Eye tacos and our new business plan

The other day in the Spanish class I teach, we were looking at the vocabulary section for the chapter we are covering. It is sports vocab (yawn yawn snooze drool). I asked my students if they like watching certain sporting events, like say a swim meet. One of them said she only likes it if there are “dulces de ojo”. At first I had no idea what she was trying to say, until one of the other students figured it out: Eye candy.

She asked me if there was a way to say that. I told her that I hadn’t heard a good equivalent. One of the other students, who is Mexican-American (and totally doesn’t belong in a beginning Spanish course) said that she had heard of “Taco de ojo” a.k.a. Eye taco.

I almost had a comically induced fit. That is hilarious.

I was telling my hubs about it today, and after I told him about my student saying “dulce de ojo” he said, ah, Taquito de ojo. I should have known he would have heard it before, not because they say it in Chile, in fact, tacos are not even eaten there. (A taco in Chile is a traffic jam… and “traffic jam-eye” is probably something else entirely)… But he works with some Mexican guys.

That got us talking about how to say it in Chilean. All he could think of was “recrear la vista” which is essentially “visual recreation”. For some reason that brought him to how perverted Chileans were with their “Cafés con piernas.” (See how progressive he is).

Café con piernas (coffee/café with legs) is basically a coffee shop where the girls are very scantily clad. It is a strip club for your morning coffee. They are all over downtown Santiago and filled with men in business suits sipping their “café cortado” (coffee and milk). There is one that reportedly has a “million dollar minute” where the girls take off their tops.

Nice. Huh?

So I told him my theory that these joints are basically society and work sanctioned daytime strip-clubs. Since you can’t go to a night club and drink a cocktail at 9:30 a.m., they have invented coffee shops with a cheap thrill.

I told him I was surprised there weren’t more kinds of places like that:

Panadería con piernas (bakery with legs)
Verdulería con piernas (veggie stand with legs)
Carnicería con piernas (butcher shop with legs)

...where you could get your cheap thrills as you run all of your errands.

And he suggested that that might be our business plan when we move back there.

So there you have it, we will be the proud owners of a bakery where you can get some sweets with your sweets. (I had tons of little metaphors to put in here, but I don’t want you to think I am being crass).