Santiago de Chile: Even the dogs are fat

We arrived in Chile on Tuesday morning after a 14-hour flight. Whereas flying on US airlines is getting more and more painful with ever shrinking space and reduced padding, our LAN plane was new, spacious and comfortable. Meals were served with metal knives and forks, as if we were adults rather than potential terrorists. The TVs worked. And this was the third world?

If good service in economy class was enough to be suspicious, the surreal made an appearance by large numbers of Japanese passengers on the plane, many wearing surgical masks. Either this was a planned hijack by Japanese medical terrorists or they were simply hyper-germophobes, who had never been kissed.

I find that taxi trips from the airport tend to be instructional, as they provide opportunities to see areas and living conditions that are not included in any travel guides. As a rule, airports are located in poorer areas, as the middle class and the rich avoid the constant noise of planes landing and taking off.

The road from the airport parallels the Mapocho river which divides Santiago. The river itself was flanked by shacks built from scavenged boards, pieces of metal and the debris of the city. What was surprising was not the poverty, but the fact that the band of poverty was relatively narrow. In Mexico, for example, the airport is surround by miles and miles of slums amid the airborne dust of a dead lake.

The relative wealth of modern Chile is shown more by what you don’t see. In the four days that we have been in Santiago, we have seen only one woman begging and only a few homeless people living on the streets. In Santiago, even the street dogs are fat.

In Mexico, Guatemala, and to a lesser degree Ecuador, there are small armies of fire eaters, vendors, clowns, hawkers, windshield washers, street performers and beggars who descend upon drivers trapped, waiting for the light to change. This type of informal economy has spread to Chile as well, but in far fewer numbers than in other Latin countries. Today, we saw a three piece jazz band (including a tuba player) playing for the captive audience. Of course, they only have to know part of one song to be played quickly before the light changes.

There are of course economic problems in Chile. While Chile is the richest Latin American country, it has a poverty rate of about 14.4%. This is yet another area where the USA is number one, as our poverty rate is 14.5%. We should feel proud. Chile does beat us, however, in terms of income inequality, but we are working hard to catch up them in that statistic as well.

It is summer here, comparable to late August back home. Almost every street has cafes and restaurants whose tables spread out onto the wide sidewalks. As many of you know, Chile has great wines and good food, and all of Chile seems to be out enjoying both with their friends and families during the warm days and nights.

The guidebooks say that the Santiago nightlife has really picked up in the last few years, but we would be the last people to be able to tell you about that. We were never into the night life, even when we still had life at night. The closest we got to the fast lane is when Toni had to go to a pharmacy to buy some bandages. She asked the doorman where to go and he directed her to a shop that was a combination pharmacy and sex shop. Toni said that the sex shop was really something, complete with electrodes for one’s nipples. (Absolutely shocking, I say!)

I can only think that the strange combination of pharmacy and sex has something to do with the Fifty Shades of Grey sensation. There are a lot of ads for the movie here as well as the States. Evidently, sadomasochism is not as easy as it looks.

We have been following our normal routing here, visiting graveyards, museums, and looking at the various neighborhoods. The first day we went to the Cementerio General, as a part of Toni’s graveyard series. As with Ecuador, most of the cemetery was comprised of two and three-story blocks of crypts for the regular folks and family tombs for the families of the wealthy. By chance we came across the graveyard of Violeta Parra, a brilliant singer in the folkloric tradition and the sister of one of my favorite poets, Nicanor Parra.  I will try to include a link to her music when I post this.

The other important site was the memorial to Salvador Allende, the president of Chile who was overthrown by the military coupe in 1973 and to the thousands of students, teachers, labor leaders and others who were murdered and “disappeared” by the military. While we were there, many people visited the site in homage to Chile’s disappeared. The role the US and President Nixon played in this was not one of America’s shining moments.

We also visited the Museum of Pre-Columbian Art, which had a very small collection of pots, textiles and some carvings. Half of the collection was pre-Columbian art from outside Chile, put there to provide a context for the Chilean art. While the Inca empire stretched down to where Santiago is today, there were not the high cultures and dense populations of pre-Hispanic Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. Indeed, the single gallery to pre-Hispanic Chile (entitled Chile before Chile), would not have filled up even the smallest room in the Mexican Anthropology Museum.

Needless to say, the conflict between Indian and Hispanic cultures and art were not the cultural nexus and driving force that it has been in Mexico. As I understand, more than 60% of all Chilenos are mestizos, that is of mixed Indian and Spanish heritage, but the culture seems to be almost completely Spanish and European. There is only one sizeable Indian group, the Mapuches, who live in the south central part of Chile.

While the Spanish European culture of Chile may have allowed an easier transition to the modern era, I do miss the fusion and passion of Mexico as expressed in its art and folk art. Four days as a tourist is of course far too short of a time to understand much less judge a country.

The out welling of art that did impress us was to be found on the streets, rather than the galleries and art museums that we visited. In the Bellavista district of Santiago, artists came together to paint murals on many of the houses. Some were great, others less so, but all spoke to the power of living art. I will include some of Toni’s shots of the buildings so you can judge for yourselves, but I love the energy. I understand that Valparaiso, our next stop, also is full of murals and outdoor art.

Tomorrow we are traveling to Valpo, as it is called by its residents. In addition to its outdoor art and colorful houses perched on winding streets on the side of steep hills, it has another Pablo Neruda House/Museum, so I will be in fat city, as it were.

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