It was a day yesterday

I think I will remember yesterday (Sunday December 10) for a while. It's not often that you get to observe people celebrating the death of their former dictator.

I spent much of yesterday just enjoying the parks of Santiago, since I didn't have much else that I really wanted to do, and I had an evening flight to Lima. At around 1:30 I was in Parque Bustamante, which is south of Plaza Italia. From there I headed through Plaza Italia to Parque Forestal, which is northwest of the plaza, and near the hostel where I had been staying, and my bag was waiting for me.

Let me wind the time back a bit further. I had also been in the Parque Cerro Santa Lucia earlier, where I had been accosted by students doing fundraising, and trying to raise awareness of the high costs of tuition, and apparently graduation. Small student protests have also been a fairly regular feature of the landscape in Santiago, which has a large number of academic institutions.

Back to Parque Forestal. Around 2:30, I start hearing cars honking in rhythmic ways I have learned to associate with protest or other political activity. I figure the students are at it again. I am sitting 2 modest blocks away from the Plaza Italia.

Around 3:30, I decide to return to the hostel, which is on a quiet street, to have some relative peace before I embark on the travels of the evening. On the way there, I meet (on the street) the girl who's been minding the hostel. She tells me that Pinochet died (2:15 local time, 12:15 for you East Coasters), and a crowd was gathering at the Plaza Italia, and that we should stay away, it could be dangerous.

Crowds, dangerous? Whodathunkit?

We go into the hostel. Local TV coverage is on the scene, reporting on that and other aspects of the event. After I while, I decided (cursing the camera thieves) that I might as well be nearer the scene. I find a safe place to watch, as police with riot gear deploy, mainly to help traffic continue to flow through what is one of Santiago's main traffic intersections. In the hour or so I was there, the crowd grew from a few hundred to well over a thousand. While I could not understand all of the chants, I think they were mostly celebrating Pinochet's death, not his life.

Sidebar: There are very mixed feelings about Pinochet amongst Chilenos. Most will say that his human rights abuses were wrong, but they have been generally supportive of his economic policies (lifted almost straight from the ideas of the recently-deceased Milton Friedman) which made Chile the strongest economy in South America today.

I finally left the proceedings around 5 PM since I did have a date with an airplane. On watching news on arrival at the hotel in Lima, I see that they did eventually break out the water cannon, although CNN's video coverage really doesn't show much good footage.

Coming home tomorrow!


  

Ice cream (or should I say helado)

The ice cream in Chile (and Argentina) is pretty good. While it's not up to the very best that Boston and Italy have to offer, it's pretty close. And the portion size for the price is also pretty good. For about US$1.50 I get a "small" which is about the size of a typical New England small cup -- somewhere between 1 and 1.5 cups of ice cream.

But they have flavors here that we don't see often in staid New England. Lucuma? Papaya? Chirimoya?

It's nice tasting relatively exotic fruit ice creams.

  

Santiago, the first time around

Santiago is a large, fairly cosmopolitan city. It reminds me a lot of large European cities -- mostly clean, rough spots here and there, a nice downtown (with pedestrian zone and the obligatory Plaza de Armas),
 
tony neighborhoods (Providencia), and a clean, apparently-well-working subway.

I spent yesterday mostly walking around the city some, but also fussing about travel arrangements, since I had to book a night bus (part of the way) to my next destination. Tonight's target is Temuco, in the lakes area south of here. But it is only the transit hub en route to Pucón, a smaller town near unto the lakes and mountains.

But I digress.

I also went into one of the local history museums, and discovered how much Spanish I now seem to be capable of reading. It's amazing what limited English contact will do, even if I sometimes make the TV work against that. The museum had a reasonably nice presentation of Chilean history, from the earliest native settlements until about the turn of the 20th century. (The 20th century galleries were undergoing revision, err, renovation.)

Near the center of Santiago is a small mount that has been turned into a very pretty city park, full of follies and 19th-century charm.
   
  

Happy trails!