The weirdest thing about Chile is that you are not supposed to flush toilet paper, but put it in bins next to the toilet – everywhere. Apparently the septic system is quite fragile? I quite like Santiago (check out my random photos), I’ve decided so far that it rates “would visit again, would take a temporary transfer to here, would not move myself permanently”. The big drawbacks are the pollution/haze and the general feeling of being slightly less developed/more obvious poverty, both of which are not things I want more of in my life.
Thursday was a holiday in Chile, celebrating “some war with Peru or Bolivia I think”, to quote someone at school (turns out it was The Battle of Aquique). Apparently it’s also the day when the president gives a big speech every year explaining what the budget has been spent on and how any big government projects are coming along – and so, traditionally, there is a protest about whatever is unpopular about current government/policy. The protests this year apparently included people angry about two students killed last week during another protest about student fees – one of the teachers at school said there are a lot of protests and anger about university fees because Chile has one of the highest ratios of average salary:university fees ratio in the world (many numbers in this slightly dated article).
I went for a run at about 11am and found the streets close to deserted, similar to my (much earlier!) Good Friday run with Dad a month ago. In the afternoon, my host family took me along to a big mall (Costanera) – my first trip on the metro! They gave me their spare metro card to use, each trip costs about $1. They explained that there were some great sales on, and although both of them hated clothes shopping, you have to do it sometime and this was a good day. I wandered around a little on my own looking for a charger cable for my Fitbit (I seem to have lost the stupid tiny proprietary thing somewhere since Tahiti, rendering my actual fitbit completely bloody useless) – unfortunately none of the stores I went into had anything. I gather someone should sell them in Santiago, but I’m still looking. At the mall, we saw a protest outside Starbucks (there are lots of Starbucks here). Apparently the workers are in some places on a strike (although at this one the store was open) and there is a court case on? My Spanish is definitely not up to reading about labor disputes! If yours is, try reading this article.
Friday morning, in our conversation classes natural ‘what did you do yesterday’, this led into a fairly wide-ranging discussion of Chilean politics and immigration – there are many Peruvian immigrants, who have been around for a decade or more, and lots of more recent Colombian and Haitian immigrants who are seen as more violent/aggressive/uneducated and are less popular. I didn’t know it, but it turns out Chile is a powerhouse economy of South America. (I have realized that I really knew embarrassingly little about the country before I arrived!) It was interesting to see the reaction of my English (of Jamaican background) classmate, who was shocked to learn that many of the Haitian immigrants didn’t speak Spanish, and asked why they didn’t go ahead and learn it if they wanted to move to a Spanish speaking country. The teacher said something like “well, most of them can’t afford to take classes like this”. For some reason, although I don’t think there are many Chinese immigrants, there are many many Chinese restaurants. I haven’t been to one to know if they have Chinese staff or not.
Friday afternoon I decided to check out some more of the city, so I walked from the school along through the Parque Forestal (very nice! Some sweet kids playgrounds, a few joggers, lots of couples hanging out) past the Museo de Bellas Artes and down to the Plaza de Armas, where I took a few pictures of sculptures and giant churches, and bought some books (one English, one Spanish!). Then I successfully caught a bus home by myself (Google Transit does directions in Santiago, so it wasn’t that impressive of me) and hung out at home watching Game of Thrones. Not sure about how that’s going, but I’ll probably keep watching to see how different the story gets from the books now.
Saturday I had signed up to go on a day-long excursion to Isla Negre and Valparaiso with the school. We met at 8am at school, with one of the admin staff, and then everyone slept on the bus for most of the two-hour drive to Isla Negre, where we were going to see Pablo Neruda’s house by the sea. We were there pretty early, so we hung around for a bit and had a coffee in the nice café (with a ship-shape outside bar. Heh. Hehehehe.)
During this time, our staff lead (Astrid) may have been in line for us? As we got our coffees she came to tell us all to get in line, and we collected our audio guides and went in as a group of ~15. Like La Chascona, it’s fairly well organised – the audio guides are the kind where you press a number and get that recorded snippet, and the numbers are posted around the house in order. Also like La Chascona, there are no photos allowed while inside, so I only have photos of the outdoors. The house included a room decorated with a dozen or so shipfigureheads, a table made on a giant wagon wheel, a collection of ships inside bottles, etc. There are photos of the interior (of all the houses) available on the Foundation website.
Going through the house took a couple of hours (when we came out, I saw a sign saying “current line wait time = 2 hours”!!!) and then we went back to the bus to drive to Valparaiso, about an hour away. The countryside was fairly dry with some impressive hills, not terribly exciting, and most people had another sleep. When we arrived in Valparaiso, traffic was terrible – our driver said it was just regular weekend traffic, because Valparaiso is a very popular short getaway location. We started with lunch at a restaurant by the port – kicked off with a shot of Pisco Sour (very sour), we had some miniature cheese empanadas (I do my bit to bust gender stereotypes by being the person to take the one left over, on a table of mostly military guys), then choice of grilled or fried fish with rice and fries, with icecream cake and a shot of some kind of digestif, a cross between amaretto and cough syrup. I chatted to some of the guys next to me, they were in a group studying for a few weeks immersion, sent from a Defense school in California. Apparently they’d all been studying Spanish full-time since January – they seemed decent, but not nearly as fluent as I would have expected just by knowing that, I guess it’s no FSI! Two of them were under 21 so aren’t allowed to drink while over here even though the drinking age is 18, because they are “here for work” and “semi-on-duty” and so on.
After lunch Astrid took us on a guided tour through Valaparaiso. First we checked out the view from Paseo del May 21, a mini tourist market next to the Naval Museum at the top of a cliff (I bought some delicious dulce de leche), then we went down to the port and took a Funicular up to the top of a hill and walking down through a ton of winding streets covered in murals and brightly painted houses. It was pretty spectacular! At random intervals there were also small street markets selling Tarot card sessions, food, toys, etc. A few photos here, a whole album on Flickr!
After walking for a couple hours, we got back down the bus and piled in for a quick drive across to Vina del Mar – this is today’s cool kids spot, with high-end restaurants and shopping, glitzy hotels and bars. Valparaiso apparently skews older and artsier, though still pretty expensive. After driving down the main street and jumping out to look at the beach and city skyline, most people got some coffee (I don’t know why, when they all went straight to sleep on the bus!) and we headed back to Santiago.
I got home about 10.30pm and a few family guests were still there, for the end of get-together for the one-year anniversary of the death of my family’s dad/husband. I was pretty tired so as the evening wore on I pretty much lost the ability to follow the conversation, I probably should have given up and gone to bed before 2am! A couple days later my host semi-apologised for the loud and vehement arguing that the gathering had involved, saying that she knew from her time in New Zealand that a lot of Australian/New Zealanders were uncomfortable with that kind of discussion. I said it was fine, I was just too tired to understand people talking so fast/over each other, but my family dinners used to be just like that, our friends used to say it was very intimidating!
Sunday I slept in, and when I woke up around 11am I thought about whether to go for a run or not. Eventually the decision was made for me when I realised my running gear was freshly washed and on the line – I am supposed to do my own laundry outside the house but I think the cleaning lady who came on Friday just picked up my pile of dirty clothes (neat pile! Waiting to build up until I took them out to be washed!) and put them in the laundry, so they got washed. (Apparently laundry has been a frequent source of problems for host family relationships, so now the school just says the student must do it themselves outside the house, cost me about $7 to wash all my clothes when I arrived here). So after a leisurely breakfast, I decided to do something active and go walk up Cerro San Cristobal, since the weather seemed fine and clear and the views were supposed to be pretty awesome. I strolled over and once I found the start of the walking path up the hill I think it took me almost an hour to get to the top – it really was a pretty steep hill, I think it was a rise of about 1m in 15? There was quite an extensive layout at the top of the hill – a church (where John Paul II said Mass when he visited Chile), a kind of open-air amphitheatre, a small area filled with candles for prayers next to the giant statue itself at the top, a restaurant and two open air plazas with cafes and touristy sales. I wandered around for a bit and decided I didn’t need to funicular down, it would be easy enough – and it was much easier on the way down, but still a 45 minute walk. At the bottom I rewarded myself with a mote con huesillo, very traditional Chilean drink which I’d heard about and was available at approximately half of the market stalls at the bottom. Then since it was 5pm and I hadn’t had lunch I had a (very traditional) sandwich ‘chicken italian’, which means ‘with avocado mayonnaise and tomato’ (get it? Like the colors of the flag?). It wasn’t bad, although a slightly odd combination. I then went for a stroll through Bellavista, which is well known for its artsy café style and murals all along the streets. I took photos of a bunch but stopped when some old man kind of yelled at me as he walked past – I was getting out of the touristy area towards the run down deserted area, where I’m pretty sure the murals were painted/organised by shop owners simply in the hope of escaping the otherwise endemic tagging. Guidebooks say that Bellavista is not somewhere to walk around alone at night, and I can believe this – would be tricky if you wanted to attend any of the some dozen large nightclubs I saw right on the edge of that rundown area! More photos on Flickr
Monday I stayed up unreasonably late Sunday night (again) so was pretty tired. After class I walked to the shopping mall to look for a fitbit charger again, but although I found a shop that sells fitbits (the Mac store. WTF?) they said nobody sells chargers/replacement parts so I’d have to order it online. Oh well. I ate lunch at the food court in the mall, at a restaurant called Dominos which I had read was a decent, widely available source for a Chilean hot dog. I ordered the Brasilena, featuring cheese and avocado – it had a huge helping of both, and I have no idea what kind of cheese it was, a very odd melted texture. It was ok but a little bland, I think I might have been supposed to select some add-ons? (http://www.domino.cl/productos/1568-agregados.html) When I got home I had a short nap, which was brilliant, before being super productive with homework and reading and trip planning, and then headed to a barbecue at the school which had some 50+ students, the vast majority of whom were in some large groups that had just arrived from America – a group of random students from Wisconsin, and a teachers school in Buffalo (thankfully, based on their level of Spanish, they aren’t going to teach Spanish, just looking to be able to communicate with non-English speaking kids). The barbecue was delicious and I talked to quite a few other students, probably the most I’ve done since I got here.
Tuesday (today!) I was still tired, for similar reasons, which made me really impatient with the general confusion displayed by a lot of the new students. You don’t have to speak Spanish to understand when the room is taking turns reading line by line and you’re next, you just have to pay attention! So I had a less productive afternoon of grumpiness, but at 6pm the school had organised a soccer game at a nearby park. We split into four teams (I found it interesting that although the group was about 60% girls, the guy organising us picked four guys, including one who didn’t play soccer, to be the ‘team captains’ and by interesting I mean backwards and irritating). We were playing on a basketball court, 5 minutes or first team to 2 goals, then the losing team goes off and another team switches on. We went for about two hours and not only did I not injure anything (although I think I have a few bruises on my shins that will show up tomorrow) but I also scored about three goals and set up a bunch – my team was pretty good at passing to me, but the usual tactic of ‘be a girl so defenders ignore you’ worked on some of the opposition, which helped. We won about two thirds of our games, I think? One of the girls was really interested to hear that I’d been running in Santiago and wanted to join me, which would be fun, so I’ll try and schedule that in my remaining few days! She was a bit concerned when I said that I went for a run last Thursday morning, until I explained that it had been a holiday and I had no intention of running before our 9am classes!
Today I also finished reading Isabel Allende’s “My Invented Country“, translated into English. When I looked up Chilean books I should read, the list was basically her and Pablo Neruda, so I picked up a copy last week when I found it in English. I enjoyed it and will probably re-read, but it was a bit of a strange book. It’s a memoir, but she’s already written a full memoir and this is more a memoir of her thoughts and feelings about Chile than her life story, although that is the background structure of the book. Some of what she says about Chile seems almost like secondhand knowledge, and since she’s lived in California now for some 20 years, perhaps it is. A couple of the stranger facts that were mentioned I looked up out of interest, and they were not-quite-wrong (eg: she mentions that no alcohol can be sold the day before Election Day, but apparently it’s actually the day of) – perhaps these were translation errors. There were a few jarring references that made it clear the book was actually published in 2003 (mention of Pinochet still being alive, for instance). Somehow I got an overall feeling of only a superficial familiarity with Chile of today, or as a specific place, but under or through that was an impression of very deep familiarity with Chilean culture and history – and this impression felt like it matched perfectly with her self-description as having been gone from Chile for so long, and so much of her childhood before her eventual exile, that she had created a country out of her own reading and unreliable memories. In the end, I wished I’d read this before I arrived in Santiago, and I expect I’ll read it again mostly for the thoughts about travel and where ‘home’ is once you’ve ever moved to somewhere new.
Now I’ve finished that, the only book I’m reading right now is The Walking Dead Comic Volume 1 – in Spanish! I picked it up back at Powell’s in March and I’m really enjoying it (I’m much more interested in horror stories in book form!). I’m thinking about reading the whole series but that will add up to a fair bit – I did find a random set of the other volumes in a bookstore the other day, so I think if I find the next one in the series I will get it. Wait, I just looked at the prices in that link I found and there are 50 volumes?!! At about $17 each?!?!!1? Yea, I’m not going to read the whole series. Maybe in English, I assume it costs much less!
I also finally booked my bus tickets and hostel for Mendoza, leaving on Sunday morning and returning on Friday to overnight before flying to Lima. My plan is to drink wine, eat steak, do some web dev and do puzzles from The Code Book so I am finished before I get to London and have to give it back to Mum! I decided against taking more Spanish lessons because I want to stop waking up at 8am every morning!!!
–posted at 2.22am 🙁