Advertisement
Published: August 23rd 2009
Edit Blog Post
Choosing which university to study at for my year abroad was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make but I never had any doubt that I needed to be in South America, Spain just wasn’t an option for me. I finally settled on Chile for three reasons, firstly, the guidebook told me that I could be at the beach within an hour and a half and skiing within two hours, secondly there are penguins and thirdly, and most importantly, I, nor anyone I spoke to, knew anything about it. When anyone mentions South America most people think of the drugs war raging in Columbia, the Rio carnival of Brazil or just extreme poverty, little attention is paid to the long, thin country on the west coast despite the fact that it has been labelled as the front runner of the South American countries to gain first world status or South America’s most prolific poet, Pablo Neruda, was born here.
Despite my ignorance, I had a good feeling about Chile, I expected a similar welcoming experience as I’d found during my six week stay in Mexico last year but with better facilities, cheaper food and generally to have the
time of my life. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
From the minute I arrived I was being asked for money, I naively accepted the help of what I thought was a nice gentleman to take me and my 46kg of luggage to my pre-booked collectivo, however despite it only being a 5m walk when he had loaded my suitcases into the back of the van he didn’t leave. Not knowing what he wanted I merely stared at him, to which he responded “I want a tip”, being a struggling university student, tipping is not something that I do naturally, however due to the fact that I didn’t feel my Spanish was proficient enough to tell him, politely, where to go and I was jetlagged beyond belief I ended up handing over $5,000 CLP, which was more than the journey cost, gutted!
My first experience of Santiago was an extremely sensual one, and not in a good way, driving past Rio Mapocho I thought I was going to be sick, the smell was so overbearing and the water was so brown I wondered if it was the city sewers, looking out the window all I could see were grey, old
skyscrapers. I almost felt that rather than flying halfway across the world I’d gone back in time to 1950s London where architects just put up any old building no matter how unsightly. Whilst the backdrop of the mountains did somewhat make up for the monstrosity of the buildings the smog covering the city was so thick I could barely make them out, I remember thinking that it was going to be a very long year.
Now, almost five weeks after my arrival into Chile’s capital city, things have definitely gotten better but I’ve had to completely change my expectations of the city and undertake a hugely steep learning curve for that to happen. As an obvious foreigner, pale skin and red hair, I stick out like a sore thumb and I’m forced to remember how different I look from the world around me daily as I’m confronted with people shouting “gringa” at me or merely pointing and laughing in my face, as if I can’t see them! The gringa label is the one that gets to me the most as I’m not from the United States and whilst I appreciate that I look different, coming from conservative, politically correct England
wherein just talking about skin colour seems to be offensive finding that I’m some sort of freak show, the fact that not only can I walk I can also speak Spanish seems to be a huge shock, is more than unnerving, its plain frustrating. I find Santiago, as a city, hugely unwelcoming and not at all tourist friendly, I wasn’t expecting the red London bus city tour or the London eye but I had assumed that, as it is on a continent that relies so much on the money brought in by tourism, Santiago would be a lot more accessible to those from the outside world.
It seems here that the attitude towards foreigners is that they should stay out, which possibly explains the £380 I had to pay for my student visa, but yet, paradoxically, whilst seeming to denounce any association with the western world, Chileans are keen to be seen as advanced in a European or Northern American sense. At one country club dinner a graduated engineering student told me “Chile isn’t like the rest of South America, we’re advanced, we’re like the United States” and, simultaneously, his girlfriend was desperate to reiterate the fact that they were
the “upper classes” and looked genuinely horrified when I told her that I’d been out for drinks in Barrio Bellavista the previous evening, informing me that “that’s where the lower classes spend their time”. It turns out that if you’re Chilean “upper class” you live outside the city centre, the further outside the centre you are, the more money you have, as was later proved that evening when my English friends and I were taken to an “upper class” Chilean house party at the foot of the mountains, I’ve never been in such a big house in my life. However, whilst fraternising with the high society of Santiago is fun it’s not something that I plan to do on a permanent basis, particularly after the same girl said to me “yeh, Pinochet did kill a lot of people but it was definitely for the right reasons”, I almost choked on my pisco (a typical Chilean alcohol, completely lethal and not advisable if you wish to avoid liver disease!) however rather than embroiling myself into an argument with her and the 30 other twenty something’s at the party who were all in agreement with her, I bit my tongue.
The impression
I got from that particular party was that Chile is a country struggling to find its own identity, within which there is a raging class war and continuing divides following the Pinochet era. Personally, I avoid commenting on that particular subject as I still don’t feel I know enough about it to take a stance, nevertheless, it does seem that most Chileans my age have been fed their opinions from their parents and need no other authority in which to make up their minds.
However, I don’t wish to generalise and feel the need to state that I have met many Chileans who do not feel the need to comment on their class or their stance on Pinochet, although one does have to wonder if that has more to do with the fact that their not upper class than anything else.
As far as living like a student goes, Santiago is hugely expensive, I was secretly hoping that once I’d paid for my plane ticket and my visa my student loan would be safe. Unsurprisingly, as with the rest of my presuppositions of what to expect in Chile, I was wrong and I’m finding that most commodities, rent, food, clothes,
gym membership and public transport are almost equivalent, even in some cases more expensive, than England.
However, the paseo a la playa last week, a semestral trip organised by “la católica” the nickname of pontificia Universidad católica de Chile, definitely improved matters. Leaving the city for the first time in 4 weeks and actually seeing green was a big relief, I had no idea how much of a country bumpkin I was, and being near the sea was amazing.
You never know, with eleven months still to go on the continent I could grow to love it but for now I remain indifferent, and challenge anyone who has been here for the same duration of time as I have to say, with conviction, that they’re having the time of their lives.
I’ll keep you posted x
Advertisement
Tot: 0.067s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 9; qc: 49; dbt: 0.037s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb