Café….well Nescafé

I’ve officially cured my coffee addiction. No longer do I need that cup of coffee in the morning to start my day, or one in the evening after dinner. Why you ask? Well, they just don’t seem to drink it here. If they do it’s an instant version, usually Nescafé, which is a barley substitute to coffee. So I’ve been drinking a lot more té! The only time I drink “real“ coffee is when I meet a friend at a cafe, but even then you have to be careful to make sure they have an actual espresso machine as certain places will say the serve café, but it’s really just Nescafé. It took me a while to figure out why, with Colombia so close, there wasn’t a bigger coffee culture here. I’ve found out, just like wine, all the “good stuff“ gets exported. Behind France, Italy, and the US, Chile is the 4th largest exporter of wine, so I was expecting a huge wine culture when I got down here. Not the case. It’s more about Pisco here. All the really nice wines are exported, and people don’t seem to drink it that often. Don’t get me wrong there are really nice wines here that are dirt cheap, but pisco is just as cheap and so much more potent. Honestly, there just isn’t a very big drinking culture here. And they seem to prefer tea to coffee. You know what they say, “When in Chile!“