Santiago, Chile: Quick Sketch
I landed in Santiago 12 hours ago. That isn’t enough time to get to know a place, but was enough time to accomplish the following:
- realize just how bad my Spanish has become
- make my first friend on this adventure
- go on a 4-hour, 7-mile walking tour to get my bearings
- eat some mostly terrible Chilean food and some mostly fantastic ice cream
- have some thoughts that will become themes of this trip, I’m sure, but for now are just questions (of the Eileen Pollack, go-on-a-road-trip-to-figure-them-out variety, so let’s all start taking notes now)
- why don’t Americans see more of the world / how does that impact our country as a whole / would we be better if we did?
- how does growing up in a dictatorship / a politically unstable and violent environment (one where trust in government / institutions is even lower than in a Trump presidency) change people’s ideas of civic engagement? of citizenship? of agency? / how does that compare to my experience of America in 2018 and to being a young person, especially, there?
- related—lots of questions about race, including:
- What is going on with Chileans’ relationship with its indigenous people (especially the Mapuche)? How is it influenced by propaganda, imperialism, and corruption?
- Why are there no people of color here? I was shocked by how few black / Asian / indigenous people I saw today (recognizing that 1. my exposure is tiny and 2. making assumptions about race via quick visual judgements is at best, imperfect and at worst, offensive). Is there something about Chile, or about South America, that discourages diversity? Is it geographical location? Industry? Religion? Am I crazy and this isn’t a thing at all?
- have some questions / ideas that probably won’t become themes but are entertaining to me right now as I execute against my hour-a-day writing commitment while exhausted and trying hard to not bang my head on the ceiling of my hostel, which is just a scant three centimeters above the apex of my skull:
- Story idea: a profile of Santiago from the perspective of one of the city’s MANY MANY stray dogs. Investigate the weird and ironic combination of selfishness / excess / government bureaucracy that results in tons of people abandoning their dogs (the only deterrent the government sponsors is a fine if you’re caught in the actual act of abandoning an animal…hard to enforce, and with, from what I can find from a quick Google of Santiago’s all-Spanish chamber of commerce website, no commiserate leash or sterilization laws) with the warmth / generosity / government bureaucracy that results in whole neighborhoods adopting the dogs as their own — getting them clothes and setting out water bowls and building them dog houses for when it rains and graffitiing caricatures of them in alleyways and under bridges
- Investigation idea: read a Pablo Neruda poem a day out loud to someone in my life and capture their reactions; write a piece about it, but have every other paragraph be about the other things Neruda became (in)famous for—his affairs and corruption—and write drafts of what current corrupt or adulterous politicians’ poetry
- Question: who do I become when I can be anyone? I know no one on this continent, basically, and could present as any version of myself with no risk of being called out. But I found myself being myself today (everything I said I would’ve done at home or at work or with my friends), with the exception of a few sentences of truly butchered Spanish (which had me more flustered / embarrassed than I would normally be). But how will that evolve over the next few months? Which parts of my personality will come front-and-center, which new parts will I discover, which parts will I let fade away, which parts will I actively attempt to get rid of, and will I be successful?
I’ll walk you through my day, quickly, and then I’ll go to bed. Not every daily writing session will end in a post—I hope not, anyways, because I’d like to generally present thoughts that are better formed, better crafted, and better researched than these ones—but considering the novelty of the situation + your peak curiosity, I figure I’ll get something out that will make both of us feel better, me for having captured it and you for knowing I’m alive and well. Which I am. Whee!
The flight from Atlanta to Santiago was fine. I sat next to a Ukrainian-American woman named Olga who had was heading back to Santiago, where she had been living for the last year and a half as she studied bass at a musical school / lived in a hostel / taught English to pay her bills, after spending the holidays with her family in California. She was lovely—she shared her mother’s persimmons with me while we discussed stereotypes of Latin men, went over the most dangerous areas in Santiago for a woman to walk alone at night, and strategized how she could sneak her maple syrup past customs (apparently, South America doesn’t have maple syrup—the Spanish translation is “miel,” or honey, which isn’t allowed into Chile). Neither she nor I slept well, but we both did catch two full movies and succeeded in coaxing extra snacks from the flight attendants, so we’ll call it a wash.
The attendants had narrated the flight in both English and Spanish, and I had understood maybe 30% of what they were saying, but I attributed the missed majority to the fact that the woman reading safety instructions en español had a thick Atlanta accent and didn’t seem to understand the concept of accented syllables. Then I walked up to the immigration official at the Santiago airport and realized that, in fact, my Spanish is absolute basura (y’all, that means trash) right now.
I had to ask her to slow down twice, just to understand her basic questions around my nationality and intent, and could barely communicate that I was an American who didn’t plan to spend more than a month or so in Chile.
It was so frustrating. Completely deserved, of course—how ridiculous of me to think that I could not speak Spanish for 6 years, barring obnoxious drunk exchanges with friends, and expect to be just as fluent as I was when I last lived in a Spanish-speaking country—but frustrating. I have to figure out what to do about it, because I can’t live in a world where I can only ask for the check by signaling in the air with a wholly American-identifying flick of the wrist. I might sign up for some classes in the next couple of weeks, particularly once I get out of Chile (it is so expensive here!). We’ll start with regular immersion, though.
After checking into my hostel, I ran out to meet up with Siobhan, an Irish woman I’d connected with on a private Facebook group for solo female travelers in Santiago (isn’t the Internet the most wonderful place?). We had planned to do a walking tour of Santiago together, and that morning, had decided to grab lunch ahead of time, too.
How fun it is to meet new people! I kind of cheated with Siobhan, having discovered her on the Internet and befriended each other over our freakishly (more on this later) similar travel plans (she, too, is in her mid-20s and doing a 6-month jaunt around South America that she only plans in 2-week increments; our only real difference is that she started 3 months before me and is already halfway through, having come to Chile post Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia), but it was still so lovely to get to know someone new over a menu del día (though, as discussed, my Spanish is trash and hers isn’t much better so neither of us really knew what we were ordering, and we ended up with a dumpling/ravioli beef pasta combo that I wouldn’t particularly recommend).
The tour began at the Cathedral, in the Plaza de Armas. I won’t walk through everything we learned here—I want to do some more exploration and research myself—but it was an incredibly fruitful four hours. We covered Downtown, Lastarria, Barrio Brasil, and Bellavista, and while my mental map of Santiago barrios is still wildly underdeveloped in relationship to Manhattan, I’m getting there (it helps that it’s much smaller). Our guide was great and let us ask him lots of questions, though his responses to my inquires about some of the political issues he was educating us on—indigenous rights, what people really thought of Allende, etc—were more self-interested than I expected. More on this later…it’s part of what prompted my questions above, and I need to do some more research / thinking on the subject.
Siobhan and I ended our tour in front of the Neruda house and made plans to visit it after hiking through Santiago’s biggest public park, San Cristóbel, tomorrow. We went back to a restaurant in Bellavista we had passed earlier in the day and ordered ourselves plates of Chilean classics—hers a cold salad and mine a hot empanada (not the best accompaniment to an 80-degree evening, but it was my first dinner in Chile and I was excited to eat something so highly hyped). I sat there, beef juices dripping down my chin as I picked out the whole olives studded into my meal (leaving the hardboiled egg, the raisins, and the pickles, because I’m open-minded like that), thinking of how many different versions of meat-and-pastry the world has and how many I’ll get to eat in my lifetime (what a gift!). Whether it’s meticulously constructed beef wellington, evenly creased dumplings, soft pierogi, buttery-crusted pasties, cardboard-enveloped Hot Pockets…I want to make a passport of just dishes like this and start collecting stamps.
After dinner, we strolled (read: stumbled, clutching our too-full bellies) around Bellavista until we found an ice cream shop. We scanned rows of shiny gelato, and my Spanish was good enough to recognize the best flavor they had when I saw it: pepino – sauvignon blanc – menta. Cucumber – (you don’t need me to translate that one) – mint. YES.
More later. I’m so happy to be here.
PS: I want to do regular shoutouts to express my gratitude for the awesome people in my life who make me better on the regular—here’s the first set:
- Paul—thank you for reminding me that everyone I met here would have had a different experience of the world than I did (different political history, different trust of government). I saw it live today and am looking forward to understanding it better.
- Mal—thank you for telling me to write everything down. I didn’t carry a notebook with me today and was scrawling notes on my hands, ignoring my guide in order to furiously type them into my phone, etc. The book comes with me tomorrow.
- AC—thank you for my pack. It’s my new best friend, even though I’m not used to carrying it yet and have a huge knot in my shoulder from not distributing the weight well enough. We’ll get it right next time. 🙂
1 Comment
Leave your reply.