Santiago--Fine Surprises

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Santiago Surprises, May 2011

Oops, how did I wake up in Santiago? I was planning to spend a couple of weeks in Valdivia, eight hours to the south. Ah yes, I'd been in that university town the previous afternoon, but had unexpectedly jumped onto an overnight bus up to the capital.

I'd been traveling in Argentina with my dear friend Nancy from Santa Barbara. We had left the ski resort of Bariloche, Argentina, crossed the Andes at the Cardinal Samore Pass in a mid-May, gorgeous, driving blizzard, and arrived on Chile's Pacific coast at Valdivia. While I was to stay there, Nancy was headed up to Santiago, the country's capital, for a plane connection.

However, not wanting to stay in big city Santiago alone, Nancy offered to buy me a [icama (bed) bus ticket to accompany her. Hmmm--a free ticket with a friend, in a plump, luxurious seat on which I'd never splurged--didn't think long about that.

We spent the afternoon walking around cold, drizzly Valdivia (its normal state), admiring its quaint downtown, its three rivers and the begging sea lions at the wharf, and then boarded an overnight bus to Santiago. I had the best (only) sleep ever on an overnight bus.

Upon arrival, Nancy sprang for a taxi to the hostel (I could get used to this high life). We were soon in the charming neighborhood of Concha y Toro, filled with once-grand, hundred-year-old mansions. The hostel was on the Liberdad de la Presa (Freedom of the Press) Plaza with a charming stone fountain, autumn-colored sycamores, benches and a couple of adorable resident dogs

The area was so picturesque, photographers and indie filmmakers often used it as a backdrop. It was a bit far from the center, so I generally took the efficient metro to town, then walked back along the spacious, tree-and statue-lined park that bisected the city's main traffic artery, the Alameda, or along the semi-pedestrian Huerfanos (Orphans) street in the evening when the metro was uncomfortably crowded. Perfect balance!

The Alameda was really named Avenida Bernardo O'Higgins after the Irish-Chilean liberation hero and first president of the republic. However, it was popularly known as the Alameda, a word of Arabic origin that signified a tree-lined park for walking. Most of the Chilean towns I'd visited had these wonderful pedestrian spaces with the trees changing from palms in the north to sycamores and jacarandas here in central Chile to poplars and pines further south.

Santiago turned out to be a pleasant surprise. First, here in mid-May, late autumn, it was relatively warm. I'd spent the last three and a half months in gorgeous, but freezing Patagonia. Santiago's fall felt rather like that of my Santa Barbara: I needed only one pair of long pants, not three, and only one jacket rather than two. I was in heaven! Of course, this similarity of climate should be no surprise--we're both at 34 degrees latitude with Mediterranean climates.

The second pleasant surprise was how attractive and entertaining Santiago was despite its bad press. Yes, it was a bit smoggy, and there were lots of people. Five million, almost a third of the country's population, live in the metropolitan area, but it rarely felt too crowded (except on public transportation). I was, however, there in the off-season, so tourists weren't adding to the bustle.

The central city was filled with beautiful architecture, much in the French Belle Epoch style since French architects had been brought in to design the downtown in the 1880s, when the city experienced a financial and population boom. This architecture was coupled with generally uninspiring skyscrapers, but there were fabulous museums and parks, great music and some very charming neighborhoods. I spent several weeks there, so as usual, I was able to explore to my heart's delight.

Since Nancy was only there one day, we took a walking tour. While I knew more than the guide on political subjects, he certainly had the edge on cultural ones, showing us restaurants, nightclubs and the sexist "coffee with legs" phenomenon. The latter was baristas in bikinis to draw men into the mediocre Chilean coffee shops. We passed on that.

Cultural Offerings

The tour ended in the photogenic Bellavista neighborhood with lots of restaurants, an ice cream shop with surprisingly yummy flavors (carrot/ginger, beet, tomato/arrugula) and La Chascona, the Santiago home of Nobel Prize winning poet Pablo Neruda. La Chascona, The Wild-Haired One, is named after his third wife and true love, Matilde Urrutia.

We took an English-language tour of the quirky home, but the tour was too rushed for my taste. Another group nipped at our heels, so we didn't really have time to savor all the amazing collections and treasures. Still, I'm glad I saw it, and even more glad I later visited his other two houses in and near Valparaiso at a more relaxed pace.

We then meandered back to the center, spending time on Cerro Lucia, a fine, park-covered hill with a castle, fountains and views of the city and the surrounding Andes. It was also the defensive position from where Pedro de Valdivia founded the city, the first in Chile, in 1541. Later, I'd often walk up the hill for a bit of exercise and respite from city crowds.

That evening, we attended the first of many excellent classical concerts I'd see during my stay. In the gilded, old world Municipal Theater, we saw a fantastic Tosca with the sublime Korean tenor, Alfred Kim. When he sang his first note, I remembered him from the Dresden opera house where he also sang Puccini--La Boehm, and was the best Rodofo I'd ever heard. See him if you can!

Later, at the theater, I would see a wonderfully avant-guard concert of Carmina Burana and Stravinsky's The Bride with 4 pianos, lots of percussion and a choir. At the University of Chile's auditorium in Plaza Italia, I heard the city's symphony perform Puccini's Gloria Mass and Beethovan's 4th, and in the evocative churches of San Francisco, the city's oldest (1572), and in huge, spare Santo Domingo, I heard sweet Renaissance and Baroque music.

Entertaining Plaza de Armas

I started my exploration in the heart of the city, the Barrio Civico's Plaza de Armas--a huge leafy square surrounded by grand old municipal buildings, the 18c neo-classical cathedral and cheap snack shops under an arcade.

The plaza was always filled with artists selling their dubious wares, stuffed ponies for children's photos, lots of people enjoying the sun on the many benches, a gazebo filled with chess players, police on horseback having their photos snapped by tourists and lots of dogs begging for the treats being fed to the pigeons. It was always a grand spectacle.

On the plaza was the sumptuous and properly gilded Cathedral with a radiant chapel for Nuestra Senora del Carmen, the patron of Chile. Nearby were other gorgeous churches, generally filled with flowers and lots of congregants. For the feast day of St Rita, Advocate of the Impossible (my kind of gal), her alter had a long line of impossible dreamers. Of the countries I've thus far visited in the southern cone of South America, Chile is by far the most Catholic with packed churches. No wonder they only gained the right to divorce in 2004!

From the center, I spiraled outward visiting barrios (neighborhoods), some of my favorites being the bohemian Barrio Brazil, the 1920s, cobble-stoned Barrio Paris-Londres with beautiful replicas of European styles from the Middle Ages onward, and the charming Barrio Lastarria with restaurants museums, galleries and an art-house cinema.

I also enjoyed the sun and a book in the fine many parks: the Quinta Normal with the planetarium and museums, many unfortunately closed due to damage from February 2010's earthquake, Parque Forestal along the cement Mapocho River and the hill parks--Cerro Lucia and Cerro San Cristobal with views of the city and the Andes.

I was there for the free Museum Day and the Day of Patrimony and stood in hours-long lines to see the fabulous interiors of normally private, former palaces, now offices and private clubs. Wise entrepreneurs made our wait enjoyable by playing live music and selling fresh-squeezed orange juice and snacks.

While I enjoyed many museums, my favorite was the world class, Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino. It had exquisite examples of pottery, jewelry and textiles, and descriptions and time lines of many of the cultures from Central and South America. I took lots of photos and notes, and I'm sure to refer to these again as I travel north.

Another favorite was in the charming Barrio Lastarria in Plaza Mulata Gil de Castro --the Museo de Artes Visual with thought-provoking, contemporary Chilean artists and a fine, attached Museo Archaeologico. Rather less exciting, along the tree-lined river park, were the (fortunately free) modern and fine arts collections housed in a beautiful Beaux Arts building.

Much more exciting was the Museo de la Moda (Museum of Clothing), far from the center in the outskirts of the attractive suburb of Providencia. It was housed in a 1920s, low, spacious, modernist mansion. Some of the rooms contained the furnishings of the original owners while others contained the temporary exhibits. For my visit, there was an incredible collection of casual and haut couture from the 80s, with music, videos and magazine covers to give a feeling and context of the era. Great fun!

After visiting the main museums, I had fun hunting for new and old palaces and the few remaining old colonial adobes not toppled by earthquakes. I also enjoyed quirky museums such as the Alhambra modeled after its namesake in Granada, the Museum of Colonial Art in colonial San Francisco's peaceful cloisters, and the Decorative Arts Museum with my favorite huge, colonial, carved tortoise-shell combs, jewelry, glassware, ceramics and more with excellent bilingual explanations also in a peaceful former convent though in a dodgier part of town.

A couple of cultural centers drew me repeatedly to see their films and exhibits. The converted warehouse of the Centro Cultural Matucana had great contemporary art and fabulous retrospectives of foreign films: Bergman, Kurosawa, Palestinian. Under the the Moneda Palace, the Cultural Center showed Chilean and foreign films and had an exhibition on indigenous art, one of the plastic art of the Chilean artist and musician Violeta Parra and a retrospective of Chilean children's toys. Santiago really had a cornucopia of treats.

The 19c French Belle Epoch style National Library had excellent free films, concerts and exhibits. One of the latter was on the writing and history of Pablo Neruda's Canto General. I'd known this "song of the people" for years after hearing a Santa Barbara choir sing the lyrics to driving, percussive Latin music by Mikis Theodorakis. Learning its history made it even richer and more meaningful.

Dead Babies

In a film at the library, I learned of a former Chilean custom around dead infants that initially seemed macabre but which soon revealed itself as humane and honest in honoring brief lives, the sorrow of their loss and the death we will all face.

An incredibly moving black and white art film from the 60s revolved around the life of a poor family in Santiago whose newborn baby lives only a few hours. The baby is then dressed in white, angel wings and flowers and put on a little chair on the family's table. Family and friends then hold a wake (though unfortunately, they all got drunk and danced while the mother and small son were alone in their pain).

I later saw the same custom depicted in a new biography of Violeta Parra (who wrote Gracias de la Vida, sung by Joan Baez and lots of others). These films in turn helped me understand the roots of a student's photo exhibit at the Modern Art Museum in which seriously deformed dead infants were dressed up and posed.

After the death of a newborn, how much better to spend a day seeing, acknowledging, loving and mourning the lost child rather than having him or her whisked away out of sight due to our morbid denial of death.

Museum of Memory and Human Rights

The new Museo de la Memoria, y de los Derochos Humanos (Museum of Memory and of Human Rights) was both visually striking in form and haunting and inspiring in content. The glass museum in partly sunken below street level, an artistic bow to the history that was hidden for so long.

Inside, the museum details human rights abuses revealed in truth commissions in a wide range of countries, but focuses on remembering the repression and resistance of the 17 years of Chilean military dictatorship. I visited several times to read all of the Spanish-language text and absorb the information.

The museum's establishment was encouraged by the left-center, former president Michelle Bachelet (agnostic, single mother of three) who really opened the dialogue about the human rights' abuses that occurred during the military dictatorship of 1973-90, and initiated the process of bringing some of the perpetrators to justice. The current president, conservative businessman Sebastian Pinera, who has ties to the Pinochet regime, refused to attend the museum's opening.

The museum had moving videos of the brutal events of September 11, 1973, when General Pinochet's military coup, backed by the CIA, bombed the downtown 18c Moneda Presidential Palace to topple the government of Salvador Allende, the first democratically elected Socialist president in Latin America.

Thousands of Allende's supporters were arrested, tortured and executed or, worse for their families, disappeared--their fate never known; many other thousands went into exile. The museum documented the 17-year reign of terror that ensued.

Not in the museum was the lead-up to the coup, about which I'd read before arriving. Evidently, Nixon and Kissinger considered Allende more dangerous than Castro, and so used the considerable economic power of the US to help Chilean conservatives sabotage the economy, turn the middle class against the government, and undermine Allende's reforms to help the poor and the working class. To this day, there are still many supporters of the fascist Pinochet, and politics is a tricky subject to broach in Chile.

To personalize the suffering caused by the dictatorship, the museum had a huge wall of photos of some of the disappeared, biographies of many of them and commemorative candles. There were also extensive images, testimonies, and documentation of the country-wide kidnapping, rape, torture and murder. The top floor detailed the courageous, inspiring resistance to the dictatorship, and the people's eventual, joyful triumph and return to democracy.

Cemetery's Monument to the Disappeared and Executed

Later, at the municipal cemetery, I sought out the Monument to the Disappeared and Executed. I went on a Sunday since I knew the cemetery would be colorful and filled with families bringing flowers to departed ones. With Mozart's Requiem on my IPOD, I wandered the city of the dead filled with cement tombs in all shapes from a Mayan pyramid, Gothic chapels, and lots of little palaces. I found the impressive tomb of Allende, the simple one of Violeta Parra and many with the names of the generals and national heroes I'd seen on street signs all over Chile.

The Monument to the Disappeared and Executed had four large, sculpted heads with their eyes closed in death in a plaza in front of two huge, towering concrete slabs, one carved with the names of the disappeared, the other with those executed (rather like our Vietnam memorial) . Below, in a little garden area, many had left personal memorials and flowers.

It was overwhelming and moving, and I was not the only one in tears as I read the names (including that of the renowned folk singer Victor Jarra). It was also heart-warming to see grandparents talking to their children and grandchildren about this tragic time through which they had lived. Thank goodness they were passing on the lessons, so that future generations work to preserve liberties.

Democracy Lives: Student Protests

Fortunately, the young generation takes seriously its free speech liberties and the importance of participating in the democratic process. In Patagonia, I witnessed and participated in protests against the damming of pristine rivers to provide electricity for far away Santiago.

Now, all over Chile, for the three months I was there, mid-May to mid-August (and longer, I'm sure), well-organized secondary and university students were boycotting classes and taking to the streets in massive, weekly protests, demanding free, quality higher education as has neighboring Argentina and other Latin American countries.

Unfortunately, they were regularly met by an unnecessarily brutal police response with tear gas, water cannons and occasional beatings. The students also occasionally turned violent , but this was the exception and never in any of the several demonstrations in which I participated.

My first march took place one morning when I was walking to town and came upon a site from science fiction. Police were in army-green, futuristic armor like Darth Vader's Imperial forces (or maybe like turtles), but they were on anachronistic horseback--it seemed like something from Blade Runner.

Then, I saw tanks with what looked like machine gun turrets on top. I sensed this would be more interesting than the museum I'd planned to see, so I walked in the direction they were anxiously looking. What I found were--students.

Filling all four lanes of one side of the Alameda was a sea of students extending forward and back as far as I could see--20,000 young people and faculty members with signs and banners clearly stating their desires. (I vowed to take some of this organization back with me for our anti-war and anti-nuke demonstrations).

We marched to the office of the Department of Education and everyone seemed to mill around rather than listening to speakers. I needed a bathroom break, so I headed to a nearby cultural center. What a shock when I returned! The students were gone and the streets were soaked.

The tanks I'd seen were mounted with water cannons, not machine guns. The tanks are popularly known as guanacos, after the large, wild, spitting camelids I'd seen in Patagonia. On other occasions when the tanks "spit" tear gas, its bitter fumes could be felt all along this main traffic artery, in the metro system that goes under it, and in the city--everyone suffered.

When I stopped briefly in Santiago in August, three months later on my way to Argentina, the students were becoming more desperate, and many residents had become disillusioned with the right-wing President Pinera and were calling for his resignation. However, it seemed these demonstrations may end up as futile as our anti-Iraq war ones had been--so sad.

Forward Travel

I'd planned to spend a couple of weeks in Chile (Valdivia, really), then head back to Bariloche for snow; however, the Chilean Volcano Puyehue erupted on June 6, as I prepared to return. It spewed ash over Bariloche and southern Argentina, cancelling flights as far away as Buenos Aires, closing ski resorts in the Patagonian Lake District and burying some towns under two feet of ash. When that door closed, another opened.

I got in touch with my friend Oscar, whom I'd met on the Navimag ferry through Chile's Patagonian fiords, and whose family had a holiday home a couple of hours away at coastal Valparaiso. He invited me for the weekend with him and his friends, after which I could rent the house--perfect!

As it turned out, I spent the three months of my visa in Valparaiso and further north in the Norte Chico. I returned to Santiago the day before my visa was to expire and booked a seat on a bus heading over the Liberatadore's Pass, the highest Andean pass, to Mendoza, Argentina.

However, the pass was snowed-in for four days, my visa expired and I ended up spending two days in the immigration office--bad girl. Fortunately, I got off with a warning--next time it will cost me $100. A lesson in not cutting things so close--you never know when you'll get snowed in. But for now, I've a front-row seat with a panoramic view of snowy mountains as I head back to what feels like my home--Argentina.

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