Santiago --- Walking Tour

I woke up much later than expected, around 9am. I woke up and went to the common room in the hostel where there was free breakfast. I breakfast included toast, cereal, milk, and tea. What more could you ask for. This was the first hostel I stayed in that fed you, which made me very excited.

While I was eating breakfast I met a girl from the United States. She had just arrived in Santiago from the States for a new job with the Chilean government. She was going to work with the students in Calama, Chile, a city very close to San Pedro de Atacama, where I had visited early. She explained to me that as Chile expands its influence and economy, English is beginning to be a more and more important language for trade and other items. The Chilean government asked her to come to Chile for a year to help teach students English. She is getting paid a meager wage, but enough to live on. Her housing, room, and board are all included. She has also had quite a life. She has just up and left her home often to travel the world. She is quite independent. I asked her what she was doing for the day, and she said that she was going to do a walking tour of Santiago, which is included in the South America on a Shoestring book that we both had. I actually had been thinking about doing that as well, so we decided that it was better to go and complete the walking tour together.

We both went to take showers and get ready for the day and we left the hostel probably around 11 or 12. We took the metro, a subway like train that provides a lot of the transportation to the city of Santiago. To use the transit system in Santiago, you must buy a Bip! Card, which holds a value that slowly deducts as you use the mass transit. The card costs about $2000 pesos, which is about $4 dollars. Strangely enough the symbol for pesos in Chile is also the symbol for US dollars. You can tell the price difference because the Chilean price is obviously much higher.

After we bought our Bip! card we were off to the beginning of the walking tour at the Santa Lucia metro stop. We first visited the Biblioteca National, or National Library. The building serves mostly as the National Archives of Chile. It really wasn't that interesting. It was a cool building and all, but there really wasn't much to see.

After the library, we walked up to Cerro Santa Lucia. This is a park in the heart of the city that was built on a hill that actually is more like a mountain. It was very pretty, there were lots of fountains, statues, and plants to look at. The top had a decent view of Santiago and the surrounding mountains.

Let me take a moment to discuss the pollution and the mountains in Santiago. It is truly magnificent to wake up to the Andes Mountain range literally surrounding your city as a natural protection. The sad part is that the view is smudged by the crazy amount of pollution commuters, buses, and basic daily life makes in Santiago. Santiago, like other great cities of the world, including Mexico City, is situated literally in a bowl of the Andes Mountains. This has provided natural protection for Chile's capital, but today it poses a serious ecological and health risk to its residence. Winds cannot reach the metropolitan area of Santiago to push away the air pollution, thus you are left with an ungodly amount of smog, which actually has decreased in recent years according to many of the locals. This decrease can primarily be attributed to the cities aggressive efforts to change mass transit in Santiago to be more ecologically friendly. I was actually told to take a picture of the mountains if I ever saw them because it was so rare, however, I have seen the mountains everyday I have been here.

Going back to the walking tour, this park, Cerro Santa Lucia, is quite the park. It is beautiful yes, but also because of the amount of PDA, public displays of affection, you see by the youngsters in the park. Chile tends to be a very conservative country in the grand scheme of things. This is odd because in the short time I have been here I have seen signs that say PORNO,advertising for a play, see youngsters making out, or gays holding hands. Much more liberal then old New Prague or Urbana in the states. The story on the PDA is this conservatism. Parents don't allow their children to bring their boyfriend or girlfriend home to chill, sleep over, or make out on the couch... so where do they go... the streets. I don't know which is worse. Literally, you can see some touching that can't be considered rated G, PG-13 or R.

After the park, we walked to the Plaza de Armas, as I said before, every city in South America has one. This plaza was recently restored and it was very nice. There were many benches and palm trees to relax the day away. There were also lots of painters who would paint your picture or take a picture that you have and paint it on canvas, for relatively cheap. It was very cool. The Plaza also was home to the Cathedral, which was quite impressive. The thing that I found most impressive was that at the back of the church you can see the nativity scene for Christmas time. This nativity scene is entirely carved out of wood and was extremely impressive.

After the plaza, we walked to see the Ex-Congreso National, which was the former home to the Chilean Congress before Pinochet's dictatorship. It is closed to the public and basically is a very nice looking old building. I have read online that on special occasions it is open for tours, so perhaps in the future, I will get to go inside. Across from the Ex-Congreso, you can see the Tribunales de Justicia or the law courts. Chile has a court system and most, if not all of the courts are based in this building.

After this area of the city, we continued to the Palacio de la Moneda. This is the Presidential Palace of Chile. La Moneda means mint and this building use to coin the Chilean currency. It first became the home of the President in 1845. It did not stay the presidential palace forever. When Pinochet took power the palace was hit by a bomb and the burning building served as a historic symbol for the take over of the neo-liberal regime. The Chilean President at the time Allende supposedly killed himself in the palace before the military took power.

Again, I am going to digress, to truly understand Chile, you must understand its Politics. Like most countries, except for the United States, politics is a vital pastime. Everyone enjoys to talk about politics and everyone has an opinion. Like the US however, either you are on the right or you are on the left. The symbols of the sides are not elephants and donkeys, but instead Pinochet and Allende. If you talk to someone who leans to the right, Pinochet is a hero and Allende is the enemy. If you talk to someone who leans to the left, Pinochet is the enemy and Allende is the hero. I actually, think that this is too complicated to explain in this post, so I am going to write another post specifically on the politics of Chile, don't worry it will probably be miles long. I am currently reading a book called Politics in Chile and everyone I meet, I talk about politics with them, so I will try to have unbiased, resourceful, and interesting comments about it.

The palace was very, very, very fun for a political science nerd like me. As we were looking at the palace, up pulls a few different cars with flags flying from them. We got closer and it was really neat to see these motorcades come into the palace. We talked to the guards who informed up of what was going on. The guard said that many ambassadors from many nations were coming to sign a free trade agreement, however when I later looked up on the Presidential website the activities of the President, it said that she was actually giving the credentials to the ambassadors of various countries on that day. The guards, did not know what what going on, another reason to do your homework and not trust random strangers. It was really cool, and we walked along side the Palace only to find a military marching band. It was very neat. To see this, they also marched into the palace, I assume for the credentials ceremony. This ceremony is very important for ambassadors of other countries and tends to be very ritualistic.

After the palace, we were decided that it was time to start heading back to the hostel. We stopped at the grocery store and picked up supplies for dinner. We bought spaghetti, sauce, cheese, and a couple bottles of wine. We took the metro back to the hostel. We basically, just chilled out with many of the people in the hostel, most from the UK, and later we made dinner and drank the wine. It was a really good time. I ended up going to bed fairly early because I needed to get up for my orientation the next day.