Catching up on Chile – Part 1, Santiago

We’ve been in Chile for over two weeks now and I’ve barely blogged.  I’ll chalk that up to the fact that the nature of our trip has changed a bit, with more seeing things and doing things and a bit less downtime.  Part of that was that my parents were visiting us for the first ten days.  They flew down from New York and met us in Santiago on February 17, and we spent some great time together  (more on that later).

We spent our first two full days in Santiago, which was real culture shock to us, coming from Ecuador, as I’ve blogged about previously.  My parents, having just arrived from NY, were great sports about indulging our search for decent quality hamburgers (Oscar) and Starbucks (me).

Loving the clean subway...

And the cool architecture

Santiago reminded me in some ways of the mid-19^th Century and later parts of a French city – parts of it look like Paris, parts like Nice.  We stayed at a B&B in the city center, which is not really the nicest part, but looks like something ripe for gentrification.   Lots of nice older homes, many with Deco touches from the early 20^th Century, but a bit seedy around the edges. 

Kids and Parents

We spent an interesting couple of days tooling around the city, but it was very hot, and so we spent a lot of time staying out of the sun as well.  It was a bit of a challenge to get used to the Chilean meal schedule, so out of sync with Ecuador’s (more about this later as well), but we did manage to have a couple of excellent meals out, with fantastic wine, and elaborately prepared seafood and meat, unlike anything we’d had in our travels so far.  In all fairness, we had a couple of epic misses on the food, like when I ordered randomly in the famous Santiago sandwich shop, Fuente de Alemania, and wound up with a bunch of huge steamed meat and mayo sandwiches. 

One highlight was a walking tour of the older central neighborhoods of the city, led by a young writer who had recently returned from living in Paris.  His tour was focused on “Five different ways of constructing Chilean identity”, and despite its graduate thesis overtones, it really hung together nicely (even if I don’t recall all five ways – 19^th Century Europhile, 20^th Century immigrant, 20^th Century political reformer, real estate magnate, etc.)

19th C Buildings

Another highlight was the poet Pablo Neruda’s Santiago house, La Chascona.  His three houses are all national treasures and museums.  They are very interesting architecturally, as intimate, nautically inspired spaces alternate with highly choreographed dramatic moments, and are at least somewhat well-known by architecture students everywhere (I speak from experience here).  But even more interesting, I think, is the extent to which one of the most important national heroes is a poet – hard to imagine this in the US.  We also visited his Valparaiso house and tried to visit his house in Isla Negra, where we were shut out by the crowds.  I’m not sure I remember ever being shut out of a poet’s house in the US due to the three-hour wait for admission.

One last highlight – the clean and efficient subway, apparently the trains are the same ones as in Paris.

It was hot!

After our third night in Santiago (and really, just about enough time), we hit the road – after our wonderful B&B host, Walter, arranged for us to rent a 12-passenger van to hold the six of us and all our stuff, which was no easy feat.  It took all morning and a couple of different rental companies, but by mid-day, we were on the way to Valpo.