ur doin it wrong

I was just going to Tumbl this at first, but the more I looked  at it, the more it fascinated me. For reasons that I won’t bore anybody with right now, I was roaming around on the Japan Science and Technology Agency homepage (really, there was a good reason), and I saw a tiny link in the corner for the Failure Knowledge Database. Intriguing, no? Curious as to whether this was an official, Diet-mandated version of Failblog or simply a directory maintained of every occasion throughout history when a Japanese scientist got served, I had to check it out.

Honestly, I wasn’t that far off – it’s pretty much a directory of various technology- and engineering-related fuckups – mostly Japanese, but not exclusively so – with detailed analyses of what went wrong, how it was handled, and what we can all learn from this.

“When we look at the recent high incidence of a diverse variety of failure in Japan, we could be forgiven for thinking that we are witnessing failure on parade,” write the authors of the site in a charmingly loopy introduction, before launching into a description of how it’s possible to cross-link all the various causes and outcomes of failure to better understand and prevent future catastrophes.

That kind of self-awareness is pretty commendable, right? Let’s air our dirty laundry and all that. But not very interesting, right? Wrong.

Each case report gets its own charming little pictograph that depicts just what happened in a cartoonishly abstracted, and inimitably Japanese, style. For instance, “Mass Food Poisoning Caused by Snow Brand Dairy Products“:

Which appears to be illustrating some Cronenberg-esque fable in which unsuspecting milk drinkers have their bowels devoured by malevolent termites lurking in the container.

Some of them have storytelling titles with the tone of cautionary tales, something out of Struwwelpeter, like “Crashing disaster on a construction site – the accident which originated from the inappropriate use of safety belt“:

While others are elegantly blunt – “A construction worker was run over by the tire roller“:

From time to time, their narrative reach exceeds their grasp, highlighting the importance of simplicity in the disaster-cartooning medium:

Now if you guessed here that a train conductor is sternly telling the construction foreman that bringing coffee for dead people may be the sort of thing that’s perfectly acceptable in China – but NOT in Japan… you’d be close, but wrong. Apparently this is shorthand for “The foreigner (illegal worker) overturned at the construction site and he received the weight of the frame scaffold, and he died.” Huh.

However, the site isn’t simply given over to Buster Keaton-stunt-gone-wrong construction site mishaps and chemical contamination incidents (which are rather blandly illustrated with a metal barrel and/or a chemical symbol, although I guess there’s only so much you can do with “Leakage from a crack of a heat exchanger due to corrosion and abrasion at a manufacturing plant of crude copper phthalocyanine blue“).

In fact, there are some that are quite recognizable, even to those of us from outside the risk-management biz. Such as

and

In these cases, both the simple renditions and the dry-as-sawdust technical descriptions of the disasters have an strangely chilling effect; it was weird reading about 9-11 purely from a reductionist what-went-wrong-and-lessons-learned perspective, with an odd Cliffs’ Notes history of Afghanistan appended towards the end as background, as if this was all excerpted from an engineering textbook from the year 2105.

All in all, it’s a very odd site, but not from the sense of being pointless – just in the sense of being an unorthodox combination of tragedy and whimsy that one wouldn’t expect from a technician-oriented data resource.

I don’t know how much traffic this site gets, but I find it comforting that it exists. I just picture a group of frustrated Japanese engineers and architects sitting far underground in their concrete bunker, endlessly toiling away at their failure reports and constantly hoping against hope that the benighted will one day take heed before it’s too late…

OK, so I’ve returned to rainy NYC, and it seems like the fun’s over for now – at least until I save up enough for my trip to Peru and Bolivia.

I was thinking of putting together some sort of lessons-learned, pithy insights kind of post, but my brain really can’t handle that right now, even after receiving steady infusions of yerba mate throughout the day, and I suppose that will have to wait until my pithiness centers have reactivated.

And so what oh what shall become of AoBN?

Well, surely a struggling freelancer in Brooklyn can still have adventures, right? I mean, they may be somewhat less glamorous – like wandering the city to find the supermarket with the lowest prices for bulk ramen purchases – but they’re still adventures, after all, right? So we’ll see. My current schedule will give me a lot more time to take photos around the city, so I may do something with that. Or perhaps I’ll use it for additional, extended bouts of navel-gazing. Or maybe – just maybe – it will sloooowly faaaade awaaaaaaaaaay…

Either way, thank you for your visits. Especially those of you who kept coming back for reasons beyond a sense of obligation as family/friends/Dept. of Homeland Security officials/etc…

In the meantime, I will be reactivating Let Us Rejoice, my Tumblr link-blog, where I post the kind of silly shit that really doesn’t require much additional comment. I will have many, many, MANY pictures to post to my Flickr site, and these will slowly but surely be making their way on there in the weeks to come. Oh, and I have every intention of making good on my threat of assembling a proper online travel diary. I’ve registered a domain but will not announce until there’s something there, so for those of you with too much time on your hands – rescue is at hand!

Finally, my plug. As I’ve already mentioned, I’m out on the freelance market once again – so if you know of any writing/editorial opportunities that suit a reasonably brightish “young” go-getter with 6+ years of journalism/publishing experience and 12+ years of work experience in life sciences research and related fields, feel free to let me know. I’m primarily interested in writing work – and strictly freelance for now – but I’ve also got some experience under my belt in manuscript editing and other aspects of print/online content development. Oh, and rest assured that I’m not nearly as prone to the cavalier use of random epithets in my professional work. OK, plug ends.

Last night abroad, and I’m sipping a pisco sour in a courtyard in Santiago to unwind…

I made my final border crossing back into Chile yesterday, via a road so shoddy and neglected that it seemed like it was deliberately designed to make you feel like you’re doing something ultra-shady just by taking it.

Chile, you say? Ah'm afraid you can't get theah from heah...

Of course, the fact that I had seven keys of coke sitting in a backpack in the back seat didn’t help. (Dear Chilean Customs officials: joking – please, no body cavity searches tomorrow.)

The Argentinean passport control folks were so surprised to see me, they processed my paperwork wrong – prompting the Chilean passport control guy to make fun of them and essentially call them a bunch of rubes. Oh, will you two never stop in your squabbling?

But I’ve become well-practiced in the border crossing protocol – in fact, it’s probably the area in which I’ve picked up my most useful “applied Spanish”. All told, El Jefe and I have danced back and forth across the Chile-Argentina border six times, amassing an impressive collection of stamps on our transit documents.

So many memories...

And so it was with some sadness that El Jefe was retired today, after 15 days of valiant service. Of course, my rental car agent Captain Hard-Ass was somehow able to spot a “new dent” on my thoroughly dented and scratched pickup, and that set me back an extra $100. But it’s only fair – after driving more than 4000 km on roads that were alternately made of dirt, gravel, boulders, shards of petrified wood, and even – once in a rare, blessed while – asphalt, I’m sure El Jefe has been thoroughly befucked in ways that will only become apparent in a week or so, and I’m probably getting off the hook easy.  I hope he gets a little rest before they rent him out again.

As for me, I’m going to finish getting loaded and eat some ceviche. Ciao y hasta luego…

Really, I hate to bitch. No. Wait. That’s not true. I love to bitch. But I hate to bitch in a vacuum, without talking about cool positive stuff too.

Truth be told, I knew full well what I was getting myself into with this itinerary (minus the massive outbreak of electronic fail), and so I took care to protect my mental well-being by bracketing the Hell Drive with plenty of Nature-y Awesomeness.

Before I left for the Great Northward Voyage, I spent the entire day chilling at the beautiful but seemingly ignored Tierra del Fuego National Park, where I think I saw less than 50 other visitors over the course of the entire day. This is a shame, since the park is absolutely beautiful.

I started off by tackling the Park’s longest trail, the Cerro Guanaco. This trail starts off challenging, with a steep ascent, then torments you in Biblical fashion with a series of hiking plagues: goopy shoe-stealing mud, slippery gravel, ice-encrusted snow, and so forth.

Schlorrppppp!

But the rewards were great as well. I spent most of the hike in utter peace and solitude, with the only sound coming from birdsongs, burbling streams, and the wind-blown rocking of the tall trees, which creaked like shutters on an abandoned house.

Unfortunately, my visit was a little too close to the cusp of winter, and the trail gradually went from challenging to treacherous, requiring one to pass along very steep slopes that were almost entirely covered in ice.

And here my troubles began...

I made my way across several such passes, but finally came to one that was just a little too long, steep and slick – especially since I’d already strained my ankle a bit on an earlier mud-related incident.

Fortunately, there were plentier of wussier pursuits for those who took the coward’s way out. The far end of the park, a section called Lapataia, is a pretty terrific wildlife reserve.

The Kelp Goose is master of all he surveys

Apparently this is a "carancho"

Beaver dams, but no damn beavers

Best of all, I made a new friend – a red Patagonian fox, who followed me for about a kilometer or two of my hike, like a stray dog. It was kind of eerie actually – kind of like that whole spiritual guide thing from The Doors (or, if you prefer, Wayne’s World 2). Except it wasn’t a naked Indian (thank god). And instead of showing me higher truths about the universe, he just padded along with me until he saw some tasty looking rabbits.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox

Still, he was pretty awesome, and I totally would have patted his head if I’d bothered to get my rabies vaccination.

The day after I completed the Ruta 3 ordeal referenced below – or, as I’m now referring to it, the background research for my upcoming book, “Gas Stations and Truck Stops of Southeast Argentina” – I spent the entire day at Peninsula Valdes, which is pretty much the marine wildlife mecca for the Patagonian coast.

Of course, since this is Patagonia, even this relaxing activity involved a good 3-400km of driving. But once I got there, the peninsula was absolutely thronged with massive right whales doing amazing, whaley things.

There were also multiple colonies of elephant seals just chilling on the various beaches.

My God... it's full of seals...

King of the Castle

On the land, I saw a bunch of ñandus, which are Patagonia’s version of ostriches.

And I even got to see a renegade penguin, stumbling around goofily on the rocky shore, apparently quite far from the rest of his brethren.

He was just following the rich, soothing sound of Morgan Freeman's voice...

The park also featured several amusing and even campy signs – often with stilted Spanglish – indicating how visitors should behave, which I found greatly amusing.

Please! Do not caress the armadillos!

Of course, penguins are like crack- you can’t stop at just one fix. Well, they’re like crack in other ways, too, but I really don’t have time to go into that, as this post is already quite long. But my point is, I followed up the Valdes trip with a visit to Punto Tombo, the largest penguin colony in South America. And it’s no joke – there are zillions of Magellanic Penguins just running around – nesting, making fish runs, and just generally getting underfoot.

Would monsieur care to see our wine list?

Penguins re-enacting the dramatic opening of Saving Private Ryan

The best part is that I managed to get there quite early – long before the tourist buses arrived – and practically had the place to myself. Myself and a few hundred thousand penguins. It was pretty trippy.

OK – enough for now. I’m completely wired on espresso and need to walk around. Time is running out!

The fundamental problem with going to Tierra del Fuego, of course, was that somehow I had to get back from it. This left me in a pickle, as I hate to backtrack – especially considering how punishing Ruta 40 had been to El Jefe’s suspension.

But then I thought – this has been a trip of Extremes. The Highest-Altitude Geyser. The Southernmost City. The Driest Desert. So why not go for a new Extreme? Let’s call it the Dullest Fucking Drive in History.

<rant>
The kindly souls in the Argentinean Highway Department have recognized that tourists and civilians can’t get by on gravel alone, and have built what is by any standard a very impressive, well-maintained, utterly toll-free highway running along the eastern coast of  Patagonia, from Rio Gallegos to up, up and away. This is good.

The bad side is that in doing so, they have somehow managed to create a 2000-km stretch of highway containing absolutely zero of interest. Barren steppes? Check. Grey, industrial oil cities? Check. Cargo containers? Oh, you better believe it. I’ve come up with a general Argentinean Tourism Corollary, which holds that the proportion of Cool Shit (e.g. exotic wildlife, remote mountain villages, national parks full of undisturbed wilderness) is inversely proportional to How Easy It Is To Get There (presence v. absence of asphalt, a second lane, signs, connecting bridges, etc.).

Sure, there are a few outliers, like Iguazu Falls, where overwhelming tourist demand has clearly forced the hand of unwilling civil engineers and the all-powerful Argentinean Highway-Paver’s Union. But otherwise? The Corollary holds: if your car and your ass aren’t suffering, you’re probably not going anywhere particularly worthwhile. In defense of the highway system, there is a lot of – constructive – roadwork going on, including a great deal of paving. It remains to be seen whether this improved access will undermine the above Corollary, or whether the thusly-linked destinations will somehow become much less awesome (e.g., all the tapirs and toucans pack up and move to the top of a glacier somewhere). We’ll wait and see.

But getting back to the point. Do you know how bad this segment of the trip was? I didn’t take a single picture for almost 36h. I’ve been known to take my camera into restaurant bathrooms and doctor’s waiting rooms, for fuck’s sake, and I still couldn’t find anything to photograph between Rio Gallegos and Comodoro Rivadavia, so you just know it had to be dull as dishwater.

CR wasn’t the end of the drive, of course – it’s just that here I was treated to the briefest glimpse of ocean, as a reminder that the world hadn’t been entirely reduced to dry brown shrubbery.

Seriously - this almost brought a tear of joy to my dust-covered eye...

And it also featured an odd celebration of that most unsung of heroes – the oilman.

Having clear-cut North America's forests, Paul Bunyan turned his steely eye toward our southern neighbor's hidden treasure: Black Gold!

But CR was just a waypoint, followed by another 500km of scrub-nestled highway. So I drove… and drove… and drove…

There aren’t really any roadside diners in this part of the world – Shoney’s hasn’t quite caught on down here – so my lunches these days have consisted of whatever the last gas station was selling.

The Ruta 3 Special: Two types of crackers, washed down with a Coke. Now that's livin'!

If you look closely in the above picture, you can also observe the thin layer of roadgrit covering my dashboard, as my truck and its contents (including me) are currently dustier than Tom Joad’s underpants.

I was subjected to additional suffering on this leg through the perfidy of my electronic devices. The cigarette lighter in my truck is busted, so I can’t use my little iPod radio-tuning device, but I was getting by just fine with my headphones. Then they broke, with a mysteriously frayed cable – possibly chewed by dust-mites. So now I’m stuck at the tender mercies of whatever English-language radio I can find when I pass by the far-flung urban areas in these parts, and my standards have FALLEN.

Now I find myself grateful for things that would, in better times, have driven me to hammer a pencil into my ear. (e.g., “Journey marathon? Awesome!”) And I find myself with ample opportunity to muse on things that shouldn’t need to be mused on. For example, did you know that someone, somewhere, for some reason recorded a wussier and more vanilla cover version of “Don’t Dream It’s Over“? I struggled for hours over who perpetrated that and why.  And did “Somebody’s Watching Me” always end with about three minutes of Michael Jackson doing the heavy vocal lifting (including “eee-hee”s) while Rockwell spits out nonsense like “I can’t enjoy my tea”? I don’t remember that – but then again, maybe I was just  too busy being weirded out by the video.

When I caught myself singing along to “Heaven is a Place on Earth”, I knew I’d succumbed to some sort of musical Stockholm Syndrome – identifying with and even developing affection for my tormentors. A line had to be drawn, and thankfully it was right around this time that I once again found myself surrounded with lots of Pretty Shiny Things to distract me. And so, let me move onto happier subjects…
</rant>

That’s what it is right now. I mean, the mercury’s certainly been lower at other points of my trip, but I don’t think I’ve had to deal with such malicious, skin-flaying wind yet, and that’s making all the difference. So right now I’m huddling pathetically in a pub. It’s kind of embarassing, really – I mean, I’m from New England, not San Diego. Sigh.

So I was going to finally get around to doing that post about my week in the desert, but I’m really not that motivated right now – it’s just too much of a time-jump right now, and I’ve still got a ton of catching up in my pen-and-ink book to do and I’m just not feeling like doing the time warp right now.

And besides, that’s so early October. Now I’m doing Cold Weather Fun.

Like glaciers!

This bad boy’s the Perito Moreno glacier, in the southern half of Argentina’s Los Glaciares National Park – a park so big and hostile, you need to stay in two different towns located more than 100km apart to visit the whole thing. As one might reasonably deduce from the name, the place is lousy with massive chunks of prehistoric ice – the biggest is the Upsala Glacier, which is only accessible by boat and which I really couldn’t spare the time or money to arrange a proper visit. But I did drop in on Perito Moreno, which is still on the order of 250 square kilometers in size and is one of the very few glaciers in South America that are actually growing in these glacier-unfriendly times.

It’s a big and beautiful icy beast, accessible via a series of walkways and catwalks. You can also arrange to do climbing and trekking expeditions, but I was too lackadaisical in my planning to set that up. Next time. All the same, I did get to enjoy some really spectacular views of the behemoth, which seems to emit an unnaturally pure blue glow from deep within, and constantly issues unnerving crackling and booming noises…

For today, I officially went as far south as I’m going on this trip, taking a sailboat trip through the Beagle Channel – which cuts across the Tierra del Fuego archipelago to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It was pretty awesome.

For some reason, he didn't seem to care much for my shortcut suggestions.

The boat took us past Alicia Island, which is downright infested with cormorants and sea lions.

You'd think they have nothing in common. But it turns out they all just adore seafood.

Before taking us to the mysterious Isla H, which is surprisingly verdant and also crawling with cormorants. Comorants with spring fever, paired off and ready for lovin’…

This is one of the 'G'-rated ones. You'll have to go somewhere else for your bird-porn fix.

Isla H is Argentina’s southernmost non-Antarctica possession, and an ideal vantage-point for shouting epithets at and giving the finger to members of the Chilean Navy, who are conveniently stationed right across the way on Isla Navarino.

To demarcate this meaningful territorial holding, Argentina has assembled a lighthouse from parts recovered from a Home Depot dumpster.

I have no idea where they managed to find a 75-km extension cord for this...

But if nothing else here catches your fancy, at least you can run back ‘n’ forth on the island and say, “Hey! Wow! I’m in the Pacific Ocean!”

“But whoa! Now I’m in the Atlantic Ocean!”

And keep repeating until somebody hits you.

And so I have arrived in Ushuaia, the “southernmost city in the world”, and a mere 1000km from Antarctica (and as close as I’ll get to Big Whitey this time around).

Now some might argue that technically the Chilean settlement of Puerto Williams is the world’s farthest-south city. But it’s also technically a rinkydink little settlement and not a real-boy city like Ushuaia, and it’s impossible to get to without a plane or boat, so fuck that. And besides, the kind of people who get worked up about details like that are exactly the kind of pedantic assholes I go out of my way to avoid.

But getting here was a real chore. As meticulously as I planned my route, I really didn’t anticipate the kind of distances I’d be confronting when I set out from Rio Gallegos, the ‘last stop’ in continental Argentina.

Ah, fuck.

And once you arrive in Tierra del Fuego, it’s not exactly like arriving on Fantasy Island. In fact, it was kind of like biting into a foot-long shit sandwich.

This season, brown is the new black.

To simulate the first three-quarters of the TdF driving experience, follow these steps.

1. Print 400 copies of the above picture
2. Assemble them into a flip-book
3. Now view this flip-book for 3 hours while sitting on a dryer full of sneakers.

Sure, there are cities. But they’re crappy ones – like Rio Grande, a town that manages the daunting dask of possessing negative charm. And it smells like old fish.

And sure, there’s wildlife. Like guanacos. Lots of cute guanacos.

OK, fine. You're cute. We get it.

But you know what? Not for nothing, but I’m getting a little fucking tired of guanacos. Sure, they’re still awesome and I’ll miss them when it’s back to 24-7 squirrels and pigeons, but by themselves they really can’t do enough to counter the oppressive feeling that I’m driving through the background of a Cormac McCarthy novel.

But then something happens – you cross into the Argentinean sector of TdF, and things get better. First, when you’re going through Customs, you hear the familiar strains of Michael Sembello’s “Maniac” from the Flashdance soundtrack playing in the background while a jolly official stamps your passport for the twentieth time today. And you know it’s all going to be alright.

Then, as you cross the border, you pass by a big pond with a wild colony of awesome fucking flamingoes.

From there, it just gets more and more beautiful, until it starts to get pretty damn amazing.

And then you realize – TdF isn’t a shit sandwich; it’s a shit Twinkie, where the foul-smelling brown exterior is actually concealing a rich layer of fluffy angel cake and sweet, delicous”creme” filling. Mmmmm.

I’m here for a couple of days, and I’m psyched to do some unwinding as well as some hiking in TdF National Park, and possibly do a boat ride through the Beagle Channel and see if I can’t catch some marine wildlife. But even if I can’t see it, I plan to eat it – so don’t worry too much about me either way.

So I’ve spent the last three days or so about as far off the grid as it’s possible to be, zigzagging back and forth between Chilean and Argentinean Patagonia, and trying to think of how I can best capture how insanely varied and beautiful the scenery is from day to day. I think the best summary I can come up with this: it’s as if I somehow crashed Roger Rabbit-style into some sort of commercial dimension, and I’m now living full-time in the world of beer and truck commercials. Here, all the mountains are Rocky and Snow-Capped.

We use only the coldest, cleanest mountain spring water...

All the meadows are Green and Rolling, with Churning Rivers rushing through them and wild horses Running Free.

The Plains all Extend to the Horizon with Billowing Clouds.

The roads are Rocky and Dusty, and None of them have Guard Rails.

Trust me - this is one of the good ones.

Oh, and all the men have moustaches. Big, bushy, Burt-Reynolds-in-Cannonball-Run or Tom-Selleck-in-Magnum-P.I. moustaches. And they ride horses. Everywhere. And not because they’re trying to show off, it’s because that’s what they fucking do. Sorry, didn’t get a picture for this. I was afraid all that untethered manliness might shatter my effete camera lens.

But I drive by all of these hand-constructed farmhouses sitting in the middle of vast tracts of pasture land, and there’s never anybody there when I come by.

Why? Because they’re all grinding rocks to powder with sledgehammers, or punching goats, or changing the course of rivers with a shovel and a scowl… whatever it is that real men do. I wouldn’t know, I’m just another fancy-pants east-coast liberal.

I should add that the driving here deserves another post all of its own – and will get one when I return. Suffice it to say that never in my thirty-four years has the rapturous appreciation of the devastating beauty of life walked so closely hand-in-hand with the soul-chilling absolute certainty of impending death. When I get back, people will ask me where all my pictures are for certain days of the trip, and I’ll have to explain that my fingernails were firmly embedded in the plastic of my steering-wheel. Let’s just say that this has been my motto for the past week:

I also think this would make an outstanding title for a low-budget Spanish-language thriller

But it hasn’t all been just about ulcer development. I’ve also had the opportunity to see some amazing 10,000-year-old cave paintings in a valley in southern Argentina:

Seriously - this was unbelievably awesome

And I went on a knee-destroying 26-km hike today through Los Glacieres National Park, where I scuttled crab-like up a snow-and-mud-covered mountainside so that I could look down at a dazzling panorama of jagged mountains that resembled nothing so much as the fortress of an evil wizard.

If Skeletor hasn't already claimed this, I'm so moving in...

I would also like to point out that the last 1km of the section of the hike leading up to the picture above is easily among the most pant-crapping hiking experiences I’ve ever had. I later found out that the trail was actually closed. Guess I should read signs like that.

But more than anything else, it’s been about surprising the shit out of the locals. Two days ago I showed up in a remote and desolate frontier town at about 9:30p, desperate for a hot meal and a place to sleep. When I told the hotel owner where I was from, he literally clapped his hands in delighted surprise, and told me that I might as well have arrived from the Moon. I liked that.

Tomorrow I’m hitting some glaciers in the southern portion of the park, then it’s off to Tierra del Fuego. El Jefe is holding up like a champ so far, and I’d like to give an extra special shout-out to my buddy Vas, whose donation of William Gibson’s Spook Country on audiobook has been invaluable for these lengthy drives. I may not be back online again until I turn up in Ushuaia in a few days, but keep on keeping on…

PS – I’m also totally digging the way that sunset gets later for me every single day as I push ever southward; in the space of a week, it’s gone from earlier than 6:30 to almost 9… I’m going to have a hard time settling back into the NYC winter cycle…

Hi, everybody. This is my truck, El Jefe:

And this is Patagonia:

I think the two will be fast friends, don’t you?

I’m not going to get around to putting up my second archived post, just ’cause this last one took longer than expected. But I’d like to repudiate my previous bitchiness about Santiago. I’ve had a very nice afternoon here, hiking on this mountainside trail right in the freakin’ middle of the city, and I’m currently enjoying a couple of local microbrews in this artsy little bar where they’re apparently making a film. Oh, and I’m going to be watching the Obama-McCain debate tonight at an expat party in this bar downtown, so I don’t have to feel the total pain of political withdrawal.

My only standing complaint about Chile now is the empanadas. Whereas Argentinean empanadas are gracefully-made, perfectly-spiced little flavor grenades, the Chilean empanadas I’ve had so far are nothing more than oversized doughy pillowcases full of fail. This may change, but that’s my opinion so far. On the other hand, the ceviche here is killer, and I’m a sucker for a good pisco sour, so I guess it all balances out…