Back from Easter Island. We have to wait until January 07 for the flight to our next destination, so we cool our heels in Santiago for the third or fourth time this trip.
Speaking of dates, in Real Time, today is January 10 – Maria’s birthday!
A brief roundup of our activities: we visit the Museum of Pre-Columbian Art. It is superb.
Even better, there are no self-loathing, groveling messages of apology and abject kowtowing to the Culture Wars that make many Western museums such repulsive places these days. Looking for examples of this peculiar self-flagellating folderol, I come across this article. Sheesh, just crawl into an alley and blow your brains out, already.
We stay in several different places. In one place, we meet a Belgian man and his teenage son. The evening is spent singing golden oldies on the son’s El-cheapo Bolivian guitar.
One day, we take another wine tour, this time to the headquarters of Concha y Toro.
Another day we ascend the Gran Torre Costanera. It’s the tallest building in South America (for now). According Wikipedia, it also ‘includes the largest shopping mall in Latin America‘. I don’t know, we’ve seen some pretty big malls in our travels.
The view from the top is panoramic.
The Museum of Memory and Human Rights is about the history of the Pinochet regime.
It’s well designed for random wandering. If you want an idea of the kind of things that were going on at the time, the film ‘Missing‘ (1982) may be worth re-watching.
We like the way the building makes extensive use of copper – a material that Chile has a lot of.
La Chascona is the poet Pablo Neruda’s house in Santiago. (He also had one in Valparaiso, which we visited earlier, and another one on the coast, where he’s buried.)
It has, among other things, a painting by Diego Rivera. Considering the minimal security, I fantasize about stealing it.
Santiago has many lovely buildings and tree-lined neighbourhoods. Too bad it suffers from two serious problems: garbage and graffiti. At seemingly random street corners, small mountains of garbage appear overnight and begin to grow. The graffiti, I believe, is the result of an extended period of social unrest (that is, ‘riots’) that took place between 2019 and 2022. Which normalized the destruction and defacement of public property. Which is pretty ironic, considering Chile probably enjoys one of the most equal and financially healthy governments in Latin America.
Something we haven’t seen before: The Santiago Metro has 21 lending libraries in its system.
Sight or Insight of the Day
Speaking of the Metro…as we are taking the subway one day, we come across this travel poster.
It’s for the Juan Fernandez Archipelago – AKA ‘Robinson Crusoe Island’ – which happens to be our next destination.