mind you, Rio is often regarded as the hedonism capital of the world and, if the profiles of some of the other potential hosts were anything to go by, then the city has its fair share of drunkards. I could have requested a couch from Maria Luiza, a 25-year-old molecular biologist who had listed only one thing under Hobbies and Interests: ‘I love to get drunk’; while 27-year-old Vidal was ‘just a regular guy who likes to party all night till I fall over’.

  I decided to follow the ‘when in Rome’ strategy and found a couch with 26-year-old architect Mariana, who was ‘unique and wild and loves to party’. I also chose Mariana because I figured that it would be quite a privilege to stay with ‘the coolest girl in all of Rio’. Mariana couldn’t host me until the weekend, by which stage she had warned me in an email to be prepared: ‘Get ready to party hard because we hardly ever sleep.’ I decided to go into training by finding another lively type to stay with for my first two nights. Pedro Conforti was a 29-year-old ‘colourist for cinema and music videos’ and like myself had graduated as a graphic designer and played in a band. He also liked ‘drunks and party crashers’. Me too.

  Pedro had given me clear and concise directions to his place, but I was a little worried about where he actually lived. In his email he said ‘I live in a small alley’ and that it was ‘in between a bar and a Dominos Pizza shop’. But not even the prospect of dossing down on an old mattress next to rubbish bins could dampen my excitement at driving into one of the most famous cities in the world. And as soon as the taxi left the airport, I spotted the famed silhouetted statue of Christ on the top of Corcovado Mountain, which then kept appearing and vanishing as we drove in and out of the tunnels that wind their way under a series of lush green hills between the airport and the city.

  Pedro did live down an alley that was off a busy commercial street, but his home was quite a step-up from a cardboard box. The narrow lane was a private alleyway and Pedro’s humble abode was an architect-designed, glass-fronted, four-storey house jammed between older, comparatively dilapidated, buildings.

  Pedro met me at the grey metal gate that separated the alley from the street. He had jet-black hair and sideburns (he was also my third couch-surfing host in a row with groovy facial hair) and was wearing mirror shades and a T-shirt with ‘I really feel alright’ on it. After a welcoming handshake Pedro said, ‘Oh, before I forget, here’s a key to the house so you can come and go as you please.’ It felt a bit odd taking a key to Pedro’s house. Apart from two very short emails in which I had requested and confirmed his couch, we didn’t know each other at all. Was this the level of trust that couch surfing created or was it that I just looked like a very trustworthy person? Either way, it was nice to feel so trusted.

  ‘Gee, that’s a nice Fender Stratocaster,’ I gushed. The first thing I noticed on my tour of Pedro’s house was how much stuff there was worth stealing. The ground floor was mostly taken up with a state-of-the-art recording studio that was crammed full of musical equipment, including a full drum kit, a ‘stack’
of Marshall amps, four electric guitars, one bass guitar, three keyboards, a collection of microphones and stands, and a mixing desk. ‘I’ll set your bed up in here,’ Pedro said, pointing to a space in front of the drum kit. ‘The walls are totally soundproof, so you can snore and fart as much as you like.’

  A wrought-iron spiral staircase wound its way up from the ground floor through an open space to a lounge room/ kitchen, master bedroom and a roof garden. The second-level lounge room was full of more great stuff to pilfer. There was a wide-screen television, an elaborate stereo system and, on a long desk at the end of the room, the latest Mac computer and another mixing desk bursting with leads of all sizes and colours. A very long and very comfortable-looking black leather couch took up almost another entire wall. ‘The couch wouldn’t be very nice for you to sleep on,’ Pedro said when he noticed me eyeing it off. ‘I have two cats and they would try and sleep on your head.’

  Past the large bedroom on the third floor was the white-tiled roof garden, which was half-enclosed, with a lounge area and bar. High up above, looking down over the roof garden as if guarding the barbecue and kitty-litter tray, was the statue of Christ the Redeemer.

  It was somewhere up towards Christ the Redeemer that Pedro was taking me for lunch and he was in quite a hurry to get there. He drove, or rather raced, up steep cobblestone streets while engaging in an animated conversation and somehow evading oncoming cars, pedestrians and yellow tramcars with scores of people hanging off the side (if you ‘hang off’ the ride is free, Pedro told me). We were heading to Santa Theresa, which had become hip when local artists had taken over the crumbling nineteenth-century hilltop villas that were sandwiched between squatter slums. The area was now full of antique shops, handicraft shops and restaurants offering, I was told, ‘the best Brazilian seafood in Rio’.

  It was after three o’clock by the time we sat down for lunch and we scored a great table overlooking the street at Restaurant Sobrenatural, which was an intimate place with exposed-brick walls covered with bright cheerful paintings. ‘I don’t know if I’m the right person to stay with,’ Pedro said as we sipped our caipirinhas (Brazil’s national drink made with cachaça, a sugar cane liquor, and lime). ‘I’m probably not your typical Carioca [citizen of Rio],’ he shrugged. ‘I don’t really like football. Or the beach.’