Más rojo que ketchup: A late-night food hierarchy

The Chilean time-frame is different than ours. There's no way around that. Lunch is usually over around 4:00, and if you're nightlife inclined, don't expect to show up anywhere before midnight, or to leave anywhere before about 3:30. This leaves a pretty significant gap between meal times, and if you're not careful, you can end up very hungry. Thankfully, there are several options. The following is the hierarchy of food choices, starting from cheapest to most expensive:

1. The sopaipilla (~100 pesos, or less than 20 cents):

• Pros: cheap, readily available, sort of like a beignet
• Cons: cheap because they're not good and not filling, like a bad beignet 

2. Meat on a Stick (250 pesos, or about 40-50 cents):

 Basically a Third-World version of Chicken on a Stick, this is exactly what it sounds like. It's more or less a vegetable-less kebab cooked on the street over a knock-off Weber charcoal grill. Can be okay, but probably won't be.

• Pros: cheap, meat on a stick is usually not bad
• Loss of self-respect because you look like a caveman eating one

3. The Completo (600 pesos, or about $1.15):

This is Chile's most famous food. It's a gigantic hot dog inside of a loaf of french bread, covered with avocado, mayonnaise, ketchup, mustard, salsa, and onion. It is huge and awesome, and it's the one thing that just about everybody in the country enjoys.

• Pros: Tastes fantastic
• Cons: Occasionally messy

4. The Churrasco (1000-1200 pesos, or $2-$2.25): 

This is the Cadillac of sandwiches. It's an awesome hamburger bun lightly toasted and served with different kinds of meats, cheeses, avocado, peppers, and onions--think of it as a cross between a Philly Cheesesteak, a hamburger, and a Po' Boy.

• Pros: Just look at this thing:

• Cons: expensive (for Chile)

The Cadillac of late night is kind of rare to find in the wild. We were taken by some Chileans to the best dinner place in Valparaíso, which is a truck that's only open on Friday nights at one specific intersection. It's owned by Compañero Yuri, a local Communist sandwich maker, library owner, artist, and Salvador Allende fan. He describes himself as "redder than ketchup" (side note: Allende was a Socialist president overthrown in a US-backed coup led by Augusto Pinochet in 1973. Allende died during the coup, and Pinochet ruled for 17 years. Sort of a sore subject down here.) This is Compañero Yuri and his truck (he's the one on the right in the beret):

All of the sandwiches are named after Communist leaders and Chilean leftists. I had the Trotsky, which was beef, avocado, cheese, and tomato. No word yet on whether I'm going to be stabbed to death with an ice pick in Frida Kahlo's house in Mexico City too, but I might lay low for a while. And I felt bad about supporting communism, but since he's actively engaged in the free market selling sandwiches, I figure he's pretty harmless. Either way, though, I probably need to vote Republican just to even out.