Santiago

It was nice to be back in the big city again – this time, it was Santiago, capital of Chile. We had made it halfway up Chile, through glaciers, fjords, backwater islands and unexpected rainforests, and now it was time to kick back and relax for awhile with some creature comforts. We had already booked a B&B, so jumped on the metro and made our way across town to Manuel Montt station in the Providencia neighborhood. Santiago was pretty dead – not many people around at all. Maybe it was because it was still the end of February, and that is when Chileans are on holiday!

The weather was awesome, but we could not really see the mountains around Santiago because of the buildings and the smog, which gets really bad in the summer, because the wind is prevented by the Andes. My first impression of Santiago was that it looked clean, and had all the restaurants and shops we knew and loved, and so I was just pleased we had options again!

This was Francesca’s second time in Santiago, after her previous internship in 2011. We planned on visiting some of her old stomping grounds later, but the first thing we decided to do, was to visit Hard Rock Café and get Francesca’s uncle a Hard Rock pin – something we have been doing in all the cities we can find one (Francesca has been collecting pins for her uncle for years!). We scoped out the cinema at the mall where the restaurant was located (Mall Costanera is the largest in South America, and is part of the Costanera Complex which boasts the largest building in the continent, the Gran Torre Santiago).

We came back the next day and watched a comedy film called Last Vegas, which was pretty formulaic but also pretty funny. This was a very nice day, which was our Valentine’s Day and our two year anniversary of being together rolled into one! The next few days I had sent a package back home to Francesca’s Mom’s house, and we got our laundry done – very productive!

Over the first few days we had been organizing a kind of sub-let with a couchsurfer who was going on holiday to Argentina for six weeks. We decided to rent his room in the South of the city, as it was easier and cheaper than couchsurfing proper, and getting hotel rooms, respectively. For our last few days in the Providencia neighborhood, we decided to go to some museums in the area. Museo Ralli was in the same area that Francesca stayed the last time she was in Santiago.

The Ralli museums are a chain of art museums dedicated to all things Latin American. The first was located in Punta del Este in 1987 in Uruguay, but as we were there in winter, it was closed. Luckily, the one in Santiago was open, if not for only half hour more, so we zoomed around it at top speed. The quality of the art was very impressive, and the highlight (for some), were some Dali copper statues. My favorite was a copy of the Rene Magritte painting, Le fils de l’homme (The son of man) – the famous one with the suited man and the apple.

After the mad dash around the art gallery (we recommend at least an hour for this one), we tried for the museo de la moda, or fashion museum, but it is under renovation until May 2014! Not sure why it takes museums in South America so long to sort their lives out! We made our way to another Santiago mall, the Arauco mall where we had a PF Chang’s Chinese meal – delicious, but we might need to go on a diet soon!

We walked back towards the metro station Escuela Militar, named for the military school nearby. We walked down a few more side roads and found the hostel were Francesca stayed. It was nice to see where she stayed the year before we got together, and we could see through the window into her old room. Cool!

On Friday the 7th we moved into our new place down in the Santa Isabel barrio. This was near yet another mall, but we decided to go head into Santiago itself rather than just tour Santiago’s malls! We first went to the metro station called Cumming (huh?) and the first museum we tried to visit we found out it had moved. The Museo de Arte Popular Americano is now located across town in the Centro Cultural Metropolitano Gabriela Mistral, so we made our way to the Quinta Normal region.

Quinta Normal is the museum district, although Santiago’s main attractions are pretty much all museums. The district is named after the park around which are located all of the main tourist sites. The park was built to house numerous greenhouses that were to hold foreign plants and trees, and now the park has a boating pond, plenty of well-kept gardens and an epidemic of young Chileans making out all over the place. The first place we went to was the Artequin museum, an interactive art museum, housed in the Paris Pavilion – a 19th Century building that was dismantled in Paris and presented to Chile as a gift. Since 1894 it has housed numerous different exhibitions at Quinta Normal.

The museum is really a museum for kids – it has lots of photos of the most recognizable paintings of all time, with a little info on each one. It also has interactive installations which we found to be quite fun –including a Wii-style dance-off game where you have to copy the African dancers on the screen as cameras watch. The game rates each person and gives them points for following the dances closely. Francesca beat me!

We were both getting quite hungry, so we headed into the park to look for food. We came across another museum on our list, the Train Museum (Museo Ferroviario), but as it was all outside, and we could see most of it from where we were, we decided to save the money.

The same for the Museo de Ciencias y Technologia, or science and tech museum. It looked a bit rubbish and had no information in English so we gave it a miss. We were ending up saving quite a bit of money…

We made our way to the large Basilica of Lourdes which is next to the park. We found a little café were we ordered some chicken an rice and a Chilean dish called Pastel de Choclo. A pastel dish is a typical dish from Spain or Portugal, and Choclo is the Quechuan word for tender corn. It was nice if you like corn, and inside they put one ingredient of beef, chicken, raisins, olives or egg. We got a whole chicken leg, bone included! Weird.

The Basilica is a huge Catholic church that was built in the 1930’s and we managed to blag our way in even though it was closed. The inside was large, but unimpressive. Francesca like the roman and neo-Byzantine style, and I have to admit the stain glass windows were pretty cool. The guy nearly had a heart attack when we tried to get into the garden (it was overgrown and messy), so we left.

Opposite the large-scale church is a full-scale model of the Lourdes Grotto in France. The original grotto is supposedly where Saint Bernadette saw visions, and nowadays pilgrims travel from all over the world to experience the ‘healing powers’ of the grotto. Nowadays there are many of these models of the grotto all around the world and most are in the US. I guess the ‘miracles’ are spreading, but I recommend going to the doctor if you are ill.

The grotto was quite amusing anyway as it was so plastic and tacky. We did not  hang around too long. It had been a long day so we hung around in the park for another half hour or so, and had a hotdog (Chile’s specialty), and then went back to our new home on the metro.

The next day, the 8th March, we hoped we would get better luck with things being open, and we joined a free (i.e. tips-based) walking tour. Spicychile is a company that operates in Chile and came fairly well recommended on tripadvisor. Our tour started in the Republica district which in the 19th Century used to be an area frequented by prostitutes and thieves. To tidy up the area, the National Gratitude Church was built there in 1883. Named in gratitude to the soldiers who fought Peru and Bolivia in the War of the Pacific, the church was taken over by the Salesian order some years later.

We moved a few blocks along to the Concha y Toro neighborhood. This barrio is very small but was one of the wealthiest in Santiago at the time. It was named after the Concho y Toro family who lived there. When the wife died (she was French), old man Concha y Toro decided to replicate her favorite neighborhood in France right there in Santiago. This might or might not be true, but the research I did after the tour showed that the family were not miner’s as we were told, but vineyard owner’s and winemakers.

Either way, we saw the house, or palacio, the family used to live in, and wandered a bit further onto the Brazil barrio. This area is a big draw for tourists who want to see the ‘real’ Santiago, but we found it to be broken down, and dumpy. back in the 18th Century this was one of the more wealthier neighborhoods alongside the Concho y Toro area, but it had really let itself go when we were there! The neo-classical Spanish houses and the neo-Gothic Basilica del Salvador (which our guide misnamed as the Basilica San Pablo) were all badly damaged in the 1985 and 2010 earthquakes. You cannot go into the church now as it is too dangerous – I would not even walk next to it to be honest.

The area is now home to a couple of Universities giving it a young people feel. Sitting on Plaza Brazil in the middle of the neighborhood, all we could smell was dog poo. We did see a sign with ‘justice for Victor Jara’ written on it – the guide explained that Victor was a folk singer who was killed by the Pinochet regime in 1973 for his membership in the Communist Party.

It was at the plaza that we realized we were on a terrible walking tour, and when the tour stopped after 45 minutes for a 15 minute break, which stretched to 40 minutes, we ditched it quietly. We finished the rest of the tour on our own using the 3G on our cell.

We made our way a few blocks to the next stop on the tour, called Plaza Yungay, which was actually a rural area until 1835. The area was named after a decisive victory over a Bolivian-Peruvian alliance during the War of the Confederation and there is a monument in the middle of Plaza Yungay dedicated to the unknown soldiers who died there. Nearby, we visited the Peluqueria Francesa, or French hairdresser, which has been open since 1868 and is kept to look old and traditional, but they looked like they used common modern electric razors to me! We took a look around at the old stuff they had – it was fun to see the pictures of old Hollywood actors like Jimmy Dean alongside old hairdressing equipment.

We next made our way to the Museo de la Educación Gabriela Mistral, which I did not find particularly interesting as there was zero information in English and no-one around to ask questions to. We did get to measure our own height on the measuring thing that they used to use at the school there, though. I’m 5’7” and Francesca is 5’3”.

I looked it up later and found out that Gabriella Mistral was a Chilean poet, and the only woman so far to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature from South America. She also worked as a teacher and taught Pablo Neruda, who is a world famous Chilean poet.

We went into the Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos next – a museum dedicated to the memory of the people who were brutalized or killed during the dictatorship of 1973-1990. The period was pretty standard for a South American country – a right wing government forcibly taking over a country, ostensibly to oust dangerous leftist radicals, and then implementing a plan of repression, censorship and brutality. What stood out most from this museum was the length of time that this went on, and how polarized political opinion still is in the country. Many still think that Pinochet, the main junta leader, was a great man who was excellent for the country’s economy. In reality he presided over the disappearances of thousands of his countrymen, yet the country kept him on as military Commander-in-Chief until 1998.

The museum highlighted the work of the families, victims and human rights organizations including various Truth Commissions to bring justice for the people affected. The audio guide was in English so we managed to get quite a lot out of the museum, including several shocking stories about children who disappeared, leftist rebel groups who fought the junta through a campaign of terrorism and how the national football stadium was the largest detention camp of political prisoners. Popular folk musician and communist Victor Jara was killed there.

The junta took power on the 11th September 1973 by surrounding then-President Salvador Allende’s palace and ordering him to surrender. When he refused planes bombed the building and soldier’s began rounding up the workers from the government. Allende allegedly shot himself with a gun given to him by his comrade in Communism, Fidel Castro, but many think he was the first person to be murdered.

Immediately the junta put a curfew into place which lasted 15 of the 17 years they were in power. The investigations that followed the junta when they left power saw Pinochet arrested in 2004 but he died before he ever stood trial. Many supporters say that he presided over the most economically successful period in Chile’s history, although there is still fierce debate on both sides as to how much the junta’s policies had to do with this. What is certain is that the gap between rich and poor was massively widened, and rumors abound that Pinochet squirrelled away $US28 million somewhere – but this was never proven.

One major thing we learnt about was Operation Condor, which was a campaign of political repression against leftists which was organized and aided by all the right-wing dictatorships of South America, including Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina – all the countries we had already visited. All of these military dictatorships were responsible for an estimated 50,000 people killed, 30,000 disappeared (in Chile they used to throw them in the ocean tied to railway spikes) and many more imprisoned and tortured. Files found at a Paraguayan police station have shown that most of these countries’ intelligence agencies co-operated in assassinations and disappearances – killing each other’s enemies and helping fabricate stories about how the leftist terror groups were all to blame.

In Chile, they even fabricated a Marxist plot to take over the country called Plan Z. This was completely made up by the junta to justify their repressive and illegal actions. People were placed on a list that meant they were not allowed to leave the country – they simply disappeared. Those who had escaped already were stripped of their citizenship or simply not allowed to return, against Human Rights Conventions which Chile had signed up to.

International condemnation followed, and Pinochet was forced to hold a referendum to ratify his Constitution in 1980. He got the ratification he needed, and it was to be another 8 years before another referendum was held. This one, he lost, and democracy only followed in 1990. It is incredible to think that it was so recent, and for so long.

The museum was definitely an eye-opener, and is definitely recommended, even though the story is painfully familiar having visited the other South American countries. Let’s hope no-one let’s these countries fall back into the horrors of this past, and that the perpetrators are bought to justice.

We needed something to lighten us up, so we went and got some food, and headed over to the Natural History Museum. One of the biologists who worked there was available to tour us around, so we got a nice tour in which all the displays were explained to us.

The museum was divided into the different regions of Chile, many of which we had already been to and so understood very well, including a section on the Chaiten volcano, the Valdivian rainforests of the South (caused by the Mediterranean climate shared with countries around 40 degrees North and 40 degrees South), and the glaciers. My favorite object was a piece of mylodon’s fur – the real fur – that survived for thousands of years! Amazing! Francesca liked an Incan mummy they had (they were fond of child sacrifices!).

A few times we saw an open-lab (one you can see in, where someone is working). The first a girl was doing taxidermy on a little pudu deer, and the second one had a guy dusting neck bones from a plesiosaur! It was cool to see them working on the objects that would eventually end up in the museum.

The most interesting stuff we learnt, though, was about the Chilean Antarctic. There are only two flowering plants on the whole continent, called Antarctic pearlwort and Antarctic hairgrass. The museum also had a picture of the only native insect – the Belgica antarctica – a flightless midge. I wonder if one day we will see them there?

In the main room was a whale skeleton and some cool fossils – even a femur of a Stegomastodon (a prehistoric elephant) which had the marks of a human hunt on it – where the spears and arrows had hit. A stuffed giant anteater was pretty awesome, but we still want to see one a bit closer than the one we saw in Brazil.

We were pretty tired by this time, so we decided to head back to our place in the South. The next day we headed back to Quinta Normal where we finished off what we did not see in the Memorial Museum and then headed over to the Santiago General Cemetery. Sounds morbid, but there are some amazing tombs there, done in all different styles, including ancient Egyptian, classic Roman and Greek, and even Incan. We walked around for quite a while in the heat before we stumbled on President Allende’s family tomb, which now has a place of honor (he was the president toppled by the coup). We eventually found a plot called simply Plot 29, after the old system of numbering they used to use. This plot was where a group of murdered people were found riddled with bullet holes after the junta had them killed. Nearby was Victor Jara’s grave – dedicated in memorial to victory – presumably against state sponsored terrorism, and fascism. A memorial wall has even been erected naming all of the disappeared and murdered, with their tombs next to the wall. This was built in 1994, while the cemetery itself was founded by Bernardo O’Higgins himself – Chile’s founding father.

It is a shame, however, that the cemetery was not treated with the level of respect that all of those tombs deserve. The amount of trash everywhere was a disgrace. The fact that there were not many signs and everything was really spaced out did not matter that much, but to have bottles of plastic, bags, cigarette butts and other crap all over people’s graves was pretty awful.

We headed back home, and had some food, and the next day we rested up at home and watched a movie. I decided I would write a walking tour for Francesca, and on the 11th March we went out in the morning to go on it! I called it Colin’s Food Tour of Santiago…