A clear day in Santiago

Santiago View from the Crwon Plaza
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Santiago, Chile, Part 1I am having a Heineken with my daily vitamins while watching a lame American movie on TV in our room at the Crown Plaza in Santiago.

We have been wandering the different neighborhoods of Santiago, checking out the local colour and local scenes, eating food that thankfully has flavour! And drinking expensive caiprihanas and a new, cheap Chilean favorite, Pisco Sours (A grape liquor with egg whites, sugar and lemon/lime juice.)

This is a crazy city. 6 million people, lots of smog (the city is situated on a large flat zone surrounded by mountains that you cannot see through the constant haze of smog) They say there is great skiing only an hour from the city, but you'd never know it by looking out the window.

Santiago View from the Crwon Plaza
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The smog must be caused by the extraordinary number of diesel buses running rampant across the city. There are even more buses than in Argentina, and the drivers are insane. Watching the buses is excellent sport. Passengers leap onto buses by the back or front doors, and its one price to ride all day. Sometimes buses stop at the curb, or sometimes you have to weave between them to catch one in the second or even third lane of traffic. We have seen numerous people leaping out the back doors while the bus is still moving. The fleet is old, dilapidated, grafitti'd and diesel-burning. The streets are incredibly loud, bus engines gearing up or down, rubber screaming on the pavement; it's very noisy and not at all like Buenos Aires. And they are fast! There are cabs too, but not nearly as many as the buses.

Santiago View from the Crwon Plaza
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the subway system is well developed, and a point of pride with the locals. The subway trains are clean, new, modern and relatively quiet. The stations are spotless and safe with no beggars, buskers or street merchants. Business people use the subway.

Security on the streets is less apparent than in Argentina, but there are police on almost every block. Santiago is known as a safe city, although we have been warned about pick-pockets in open market areas.

We have been approached by a number of locals (we are staying in an area with lots of universities, and friendly English-speaking students)

Cool art in the Bohemian Barrio near the hotel
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They all have greeted us kindly, and welcomed s to their city. They all want to know what we think of Santiago... It seems they are very proud. It's difficult to answer honestly, as we have not found a lot to compliment them on. We are truly lucky in Vancouver.

We are skipping the city tour, as we have a great guide book, and it is easy to take the subway to the different barrios and explore on foot. The peso is crazy here; prices are listed in the thousands of pesos, and the conversion is 450 pesos to one Canadian dollar. Which means that a $2800 peso pisco sour is about $6 bucks. We have not seen any real bargains here yet, so we have been careful with our cash.

More cool art in the Bohemian Barrio near the hotel
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Photographically, so far Santiago has been a bust. The monuments are nice, but not as regal as Argentina’s, and they are all dusty and faded from all the smog and exhaust. It feels like the city could use a really good rainfall and a fresh coat of paint. It seems the city has grown to 6 million people without much input from city planners, so neighborhoods are spread out and chaotic, with apartment buildings and retailers and office towers all mashed together.

We have just booked a hotel in Vina Del Mar, a beach resort about an hour and a half from Santiago (we are hoping for some fresh air and a chance to regain some of our Brazilian tan!)

It might look good in the picture, but it was greasy and heavy and swimming in onion goo.
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Well, my beer is finished and we are off to a barrio called "Paris London".

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We have walked half of the city today. Block after block after block of dusty old buildings, far past their prime and covered in graffiti and grime. Marketplaces filled with crap and more crap: Cheap clothes like you would find at a dollar store, knock-off running shoes for ten bucks, crappy jeans, leather wallets with Bart Simpson embroidered on them, cheap belts and ugly shoes. This city feels like a Zellers on sidewalk sale day.

The secrets of los mountains
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And the ever-present buses, constantly spewing toxins and noise, endlessly assaulting our ears. This is a loud, noisy, hot and dirty city (and not in a good way!)

Trying to find lunch in a clean restaurant: nearly impossible. Most places are holes in the wall, with tables and chairs from the sixties or seventies. dirty, grimy and run-down like the rest of the city.

They like to serve thick cuts of steak or chicken breast with French fries covered in greasy onions and a couple of fried eggs. The obsessive food culture of Brazil is very far removed from Chile. Restaurants have bathrooms where you take the toilet paper in with you from a common outside room, then you wash & dry in the common room again. I'd be OK with that, except that you have to touch every door and surface in the bathroom without ever washing your hands, which means that the people before you had to do the same. It's just not sanitary.

I have not given up hope yet, however, and I realize that my perspective might need some adjusting.

The streets are absolutely jammed with students. There are dozens upon dozens of universities and colleges around here. Students wear uniforms, so you are often confronted with gangs of scraggly schoolgirls in short skirts, who manage to make their uniforms look threatening by topping them with a mop of raggedy Marianne Faithful hair, wild piercings and an ever-rebellious cigarette. The boys and men; unkempt. They either don't know or don't care. If they have any style, it's in a modified mullet, sort of soccer (futbol) style...and it's ugly.

[Note to Joe: your meter would have stopped running in Buenos Aires, and may have actually ticked backwards here. Chile requires it's very own scale, outside the scope of our regular scale rather than an extension of it.]

The university students are on a funding-drive today: they are stripped to ripped-up jeans and splattered with body pain in their hair and on their skin.... They look like they've just crawled out of the polluted river that runs parallel to the main street. I found it odd to have students explaining how expensive university is here and asking for money in a park where homeless people sleep and mothers with babies try to sell onions and garlic to make a few bucks.

The smog has cleared a bit today, so you can make out a faint outline of mountains on the horizon. But these are not the lush and green mountains of home, they are bare and brown, and some are capped with a dirty spate of snow.

Thankfully the Crown Plaza has a nice outdoor pool where you can order a drink and listen to 80's music. (They played a compilation of 80's hits, 30 seconds or less of each song, and it lasted at least two hours... This was most irritating.)

And speaking of 80's music; the pedestrian mall we walked down had all of Madonna's greatest hits playing, both yesterday and today, but rendered in that charming elevator style we all like so much!

The restaurant we ate at last night also had a thing for the 80's. What the hell is wrong with this city? Disco and new wave nights at the local bars are popular, punk rock style is all over the streets.

Did I mention how horrible the buses are?

We are going to try a local club tonight, but I plan to send Becky in my stead... Maybe a few drinks will make things look a little more hospitable.

If not, we're off to Vina Del Mar tomorrow for a little beach time.

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