Packing Is Going To Be Tricky...
⬅ previous ⬆intro next ➡Day 2 ~ January 15 ~ Santiago
Up until this point, everything has been very smooth and efficient, so the Chilean immigration formalities come as a bit of a shock. There are quite a few desks open, but the procedure seems astonishingly slow and the queues are huge. We have been to Chile before and don't recall anything like this from our previous trip, and checking back I make no mention of any arrival delays in the 2022 blog.This time, it seems almost like they have to phone the Presidential palace to check that every visitor has a personal invitation from the President!
Finally we're through. Oh, but then I have to get my bag scanned: oops, I have contraband Christmas cake! But somehow I seem to be being told I can't bring this in, but the officer doesn't confiscate it and it ends up back in my bag again. Don't ask. I have no idea quite what happened there.
Amanda misses out on being scanned – again, no idea why – but that's not all she's missed out on. If you refer to my blog link above, you'll see I mention the special piece of paper they give you on entry: except that Amanda has not been given one this time!
I've got mine, but she is sure that she simply wasn't given hers, not that she's mislaid it or anything. I guess we'll find out just how important it is in due course...
Whatever. We have got out. All is now well for the moment.
We meet our Chilean rep and are driven to our hotel. We were offered the same place as last time, but thought we'd like somewhere different just for a change, and talking to Clare at Audley, ‘Hotel le Reve’ sounded just our sort of thing.
The room is nice enough.
The bathroom is very clean-looking and well equipped with a good sized shower.
And our room opens out onto this lovely enclosed courtyard where we will later sit in the sun and have a coffee/beer/whatever.
After checking in and unpacking, we go for a walk in the neighbourhood, just to see what's to be seen and find a spot of lunch.
Although our hotel is just off a six-lane dual carriageway, the Avenida Providencia, the traffic seems not to be a big deal. We don't visit this church, but it's a distinctive local landmark. It's named the ‘Iglesia de la Divina Providencia’ (Church of the Divine Providence) and it's given its name to both the road and the whole district we're in, Providencia.
What's this? A Chilean sushi restaurant? This we have to try!
Well it's sushi, Jim, but not as we know it.
Damned yummy, though, and dirt cheap by sushi standards. In the (admittedly unlikely) event you happen to be passing, we can thoroughly recommend Mitsuko Sushi. In fairness, it's definitely ‘fusion’ rather than pure Japanese, but we are old-fashioned and stealing good ideas from other cultures and doing your own thing with them is fine by us. The only thing I personally would mark them down for is not selling beer, but hey, I can keep my middle-class alchoholism in check for one meal. [I had a whole raft of blood tests done last month as part of my regular diabetes review, and my liver results are, as usual, pretty much slap bang in the middle of the normal range. I confess this is mildly surprising.]
I can't deny his skill, but if I were a driver here, I doubt I'd pay him just for performing on the crossing while the lights are against me.
Earlier pictures might not show it, but there's a lot of green space and parkland in the city.
Looks like the Chinese ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ is here. I can't be sure if it was not the case in 2022, or whether we simply didn't notice.
So according to this website, Chile signed a BRI Memorandum of Understanding on November 6, 2018. With Covid intervening, of course, it's quite likely that little if anything of substance was happening in 2022.
Now it has to be said that Amanda and I do occasionally disagree when it comes to art and architecture, but in the case of Corten steel we are as one: no, just no.
We may or may not have time to visit the “Gabriela Mistral” cultural centre while we're here, but if we do, it won't be for the rust.
Gabriela Mistral is clearly big here.
We must confess ignorance, but as always, Wikipedia comes to the rescue:
Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, known by her pseudonym Gabriela Mistral, was a Chilean poet-diplomat, journalist and educator [who] was the first Latin American author to receive a Nobel Prize in LiteratureThis is at the base of the Santa Lucia hill, which we visited in 2022 but are finding surprisingly hard to remember. [I will later compare the GPS tracks and find that we are mostly in a completely different part of it.]
We enter by the southermost gate, which we didn't previously go anywhere near, and ascend some stairs to the ‘Terrazza Neptuno’ – the Neptune Terrace – with its rather splendid fountain. It's not just a fountain, though, it's a huge elaborate architectural folly!
Actually, it's got quite a complex history. It was commissioned by the Chilean state from the French “Val d’Osne” foundry as a copy of one created by the sculptor Gabriel-Vital Dubray and exhibited at the London International Exhibition in 1862. No, that's not the Crystal Palace “Great Exhibition” of 1851, which I confess I confused it with in my mind at first. The 1862 event was a follow-on after the former's success, and took place in Kensington on the site of what are now the Natural History and Science Museums.
Initially it was installed a little way from here, in the ‘Alameda de las Delicias’. But where's that? There's no place by that name to be found in Santiago today. That's because it was the original name given to the main avenue through the centre of Santiago which is now formally known as ‘Avenida Libertador General Bernardo O'Higgins’. Aparently locals often still refer to it as ‘Alameda’.
Other copies of Neptune (the figure) himself are to be found in many locations around the world: this kind of mass-produced art was new at the time and labelled “industrial sculpture”.
Lots more detail here.
Anyway, onward and upward!
It's not all that clear in the picture, but there is quite a lot of vegetation growing on the structure as well as around it, and some of the render is definitely crumbling a bit. It would be a shame if it suffered more damage from neglect, as it's quite an imposing edifice.
That's where we're going...
Santiago mostly lies on a plain, so from the top you can see pretty much the whole city. The building in the centre of the picture is the ‘Gran Torre Costanera’ – Great Costanera Tower – which is presently the tallest building in South America.
And as you can see looking in the opposite direction, the surrounding hills and mountains are never far away.
If there was a nice little artisanal ice cream stand at the top, we would definitely partake right now, but they only have the Chilean equivalent of Walls, so we must accept reality and now descend.
Back at the rusty art museum, we check out some of the outdoor art.
Some of the interior too, although I must be honest and say that we have only entered the building to use their toilets. I'm thinking this looks like ivory, so maybe I should be outraged, but then again maybe it's 3D-printed ABS. Who knows? If there was an explanatory caption, I failed to notice it.
Outside again, there are murals. To the left of this picture, there are figures holding banners reading, “We want excellence in education for all Chileans” and “Free and inclusive education now!” and things like that, which is a bit deep maybe. This, by contrast, is a warrior in a bobble hat rescuing a fish from the construction site of a hydroelectric dam before it is scooped up by an excavator. [I'll be honest again and admit that I may not have the full story here.]
I hope I won't get into trouble for taking pictures here!
Back to our hotel, then.
I'll have a beer (while Amanda has a coffee) in the courtyard. But this is not just any old beer, this is beer from a company founded (in 1896) in Punta Arenas, the city in the far south of Patagonia where we will begin our Antarctic voyage!
It's fine beer too. We (well, I) enjoyed several Austral beers on our previous trip to Chile, but obviously I had no idea at the time that they would have future significance like this.
Got to say, this is a very pleasant little spot to sit, but the hotel doesn't have a restaurant so we need to venture out for dinner.
That said, we don't need to go much further than the other side of the road, as there are quite a few places along here.
‘El Huerte’ looks decent, all but opposite the hotel. We don't realise it's vegetarian until we sit down, but this should be interesting: ‘vegetarian’ and ‘South America’ are not concepts we normally link closely.
Tasty little samosa-y starters. Well, for me at least. Amanda has ‘sea weed ceviche’ which sounds more interesting on the menu than it appears on her plate.
How can we resist a wine called “Glup”?!
Fortunately, it's very nice. We have not had to make a sacrifice for the sake of frivolity.
Foodwise, though, Amanda reckons she's followed a poor starter choice with a poor main course choice: too much gunk and she doesn't like gunk. Undoubtedly more luck than judgement, but I've enjoyed my dinner and she hasn't really. It doesn't help that she has a migraine headache that's been coming and going since we were on the plane.
Ah... Well let's say he's more talented than some buskers we've come across, but that's not a very high bar.
After dinner, we have a short post-prandial stroll down the road, partly to check out possible options for tomorrow night, but also to be amazed by the wiring: we've seen a lot of, err, interesting third-world cabling over the years, but never this combination of electrical chaos in harmony with nature before!
We're not sure we're brave enough for Club Gordos, although when you look at the board listing their rather pedestrian food and drinks offering, you do have to wonder if you might be getting a bit ahead of the reality. Suffice to say that none of the patrons sitting outside look anything like what I would expect (hope?) the denizens of a joint like this to be, and I'm sure the legendary Kit Kat Club did not need to bring in the punters with a ‘happy hour’. (I fear the Berlin of “Cabaret” remains a work of fiction. A very fine work of fiction, it must be said: it is that rarest of things, a musical I would actually choose to pay my own money to see!)
On which note, goodnight.
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