Cafe con Piernas

People here seem to drink lots of nescafe, but my friend Jenna and I have constantly been on the search for some real coffee. We have stooped so low as to go to... dunkin donughts... but we are always looking around and seeing where we might find some fresh coffee. The other day we were walking around downtown in the middle of the day, it was hot, we were tired, all we wanted was a coffee. So we see a place called Cafe Haiti and we rush in, order, and notice that the girls are all dressed in matching "dresses" (which would easily be shirts), which show off their bods, and then we look behind us and see that we are literally the only women in the coffee shop. Ahh, we are awkardly surrounded by businessmen who are looking at us like we are some crazy gringas. But the coffee was soo good!!! I realized that we had just stepped in to our first Cafe con Piernas, the famous chilean coffee shops/strip joints. Yes! So today, Jenna and I were again walking around, we were hot and tired, and we were wandering through some sketchy mall-type thing with hair salons and random things, then we hear this loud club music coming from behind a door. "Should I do it?" I ask, as if there is any question. So I put on my sunglasses and open the door, and see strippers in thongs and bikini tops serving businessmen in a very seedy environment, everyone turns to look at me as I open the door, and I say "cafe?" and awkwardly shut the door and run away. Then we continue our walk through a street with an odd amount of gun stores, and low and behold, another one! We see several business men enter and exit discreetly, acting chill, so I go and open the door and there is this haggard woman in some type of leggings with a hole cut out for her bottom, her hair is stringy, and she looks like she is on a lot of drugs. "Cafe?", I ask, and she just stares at me. So does everyone else in the coffee shop. I turn and leave, then start cracking up.

I mean, can you imagine??? This is apparently a normal thing here, businessmen going during the day to go get served their coffee by strippers. And I would say Chileans are generally pretty conservative and catholic, but I guess this could be a machista thing where men "need" to be served coffee like this. Anyway, its really funny, and perhaps I will get up my courage to go in and do a sociological experiment inside the cafe con piernas. But for now, I will continue to just open the door awkardly then run away. I wonder why starbucks has not caught on to this idea.