Where the Land Ends: A Semester in Chile: Y Tú, Mamita, ¿Qué Querí?

I decided on the spur of the moment last week to go to Santiago for the weekend with two friends from my Spanish and Culture class. The most I had seen until then was the airport and one bus station, and I figured that I should get a better taste of Chile's capital city. So Lindsay, Lisa, and I met up at the bus station in Vina and took the bus an hour and a half to Pajaritos, a small station in Santiago, where we bought metro cards and went to hunt for our hostal, the Casa Grande. After checking in and ditching our stuff, we went out to find some dinner. This was more difficult than you might think--we were going out at a normal dinnertime for three gringas, but way too early for Chileans. Finally, we found a diner-type spot near our hostel and were led to our table by a young waiter who was clearly thrilled out of his mind to have three cute gringas as a captive and hungry audience.

"Do you like to go out?" he asked, oh so casually.

"It's ok," we responded.

"Oh. Well, today's my birthday," he announced, unconvincingly, as if this would somehow magically persuade us to go out with him. A little while later he was back with our food to try his luck again.

"So, where are you staying?" he inquired.

"In a hostel," I replied vaguely.

"Is it close-by?" he pressed.

"Ma' o meno' (More or less)," I said in a pointed tone. This time I think he caught on, and he was strictly business from there on out. We finished our food and left to walk around the neighborhood, but Barrio Providencia was clearly not the place to be on a Friday night: most things were closed and there was little to do. We had planned to take it easy anyway, so we ended up having tea and coffee at a little cafe at the Cine Arte and returning to the hostel to relax and plan our weekend.

The true horror began around 2:00 in the morning. Upon checking in we had noted that a young mother and her baby were staying next door, in a room partitioned from ours by what seemed a tragically thin sheet of plywood. We had exchanged knowing looks but all secretly--and, it turned out, foolishly--maintained the hope the this was a nice, quiet baby. This hope, of course, was shredded into bits as the first piercing wails assailed our peacefully sleeping ears. We stirred, unsure of what to do. We were silent for a while. Ten minutes passed. The screaming continued, punctuated by an occasional useless petition by the mother, "Bebe." As if the bebe would know that that meant to chill out. After twenty minutes, it was difficult to know whether to laugh hysterically or join in the sobbing. All we knew was that we had a full Saturday planned and were counting on a long and tranquil night of rest, a shockingly rare experience for the international exchange student. Finally, driven to action by the incessant wailing, Lindsay popped out of bed and pleaded with the desk clerk to let us move to another room. He agreed, and we groggily gathered our stuff and walked down the hall to our new space. More or less settled in, we all resolved never to have children and drifted off the sleep.

The next morning, not quite as well-rested as we had hoped, we went to enjoy the breakfast included in the price of our room: "We remind all guests to please take only one (1) cup of coffee, tea, or hot chocolate and only one (1) portion of bread." Of course. Reasonably satisfied after savoring our rations, we went out to see the city. We walked through nearby Bellavista and found a funicular (elevator) that took us to the top of Cerro San Cristobal, from which we had a panoramic view of the city, in all its smoggy glory. We admired a hilltop statue of the Virgin Mary (a prerequisite for any true Latin American city) and then hopped into a cable car on the teleferico that sailed through the air over a beautiful wooded park.

Walking down off the hill after our adventure, I stopped off at La Chascona, one of the three Pablo Neruda homes in central Chile. Curiously, Lindsay and Lisa weren't interested in seeing the (fabulous, unique, designed by a famous poet) house and so we agreed to meet up about an hour later to give me time for a tour and them time to find some other kind of diversion. I paid about $1.50 for a guided tour in Spanish, and joined a group of people from Brazil and Mexico (no worries, they looked fairly healthy). For the next forty minutes we learned all about the quirky details of the nautically-inspired house, constructed by Neruda as a secret refuge for his illicit affair with Matilde Urrutia, his third lover and eventual wife. Isn't that charming. Still, questionable relationship tactics aside, the sprawling house and gardens showed off Neruda's keen eye for design and his hilarious personality (in a cabinet in the dining room were two tiny ceramic dishes labeled "Marijuana" and "Morphine" for salt and pepper; on the other side of the same cabinet was a secret passageway through which Neruda would escape from boring meetings, or suddenly appear to liven up parties). At the end of our tour, I chatted for a bit with our guide, who had studied philosophy at the Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso, where I am studying.

From Bellavista we took the metro downtown to La Moneda, the presidential palace of Chile and focal point of the 1973 military coup. We had hoped to enter the courtyard, but were told by the guards that the building would be closed for the day due to a protest earlier that morning. They had swords, so I took their word for it. We admired La Moneda from the outside and took a spin around the Plaza de Armas and the Catedral Metropolitana, with a quick stop for ice cream in between. Our last destination for the afternoon was Patronato, a shopping district of Santiago known for cheap and bountiful clothing. We didn't stay long--the streets were so crowded that I started feeling claustrophobic, the merchandise was nothing impressive, and we were getting pretty tired of being singled out as gringas every five minutes. Luckily, it was nap-time in Santiago, and we joined the rest of the city for a rest from 5:00 to around 7:00 in the afternoon.

When dinnertime came again, we walked over the Barrio Bellavista in hopes of finding more options. What's annoying about this sector, though, is that it is way more touristy and a draw for exchange students. So you can't walk five feet without some pushy waiter trying to seat you at his restaurant. It got pretty annoying, and most places were expensive with little justification for the price, so we ended up being really Chilean and stopping at a cheap, hole-in-the-wall sandwicheria. The guy behind the counter was no-nonsense and he served up simple fare with grease and plenty of compliments. Lindsay and Lisa ordered churrascos (basically, meat sandwiches) and then it was my turn. "Y tú, mamita, ¿qué querí?" (And you, little Mama, what do you want?), asked the cook in that oh-so-endearing, everyday Chilean way. Luckily, I had discovered the vegetarian version of the completo, the hotdog concoction that is so popular here. My version was a fried egg with cheese and all the toppings--avocado, mayonaisse, tomato--on a hotdog bun. Lowbrow, I know, but extremely tasty. We topped it all off with some fries and reveled in our authentic dining experience, figuratively thumbing our noses at the pushy waiters at the overpriced touristy restaurants. Coffee and brownies at the much posh-er La Casa en el Aire cafe rounded out the evening.

For our last day, we decided to escape the smoggy city and see some of the countryside surrounding Santiago. Following the advice of our hostel staff, we hopped on a bus to Cajon del Maipo for some hiking in the Andes, well-stocked with bread, cheese, fruit, nuts, and water for the excursion. We got off the bus near the little village of San Alfonso, one of the many smaller towns along the winding route our bus took. We did some easy hiking along a little river, finally escaping the mountains of trash at the mouth of the little canyon (environmental conservation is not stressed so much here yet) and climbing up increasingly challenging rocks into a cool and peaceful mountain hideaway with stunning views of the Andes on all sides. We had our picnic on a big, smooth rock and then climbed back down to the road to wait on our bus back to the crowded, noisy world of the Santiago.