Kepfram & Ellie's Travel Journal

Thankyou & goodbye: 3 days in Santiago
Random Facts & Observations:
population - 5.8 million more or less
current books - A Short History of Nearly Everything (Kepfram), The Family Arsenal (Ellie)
black people count - over 10 our first day so we stopped counting, apparently it's an urban thing since we only saw about 5 in Chile prior to Santiago

There is never enough time.
Or rather we never have enough of it (after all time is infinite, it's us who are finite). We scheduled 3 days for our visit to Santiago, planning to take a night train south to Temuco the last night & continue on from there. The problem with all this is that with cities above a certain size it is hard to see all their attractions. It would have been nice to search out all the street art & ride all 15 ascensores in Valparaíso or visit each of the volcanoes around Quito, or more of Santiago's parks & neighborhoods, but it didn't happen.

I liked Santiago. Old buildings, tall new buildings, a well maintained subway, & plumbing systems that can accept toilet paper! Our hostal, had a HUGE, well equiped kitchen so I made dinner every night of our stay, often in stark contrast to the meals of the other guests (my lemon zest on one counter while someone else was making ramen noodles, or I'm making polenta as somone fries up a grilled cheese). I was asked numerous times if I was a chef. The hostal also had abundant HOT WATER, I don't know @ what point this became so precious, but I took a decadent 1/2 hour shower in celebration, just because I could.

We visited the Children's Museum & Aquarium with Cécile & Yvan, then La Chascona, Cerro Santa Lucia, & the Fine Arts Museum the next day. The kid's museum/aquarium were a bit dissapointing & not that interesting to me. Ellie liked La Chascona, but I prefer Neruda's poetry to his taste in architecture or interior design.
Cerro Santa Lucia was pretty. A hill turned park in downtown Santiago. Close to sunset the city smog turns a lovely golden orange & you can see the panoramic beauty of a city with lower air quality than Mexico City. For me, the fine/contemporary arts museum was good & bad. Some beautiful paintings, photos, & sculpture, & some contemporary work which I have not yet learned to appreciate in any language.

I'd like to visit Santiago again if not for the smoke. Everyone & everywhere we went, it was hard to escape. In the mall, the hostal, the subway station, even on our train out of town there was little consideration for those who didn't smoke. In our hostal when we asked the smokers to leave the kitchen if they weren't cooking anything they told us they could smoke in the hostal (kitchen included) & then were kind enough to put out their cigarettes so our food didn't taste like ash. The smoking "section" on the train is at both ends of the car by the bathrooms which does little to keep the smoke away from the rest of the passengers & nothing for anyone visiting the bathrooms.

Ellie´s Thoughts:
I suppose Santiago was once a beautiful city - before industrialization and the resulting air contamination (think Pasadena where you´d hardly know the valley is surrounded by mountains). Interestinly enough, although we were in town during a low air quality alert, you couldn´t smell the polution and our eyes didn´t burn.
The best thing about the city for me was the fabulous weather - quite a surprise after feeling so cold due to the constant fog in Valparaiso (only 300km away on the coast).