On Wednesday after class I caught the metro into town – although it was 2pm, presumably not a peak period, the carriages were packed full with people pressed against each other. Apparently the trains had been closed that morning, perhaps that explained it? I was heading in to visit the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, which records Pinochet’s regime and the massive human rights violations that took place. Pretty brutal stories – I opted not to get an audio guide as I thought I could get enough detail from the exhibits. It reminded me a lot of Holocaust museums like the one in Berlin, or some of the museums in Prague that recorded similar incidents under Communism. It’s a very well put together place, pretty new and well designed.
I took a couple hours wandering through, and then walked towards downtown – the suburb I walked through was very rundown, lots of abandoned buildings and graffiti, including tagging, street art, and political messages – one clue as to how abandoned the area was that I saw a big sign up for ’30 years ago – we do not forget’ and another one for ’31 years ago’, both presumably referring to the coup, which is now almost 32 years ago. I stopped in the square in front of the Palacia de la Moneda, which I’d seen in pictures of the coup at the museum, and ate some dessert I’d brought with me and relaxed for a while. I had planned to visit the National History Museum as well but spent longer than I’d expected in the Museo de la Memoria, so instead I went straight towards the Feria Santa Lucia to do some tourist shopping (I’d asked my host where was the best place to go and she said here – prices were about 2/3 as much as the similar stuff I saw at Cerro San Cristobal). The market is right next to Cerro San Lucia, which looked like it would offer a very nice view but it was almost 7pm so I decided I’d rather go home than climb it. I caught a bus that was stuffed so full the driver could barely close the door behind me – about ten minutes in some poor girl needed to throw up, so we pulled over to the side of the street, a bunch of people got out of the way, she got off, and then we all piled back on and kept going.
On Thursday in Conversation class the teacher asked what I’d done yesterday, and I said I’d gone to the museum. He asked the other two if they knew what it was for, and while the Brazilian was clearly familiar with the topic, our college kid representative knew only that she was going to it tomorrow with her class, and her teacher said it was important. The teacher tried to explain a bit about it, that during Pinochet’s reign many Chileans said they had no idea what was going on, and the Museum was part of an effort to make sure nobody could continue to claim ignorance or forget.
In the afternoon, we had a planned trip to the Mercado Centrale, downtown – however a student protest was schedule for that evening, and apparently marches and traffic disruptions had started that morning and the school decided not to send anyone downtown. I was going to go over to the General Cemetery to see Allende’s grave instead, but the admin staff told us that while the cemetery itself would be fine, getting there and back would probably be a lot harder than normal with traffic already disrupted. So instead I bought a book and went home and read about Mendoza 🙂 My host got home slightly earlier than usual and said that she’d left work early and taken far longer than usual to get home. I could hear and see traffic blocked up on the street outside our apartment for most of the afternoon, starting at least by 4pm. Glad I decided not to go anywhere!
Friday was my last day of classes. Afterwards I went for a short run (at about 2pm – poor timing, with the sun out and all the people walking around to and from lunch) and then met a woman from my classes to walk to the Cemetery. It was about a 40 minute walk from the school, we spotted a Palestinian restaurant along the way which Laura will have to try! When we got there, it was totally worth it – the graves include a ton of insanely elaborate marble vaults which look like any one of them is worth more than the entire surrounding suburb. (And also rows and rows of what looks like just a wall with coffin-sized vaults inserted into it). We walked through perhaps 10% of the place, far enough to see Salvador Allende’s grave – probably spent about 40 minutes in there? Some of the monuments were collapsing, I noticed one of them that said something like “renovated in 1998 by X for her parents Y and Z” so presumably some ongoing spending is required. Overall it was just incredible, well worth the visit. We took a different route back to the school and happened to walk through La Vega market, the “locals market” (as opposed to the more touristy Mercado Centrale, which is just across the highway from it).
Saturday I got up bright and early to be at school at 8.30am for our hike to the Andes, and when I got there only Laura was there because it was actually an 8am departure and I had been misled, as had she. Very fortunately for us, the bus had had to loop around to drop off a staff member, and arrived back at 8.35am! We got on the bus, got laughed at, and headed off. After stopping in a small town for people to buy water and extra food (lunch of a sandwich and juice box was being provided) we got to our departure point around 11am. The hike wasn’t too hard – a steep uphill section to start with, a bit of a stiff cold breeze, but mostly an easy fairly flat path. The mountains around us were just amazing, I’m pretty sure none of my pictures really do them justice! A map of the route we hiked is available at http://es.mapmyride.com/workout/1007516279 – if you zoom out, you can also see the town we stopped at, San Jose de Maipu. On the way back we stopped at a random bakery and all had empanadas made to order, pretty good. Then I slept most of the way home.
As usual, all the photos I took are on Flickr: hike pictures, Santiago