Chile: It's more than just long and skinny

Actually, just like the Chilean countryside, there's not a lot to distinguish Chilean cities from American cities. The cars are pretty new and the buses are pretty modern (instead of 50 year old Japanese imports, complete with kanji on the side); the parks and plazas are well tended, and there are lots of contemporary shopping centers, supermarkets and skyscrapers. Santiago has a clean, simple-to-use metro and a skyline of modern buildings that I think actually outdoes many American cities (I think because they're newer, so the architects have abandoned the "let's build another big glass box" mentality of the 80's or the "how about a yellow concrete box, and we'll cut it up with smaller boxes. If we're lucky, it will look as ugly as possible" mentality of the 70's). I think the biggest differences are apparent once you get inside private homes - they tend to be small, and they lack all the little niceties found in America, like light fixtures (instead a hanging wire with bulb attached is more common) or any sort of climate control.But while I found this in Bolivia, the apartments and homes here seem as if they were constructed by people who actually have had training in construction, or maybe they just actually gave a fuck (or had a boss who did). The paint jobs aren't so slap-dash, and there aren't places in the stairwells where anyone over 5'5" is certain to hit their head if they're not careful. Another thing is that many of the faucets here have the option for cold or HOT water, which by this point has become a delightful luxury for activities like hand washing and dish cleaning. Oh, and I haven't seen any breaker boxes inside showers yet (or been electrocuted in one). And when you walk through a Chilean city, the cars actually stop at crosswalks, and even will wave you through - quite a contrast to the mutual disrespect shown between cars and pedestrians in Bolivia.

One small annoyance is the light switches. Sometimes they're inside the room, sometimes they're outside. I'd say it's about 50-50. Which means about half the time I wander into a room and grope around for the switch before I realize my mistake and leave the room, hit the light, and then re-enter. Another thing that is a bit of an annoyance is the money: unlike in Peru and Argentina, where you get 3 pesos to the dollar, or in Bolivia, where it's 8 to 1, in Chile you get 515 pesos for a dollar. So when you go in the grocery store, avocados might be marked "$1,299/kilo," or shoes might cost $18,000 (they use the $ sign for everything). It takes a lot longer for me to do the conversion in my head, and it's a lot harder to keep track of how much I've spent (OK, I spent $4,200 on lunch, and three metro rides are $130 each, and $280 for the bus...). But I imagine I can get used to these things. And it's not like there weren't annoying things in the other countries I've been; in Bolivia the B/1 coin was virtually identical to one of the two types of B/2 coin. I mean, at some point there must have been a meeting to make a decision about what the coins were going to be like. Actually, I imagine that meeting going like this: "we need to design a new B/2 coin. So let's take the old design for the B/1 coin, erase the 1, write in a 2, and use the money we were budgeted for a trip to the Bahamas."

Another thing about Chile is that there are prices on everything, and you don't really bargain much. And the taxis are metered, which I really like (that's the easiest place to get messed with when you have to fix a price yourself, which also makes it the most tiring). Chile is much more expensive than Bolivia; things seem to cost three to five times as much in Chile, some things 10 times as much. It's kind of like living in the United States, if everything you saw for sale made you think "hmm, that's a pretty good deal I guess." But it really is a lot easier to go through the day without having to bicker and haggle over every little thing.

There are other similarities between Chile and Bolivia: Chile has people on the streets with blankets laid out, filled with strangely random goods for sale - although this seems much less common than in Bolivia; and in restaurants there are the same three choices of soda as in Bolivia (Coke, Sprite, or Fanta). And just like in Peru and Bolivia, I wear a large dollar sign on my head. I was waiting in the Santiago bus station, and I saw a guy walking through the crowd, past several waiting Chileans, right up to me and he gave me the line of "I'm trying to get home to see my sick mom, and I don't have any money, and I was wondering if you could help me out." Wow, that is so, so convincing. You know, we have that hustle in the States, too. In fact, these interactions have produced an amazingly strong fight-or-flight reaction in me when it comes to being in the general public. I tried to go to the market today for lunch, but I was accosted by so many waiters trying to get me to come to their restaurant that I had to leave because I was starting to panic. One guy totally saw "gringo" coming, and signaled to me through the crowd, and the aisle was too narrow to avoid him, and he was trying to talk to me while I pretended to examine fish in a case opposite his direction while I kept walking. He wouldn't let up, just kept yelling after me in English and Spanish. It's just gotten to the point where I just can't help but feel like I'm being hustled; like they're the ones deciding where I'll eat, not me, even if their intentions might be friendly. After I left the market and was waiting for the adrenaline to leave my system, I thought how they probably have no idea the reaction they're provoking in me, and how much more likely I would be to eat at their restaurant if they would just let me examine the large menus they all have posted and ask questions when I'm ready, if I have any. I know that this sort of reverse discrimination I've been talking about (Vest Guy, Bus Guy, Restaurant Guy) doesn't really affect my greater economic and social well-being, like many types of discrimination do, but it's still just so tiring and frustrating.

Another big similarity between Bolivia and Chile is the receipts: I think Chile is even more into producing receipts than Bolivia. For example, while I was in the bus station I wanted to buy a danish. So I went to the counter where the danishes actually were, and told them I wanted one. They wrote that on a piece of paper, which I took to the cashier, who then produced a receipt of payment for my danish. Next, I went over to a different counter and gave them my written request for a danish, plus proof of payment. They went back to the counter with the danishes, got one, wrapped it up, and handed it to me along with a receipt showing I had received my purchase. You know, I could just give you the money, and you can give me the danish. We don't have to bring ink and paper into this! (RIP Mitch) Another good example is the ATM: when you complete your transaction, the machine asks if you want a receipt. If you push the "no" button, nothing happens. Push it as much as you want, but you're not getting your card back until you push "yes" and just accept the fact that you're getting a receipt. Phone calls, street food - you're getting a receipt for it all, whether you like it or not.


I'm in Santiago at the moment, waiting to hear back from Omar Bello, the expert on Bolivian economy at the UN's CEPAL. I went to the building, which is pretty secure, but I did speak with the secretary for the Department of Development and Economics (but from the security gate). After a short wait, she came back and gave me contact information for Bello, and said he might be able to meet with me tomorrow. That hasn't ended up happening, but the process has still gone much smoother so far than anything did in Bolivia. I spoke with Bello on the phone today, and he said he was going to email me back tonight, and he sounded like he thought we could meet sometime this week.

I'm staying with a couple of guys from Couchsurfing.com, Alejandro and Diego, who live pretty close to the center of Santiago and are pretty chill. Alejandro is an architect; Diego works for the NGO Ocean Conservancy. Their apartment has unadorned white walls, and in a seemingly post-modern acknowledgment to the lack of decoration, there is an easel with a blank white canvas set up in the living room. Unfortunately, they work during the day until 6 or 8 at night, so we haven't been able to hang out much. Plus, I've been really tired lately, and have been going to bed pretty early.

Of course, that might have something to do with staying out until 8am several nights in a row while I was staying with Jason in Valparaiso/Vina del Mar (as is the practice when out clubbing in those cities, and I think it's screwed with my internal clock). One night, I got home about 9am and Jason was asleep. I called him and told him to come let me in, and he just mumbled and said "I hate you," and hung up. I had to hop the fence of the apartment complex.

Valparaiso is kind of the better-known area, and Vina is a little more upscale, but the cities run together. Jason lives in Vina; most of the clubs and touristy stuff is in Valpo (I'm just going to say Valparaiso from now on). Valparaiso is a port town and beach resort area where people vacation to from Santiago in the summer (it's late fall now, and the weather can only be described as glum: grey skies, cold rain, low temperatures, but I've never loved going to the beach anyways), and is a UN World Heritage Sight. As Jason showed me through the streets, covered with murals and small public art projects; brightly colored colonial houses; and beautiful ocean views, I couldn't help but wonder if I had chosen the wrong country to spend six months in. We rode in the ascensors, or elevators, which were built in the 1920's and are still mostly original. The ascensors are little wooden boxes that people get in, and then they are slowly pulled up or lowered down one of Valparaiso's many hills on a track that is similar to a roller coaster (only no precipitous drop at the top). Most of them provide spectacular views of the city, and I thought they were really fun just because they were so damn cute and quaint. Inside, it's perfectly obvious who is a tourist and who is a commuter: I was practically clapping my hands with glee, while old men read newspapers and didn't even look out the window.

Another interesting thing about Valparaiso is the buses: there are several private companies that compete on the same routes, and it's pretty wild. When a bus approaches a stop, there is a guy waiting who, for a few pesos, tells the driver how long it has been since another bus came through running the same route. If it's only been a minute or two, the driver will hit the gas, careening through traffic, in order to overtake the other bus and try and snipe his fares at the future stops. If it's been several minutes, the driver will go at a snails pace, hoping that this will provide more time for more fares to arrive at the stops. The drivers get a commission on the buses take, so it's worth it for them. This also means that they may or may not give you change, or maybe that they'll short-change you, in which case there's nothing you can do except try not to fall over as they race to the next stop. Oh yeah, and when you get on and pay your fare, you may or may not get change, and if they give you change it may or may not be correct. Depending on the mood of the driver, I guess. Also, people get on to try and sell random stuff, like a plastic stick with a plastic dolphin attached to the end on a string. They get on and hand one to everyone, and if you don't take it they'll drop it in your lap. Then they say some stuff about why you should buy their crap, and come back through and you have to either buy it or hand it back and feel like an asshole because they have some sob story. Fortunately they speak way too fast for me to understand, so I have no guilt and no plastic-dolphin-on-stick pieces.

My Spanish is coming along OK, especially given I haven't taken real lessons since Cusco. I actually feel like my listening comprehension has improved a lot over the last month or two (ie it's gone from crap to semi-crap), and I can actually talk on the telephone without having to ask "que?" at least once after every sentence of the other person. But other times, people say simple stuff to me and I totally don't get it. And once I don't get it, it can be hard for me to start getting it again for a while. It's like my brain is still processing the first thing I didn't get, and it can't move on to anything new until it's figured the first thing out.

Other times I have problems just because there are so many regional differences in Spanish. Like in Bolivia or Peru, I always heard donde va? (where are you going?). But at the borders coming into Argentina and Chile, they asked donde viaje? (where are you travelling?). It's different enough that both times I totally stumbled, wondering if they were asking me where I was coming from, or where I was headed, both of which seem equally reasonable questions at an international border. And Chile is the worst - not only are they known for being the fastest speakers on the continent (while Bolivia is the slowest - Jason told me he has heard from Chileans that Bolivians talk so slow it seems like they're slow in the head), but they cut off the ends of words (Diego asked me to hand him a lapi the other day - the word is lapiz, "pen," and he actually didn't really say the i even, so it came out more like lap with a barely pronounced p); they use the vosotros conjugation for verbs, which isn't used in Bolivia or Peru and which I haven't really learned (eg como estas, "how are you," becomes como estais, only they cut off the s and just say como estai); and they use whole new words that are only used in Chile (like polola for "girlfriend" instead of novia). Actually, I felt a lot better when Jason told me that there are some Mexican people in his program, and it took them a couple weeks to be able to understand everything people were saying - and Spanish is their first language.

My plan right now is actually to find a place to live in Valparaiso for a while, because I really liked it there, and it's always nice to be with close friends. Plus, I plan on taking more Spanish lessons, and if I can handle Chilean Spanish, I can pretty much handle it anywhere else. And Jason said that if I'm going to live there, we have to make a pact to only speak Spanish. Jason is a self-hating gringo who is militant about learning Spanish, so I should learn a lot, even if it might impare our ability to banter and joke around (we might have an exception for those things, though).