Plaza de Armas

On our first cool Sunday we took the subway into town and strolled about the Plaza de Armas. Every town and city in Chile has one.  It was the first thing drawn out by ye old Spanish town planners to be the civic and social heart of the colonial city grid. Santiago's Plaza de Armas is exceedingly venerable, dating back to 1548, only eight years after the Spanish arrived and declared the country west of the mountains a colony.  The buildings that face onto it are equally venerable - all the big bits of architectural history are represented: the rather baroque-ish Santiago Cathedral (1745), the Municipalidad de Santiago (1785) (slightly more renaissance, in a middle-classic solid sort of way), the Palace of the Royal Audience (1804) (not quite with the neoclassical program) and the historic Central Post Office (1882) (French Second Empire, very up to date).   
            Regardless of what fronts it, a Plaza de Armas always has fountains and palm trees, heroic statues of military men and horses, and most importantly, benches under the trees where you can sit and watch the people of the pueblo pass you by. 
            Santiago's plaza is full of tourists, but it is very much still a living city square.  The benches are occupied by tarot readers and balloon sellers, theater students reading poetry, gaggles of teenage girls giggling and painting their nails, and around them babies are running through the fountains, old men play chess in a band shell and in one corner of the plaza Art is happening, painters selling copies of every painting known to classically-educated man.             
            Artists sit on high stools, painting from photographs, the paintwork getting thicker with every iteration.  Diego Rivera?  Pay by the lily. A Venus by Botticelli? Or only her left breast?  Any way you like her – on canvas and driftwood and even wire netting, if you want it that way.
            Choosing serenity over art, however worthy, we walked into the Cathedral.  It's quite a building. To quote my father every time he passes - “Such an Ugly Cathedral!  What an ugly cathedral!”
            I don’t think it’s nearly as bad as he seems to think. Granted, it has no great aesthetic appeal, with the all grace and soaring elegance of a tool shed.  But it’s not ugly. It’s just nondescript. The acres of marble facing are painted onto the stone and the paint needs a good scrub. The columns are lumpy and graceless, the frescoes are chipped,  the gold leaf is covered in cobwebs, and a century or more of smog and dust and city grit has tinted everything a dull, matte shade of faceless grey.
            And the tinkly cut glass lighting fixtures on every column have got to go.
            But it’s not that bad.  Give it a good scrub, take out the altars and as Dad has pointed out, it would make a great dance hall. 

The Cool Change Cometh!

In Santiago weather is taking a turn for the BETTER. Yes, I open with weather-speak, but it's been so terribly hot and dry lately that any change toward cool and damp is a BIG GOOD THING. It's sort of overcast outside and very cool inside and ooooh - I unravel in damp weather. 

The first day of change is like putting down a load that you didn't even know you'd been carrying all through the heat until it disappeared. I feel obliged - truly obliged and incumbent and duty bound - to spend that first day lying flat on a rug with my pores open wide and soaking up the damp. 

It's that good.

That day was two days ago -Sunday.  We purred and basked till mid-afternoon and then we took the subway into the city center and spent the afternoon wandering around the Plaza de Armas and out of it, through the inner-city streets.  In the cool of the late evening we sat down at a table in the shade of a tree outside a little restaurant on a quiet street and had a long, slow meal of random little things - and were serenaded by street musicians.  Three shifts of them.

First we were played at by a young man with a guitar, long hair and a set of pan-pipes.  He couldn't play the pan-pipes, and on the guitar he knew exactly three chords, only middling well,  but his hair blew WONDERFULLY in the breeze.

After he'd played the three songs he knew and walked round the tables, collecting our spare change and wandered off around the corner,  we were approached by a second man who didn't have pan-pipes and DID know how to play his guitar (lovely flamenco stuff)  But on the negative side, he couldn't sing.  Not a note.

He was terribly enthusiastic, however.  Determined to give it his very best shot.

And while he collected the rest of our pocket change and ambled offstage, his place was taken by an entire band -  three young men with electrical guitars, battery-fed amplifiers and an entire drum kit.  And those kids could really PLAY.  Lined up against the stone wall of the restaurant, they played the best of the old stuff until the municipal security patrol car drew up in the street beside us and sent them on their way.

Santiago is great for street music.  The streets are full of sound. Street sellers with whistles and hurdy-gurdy players and old men with flutes and guitars - too old to have been able to take advantage of Pinochet's reform of the pension system, and playing to supplement their keep.

In our immediate neighborhood we have a group of six opera students from a conservatory who often perform under a covered arcade next to the metro station.  The roof does amazing things with the acoustics and its shade lets you stand and listen right through the summer sun.

And this summer, we've had a school holidays treat.  A group of music students  have staked out a spot right in front of our local supermarket.  Ten violinists, a young man with a cello and a girl with a cornet will walk out of the crowd, make a circle against a wall and play all afternoon.  The lead violin raises his bow and drops his head - and music breaks the air open and fills the sky with a WALL of sound.

Bright red and brown and golden noise - the shopping streets slow, and mouths open, men and women walk into each other and still- even the local beat police on their horses stop to listen, their reins slack and their faces still.

I put down my bags and lean against a stone pillar. The music plays up and down the walls - and under my hands stones are dancing, ringing back and forth under the great weight of sound.

Two little girls stop dead in the middle of the open space in front of the musicians.  You can see the music crashing over them like a wave.  One stands stock still - her arms spread and her mouth open and the other stretches her hands up to the ceiling and spins around and around and around -

A conversation

A conversation:

In my kitchen, pouring chamomile tea, two ladies of  a certain age and robust constitution are comparing travel dodges.  

 Specifically -Toronto Pearsons International Airport, and its several miles of horrible corridor passages.  When you get off of a 12 hour flight they're either just the thing for a good solid leg stretch (while humping 16 lbs of hand-carry) or you despair.

            "Take a wheelchair" one lady advises knowingly.

A tsk of indecision.

            "Really!  Everyone says they're never going to do it, and then they try it once and they never do anything else ever again!"

A head shakes slowly - "But I've heard - they don't take CARE of you.  They take you off somewhere and then they dump you in a corner and they walk away."

            "So bring a book!"  (exasperated.)

            "Eh?"

            "You're going to spend an age walking down those passages anyway - there's no point being in a rush in PEARSONS. Take a good book along and let them do all the work for you!"

THAT's strategy.

Maitencillo

This weekend, we drove down to the small resort town of Maitencillo on the coast east of Santiago.

Where we found that most of Santiago had gotten there before us.  February is the official season for summer holidays in Chile - the cities empty and beach resorts fill up: every hotel room, hostel dormitory, caravan, camping space and roosting space under the highway overpasses is booked solid for the entire month. 

Which is why we were making a day trip instead of a weekend of it - we'd foolishly underestimated the sheer NUMBER of people down there - those hostelries who didn't outright laugh at us or simply hang up on us made it clear that we'd be welcome some time mid-march - if we were willing to commit to a fortnight or so.

So we spent just the day instead.

The coast at Maitencillo is very VERY pretty.  It is rocky and grand and ragged and cove-ish, rather than the sort of sweeping stretches of sand that we have in Australia.  And the water is COLD - swimming at a Chilean beach is SERIOUSLY heroic - the Humboldt current sweeps up the coast of Chile bringing water from Antarctica all the way up past the Tropic of Capricorn. 

One dips, rather than swims.  One paddles and stays close the shoreline.  But even icy waters are heaven on a hot summer day and every single stretch of sand was mobbed.  And the rockpools, where the water was marginally warmer had to share their sea urchins and sea anemones with human swimmers.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Meet the Secretary

This morning I went back to the Clinica Alemana to have my tetanus booster shot.  (because we silly people who stab ourselves with scissors while wrapping Christmas presents have to do things like that.)

            The Vacunatorio lives deep in the bowels of the hospital's underground parking garage.  One takes the main elevator down to level number Sub 2, exits the hospital proper out of the door past the pathology labs, then trips merrily down a little black and white zebra crossing that wends its charming way through a dark concrete catacomb filled with angry Chilean drivers in SUVs, all squealing their tires ferociously on the concrete floor because after doing seven circles of the garage they haven't found a place to park, and they're learning that the little red and green lights indicator lights on the ceiling above each parking space bear no resemblance to the filled- or otherwise- state of the parking spaces, but merely (morely?) in their small angry incandescences, contribute to the sense of a noisy, subterranean, petrol-and-rubber roaring hell.

            If you can make it successfully across the unmarked and unlit entry ramp down from the street, you are home and hosed, standing happy on the doorstep of the Vacunatorio. In the dark of the garage, it is an oasis of filtered air-conditioning, soft lights, and rows of waiting room chairs upholstered in a peculiarly medical shade of not-quite-pepto-bismol-pink.
            The place was empty, but for me and four female receptionists. Two were giggling, one was filing her nails, and one was doing a crossword out of a newspaper. (This is important later.)

            The place was empty, but I looked for a number machine anyway. I was operating on instinct. 
            Chileans don't do queues - they take numbers instead.  They take numbers for everything - numbers in the pharmacy, numbers in the dry-cleaner, numbers in the shoe repair shop and in the supermarket for the deli counter and for the butcher and to buy their cheese and their bread.  The only place Chileans don't take a number is in the supermarket  when they're waiting for their turn for the man who weighs their vegetables.  Nobody is entirely sure why.

           Without numbers, Chileans will explain, the result is anarchy and a scrum.  But there is never a scrum in front of the fruit and vegetable man.  And the ticket waiting area in front of the butcher's counter is always a zoo of people steaming through their nostrils and counting numbers out of the corners of their eyes, or trying to roll their trolleys over other people's feet and frighten them into dropping their numbers and running away.

            It doesn't quite work out.
            And it proved irrelevant in this case: the number machine in the Vacunatorio, was out of order. A sheet of printer paper was taped across its fancy electronic front.  The paper said "Not Working. Apply to Receptionist for Assistance."

            So I did. I walked up to the row of receptionists in their pink booths and stood in front of them and cleared my throat- delicately, as one does, in this sort of circumstance.
            The gigglers momentarily stopped giggling, and the girl doing the crossword looked up at me, and then they all looked away again and picked up where they'd left off.

            Almost exactly 120 seconds later, the girl filing her nails looked up and smiled, and  in a voice that was warm with pleasant, everyday cordiality, she said "Hello. May I Help You?"

            "Yes. " I said, and smiled back. "I'm here for a tetanus shot."

            Her eyes, and her voice, glazed over. "Oh."  She said dully.  "A vaccination.  You need a number."  And she looked away and began to file her nails again.

            "But the number machine is broken. It said to - "

            "Over there."  She said - waving an arm vaguely in the direction of the far corner of the room.

            "But -"

            "Goodbye."

            I sighed and I walked across the room and in a corner that wasn't quite reached by the lights, I found an old-fashioned, common-or-garden mechanical ticker-tape number dispenser.

            But I didn't quite trust myself to take a number just yet.  First I looked up at the wall above the row of receptionists, where an electronic number board shone out in bright red letters:  36.

            Then I took the ticket, and very carefully, I read the number on it: 37.  I knew, I just knew what was going to happen next and I knew that when it did, I was going to crack.

            I didn't want to crack, but the crack was on its way.  It was rising fast.

            Ticket in hand, I padded back across the floor and planted myself right in front of the young woman filing her nails. She raised her head, she looked me in both eyes for a long slow count of thirty, and then she reached out a hand and pressed a button.

            "Thirty-seven!"  She called out, in a loud, chirpy, waiting-room-covering voice.

"Thirty-seven! Who's next?"

            And I cracked.  I started to giggle, and then  I started to laugh.  I couldn't help it - it was theater of the absurd, served up by a quartet of petty bureaucrats in pepto-bismol pink.  I laughed and I laughed, and to her credit, the woman blushed and looked slightly shamefaced.  A more hardened Chilean secretary-type would have stared me down and sent me to the back of a non-existent queue.

            This young woman, who still had far to go in the hardening of her arteries, blushed fiercer and went to find a nurse to talk to me because she found that all things considered, she really didn't think she could, herself.

Stomachs that Don't Necessarily Do What You Want Them To

It's summer drought season in Santiago, and stomach viruses are running rampant through the city.  Mr Tabubil and I, with our untrained gringo stomachs, are coming down with EVERY SINGLE ONE.

Posting may be slightly erratic until we've run through the current crop.