Chilean Phenomenon #3: Nescafe

As part of my Queer-Eye-For-the-Straight-Guy-esque attempt to spiffy up my room, I now have a wall of beautiful people cut from the magazines my lifesaving parents have sent me. Among my Matthew Perry’s and Jennifer Aniston’s I happen to also have an add for coffee which shows several couples drinking coffee together in someone’s house and sports the commentary: 3658 miles from the coffee fields of the Colombian Andes. But still the perfect climate for Colombian Coffee.

I’m not exactly sure how many miles I am from the Colombian Andes, but I can assure you it’s closer than 3658. And I’m still stuck drinking dark powder and water that people here keep insisting is coffee.

That’s because, in Chile, one does not drink coffee, one drinks Nescafé. My host family even has a coffee maker, but they never use it. Their logic? Why bother to take the time with the coffee maker if it’s so easy to make Nescafé and it tastes pretty much the same. But let’s not fault Chileans for their complete lack of taste buds.

Instead, let’s fault them for the way they drink their Nescafé. Because one would figure that if forced to drink powdered coffee, it would be best to add cream and sugar in the normal manner and do one’s best to pretend the stuff was real. But that’s not the way it works in Chile. If you ask for coffee in a café, you have the option of getting Nescafé made with water or with milk. As in powder, plus all water or all milk. And then you can add sugar to either one of them. Just try asking them to make the Nescafé with water, allowing room for a little bit of milk at the end, and they look at you like you’re from Mars. And by the way, I did mean actual milk. Because there doesn’t seem to be such a thing as putting cream in your coffee here. It’s usually about 2% milk, and it comes out of a box. Refrigerating is, like so many things, optional.

The truth is, for a long time I held off. I was happy drinking my cheap tea ever night with “onces”, the tea time that replaces dinner here, instead of subjecting myself to the sludge that results when mixing powdered coffee with hot water. And then I got back from a wonderful weekend in Buenos Aires and discovered I had to read a book in very colloquial Spanish. In 2 days. So, in the not quite immortal words of “Love Potion #9”, I held my nose, I closed my eyes, I took a drink.

In the end, I can’t say that I’ve quite “embraced” Nescafé, but I’ve accepted it, and I’m definitely a better person for it. There’s just not really nothing else to take me through those godlessly early classes.