Likes and Dislikes

The other day Amy was walking home and she spotted another silver Mitsubishi SUV that looked almost identical to the one she drives at home.  She turned to me and said that it made her actually long to touch the seats in her truck again.  Now I know that sounds a little overly emotional, but two months away is a long time, so it got me thinking about the things I like and do not like here in Chile.  Here is what I am sure is an abbrevated list of both.

LIKES

Weather - Today it is 76 for the high.  The Chileans wore warm hats to work.  To be fair it is cooler in the morning (low 50´s) but this place really does have outstanding weather.  It gets warm in the summer, which we are heading into, but the beach is 1.5 hours by car and the mountains are even closer if you need to cool off a bit.  And there is virtually no humidity.

Wine - I will do a longer post on this later, but to give you some sense of the price/quality, it is sometimes very difficult to find wines on menus that cost more than 30 dollars at restaurants.  There are dozens of bottles, good bottles, available for less than 10 bucks in the stores.  It is almost all Chilean with a sprinkling of Argentinian and Spainish wines as well.

Seafood - When you have nearly 2500 miles of coast and the Antarctic current flowing north you have a lot of good fish and seafood.  Machas, Congrio, Reineta, Corvina, Locos........and that doesn´t count the farmed salmon or trout that are all over the place.

The Subway - Last Friday´s debacle not withstanding, it is clean, runs regularly, and is about a $1.10 a ride.  And watching George stare out the window while we are traveling and learning the stops makes it even better.

Ethnic Food - with good seafood the sushi is very reasonable and high quality.  There are also a ton of Peruvian places that serve great ceviche and seafood as well.  Italian food is also very good here.  We are heading South to try the German places later next week.

Quality of Life - Chile is safe, predictable (things actually work!) and pleasant.  It has virtually all of the amenities we have at home.

Our Friends - we have made a lot of wonderful Chilean friends (as well as ex-pats) who have been warm, welcoming and generous in the way they pour the wine :)

No place is perfect............

DISLIKES

Pollution - Santiago is in a bowl and has six million people and a lot of cars.  It is not as bad as Mexico City, but it can get bad and we are currently in the dry season which means it really doesn´t get washed away that much.  I´ve experienced worse, but it´s not great.

Apartment Life - It has been too long since I lived in an apartment with neighbors making noise above and below me, sometimes late into the evening.  Living in the relative quiet of Arden has spoiled me.  Oh, and the space is not exactly what we are used to either.

Sports - I like soccer, don´t get me wrong, but last weekend Amy and I went to the only bar in Santiago that has NFL Sunday Ticket.  It was needed.

Coffee (or lack thereof) - it is awful and that which is less awful is very, very expensive.

When 6 million people lose their transit system

This post could otherwise be entitled, a few metro lines go down, and chaos ensues.  Around 7:00 this morning an electrical shortage downed large sections of three of the five metro lines in Santiago.  The result was a city full of people left scrambling to find other means of getting to work.  As of 4 pm this afternoon there are still 24 stations closed and hundreds of thousands of folks facing long and unpleasant commutes home.

In many cities around the world, especially in the U.S., finding alternative transportation would be annoying, but certainly not chaotic.  In Santiago, however, a 2007 major over-haul of the transit system occurred, which essentially outlawed an abundance of private buses (known as "micros) that were operating simultaneously with the public options.  The private buses posed some serious pedestrian-safety flaws that needed to be addressed, but otherwise it offered a popular, efficient and profitable method of transportation.  Under the new system, the Chilean government expanded the metro capacity, but drastically limited the convenient "point to point" bus service.  With fewer transportation alternatives, the metros are now overcrowded with commuters, who are then left without any reasonable mode of transportation in the event of a metro malfunction.    

An economist friend of ours, who has been a frequent visitor to Santiago for over a decade, offered an interesting and much more thorough perspective of this transformation in 2008:  http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2008/Mungerbus.html  His article also offers some great insights into the economic culture of this city and the country.    

The Santiago metro services about 2.5 million users daily.  The news today had constant footage of these individuals running en masse to get to buses already stuffed so full of people that the doors had difficulty closing.  Those on the stuffed buses were the "lucky" ones, because once many of these people reached the bus stops, there were already swarms of people hoping to encounter a similar fate.  Keep in mind that the temperature today was almost 90 degrees.

                                                                            
Take a taxi, some might say.  If one was able to find an available cab, the traffic jam created by this mess likely would have taken a person 2-3 hours longer than normal to arrive at their destination.  The alternative for many was a very lengthy walk to work.

  

Sometimes a picture says it all

Artsy Macrame

There is a lovely artisan village close to our apartment that I enjoy going to.  

 

It's called Los Dominicos Village, which is adjacent to a famous colonial church formally known as San Vicente Ferrer, but often called Los Dominicos Church.  We've adopted a church a few blocks from us, but this one is so striking that I'd like to attend at least one of their masses while we're here.  But I digress...

The village has a variety of shops that sell a lot of the typical Chilean kitschy items found in many places around Santiago.  

        

 

I'm not the kind of traveler that snubs her nose at these kinds of things, because I've already made a lengthy list of similar items that I'm planning to either carry back or ship.  I'll probably even do a later post on what these items entail.  But my tacky side is at times tempered by a desire for the finer things in life, and I'm fond of this village because they also have several shops with artisans who are producing unique pieces on-site that could be considered art.  

I've perused several of these places on my own, but finally had the opportunity today to show some of the shops to Pat.  He served two fundamental purposes.  The first was to see if he liked any of the pieces I liked for our home, in order to give him the illusion that he has some input in these decisions.  The second was to help me maneuver around the language barrier and determine the price conversions.  I'm still shockingly bad at this--even after 6 weeks!  

One of the things we both enjoyed a great deal was a large abstract macrame textile.  Behold:  

We liked it so much that it's now rolled up and sitting in our apartment as we're trying to figure out whether to carry it back or ship it home.  The problem is not the textile--it is the four and a half foot piece of wood at the top from which it hangs.  Pat didn't expect this to be a part of the package, but for me this was actually a selling point.  Any suggestions?

La Comida Chileana - part 1 Breakfast

So before I begin this post I must disclose that it has long been one of my pet peeves when people post food pics on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.  So if I told you to stop doing such things you can from this moment forward call me a hypocrite.

In this three part post, meal by meal, here are some things Chileans do and don't like to eat.

El Desayuno

Not a big meal around here (much to Amy's chagrin), and there is really only one place we have found that does brunch.  The "typical" breakfast often looks something like this:

Yes that is a mashed up avocado on toast.  They call avocado "palta" down here.  Chile is the second biggest producer of avocados in the world, and it is eaten pretty much all day.  They also do boring stuff like cereal and oatmeal and eggs, but compared to the artery clogging meals in the morning one can get in Central America, it is very tame here.

In fact, the avocado section of the produce area in every market is typically the largest and they are cheap - less than 2 bucks a pound

Of course you might not have time to mash up an avocado and make toast, so there is always the healthier option available at most panaderias.

Those are croissants stuffed with vanilla crime or Dulce de Leche (the medical term in Latin translates to "death with a smile").

A quick word about the coffee.  As a Chilean friend of mine said, the country lacks what he described as "a coffee culture."  He wasn't kidding.  Outside of the Juan Valdez shops the coffee here is just not good.  Nescafé instant still takes up almost all the shelf space at the supermercados.  No country is perfect.

Mysterious Hollywood Stars in Chile

So we are out walking around the other day and I spot some famous Hollywood type trying to be all discrete in styling shades.

You can see his personal assistant trying to fend off media interest in the background.  Anyway, in order to maintain the traditional left wing image of Hollywood types he took public transit.

However he took a little time out to entertain the growing number of gawkers and autograph hounds.

In order to get a feel for the city's recreational services, he also hit a park in Quinta Normal.

And the city's climbing facilities.

Hard to escape the prevalence of American pop culture even here.

Hitting the Pacific Coast

Chile is basically a 2600 mile long serpent of land stretching along South America's Pacific coast.  Despite the length, it is quite narrow.  The average width of Chile is about 100 miles, and at its widest it is only 220 miles.  So no matter where you are in Chile you can get to the sea in a few hours.

With Amy's folks here we thought it was the perfect time to take a trip to Vina del Mar, which is the closest beach resort to Santiago, and see the ocean.

Vina del Mar is about an hour and a half west of Santiago and has some wonderful views of the rocky coast.

Our hotel was perched out on the waterfront and from our balcony the sunsets (enhanced with a little vino and pisco) were very pretty.

Dennis and Lisa had never set foot in the Pacific Ocean and we got that straightened out right when we arrived.

The water is described by the locals as "fresco" but perhaps a better word would be freezing.  That didn't deter George and Viv from plunging right in.

We had a great trip and hope to head back to the coast soon to see Valparaiso which is actually connected by subway to Vina, but we may wait until the water warms up to merely bone chilling.