Suzanne Vega’s 1987 hit “Luka” is still big in Santiago. I’ve heard it twice in the past 36 hours. The first time was yesterday in a supermarket. OK, no big deal. But then the second time, today… coming out of a radio attached to a bicycle. The bicyclist guy was huffing and puffing up Cerro San Cristobal (more on that in a minute), wearing pretty serious bike gear. And out of his radio: “My name is Luka, I live on the second floor…”
Cerro San Cristobal is a spur of the Andes mountains rising right in the middle of the city. It’s about 1,000 feet higher than its surroundings. We accessed it from the Bellavista neighborhood, a short walk from our apartment. You can take a funicular up, but we decided to walk the road instead. A lot of Santiaguinos were doing the same thing, including a surprising number (in what must have been impossibly low gears) on bike. It took about an hour to reach the top, as the grade is pretty gradual. As we neared the finish, we encountered more and more bicyclists on their way down, careening downhill at suicidal speeds. But true to Santiaguino form, the cyclists were stony silent.
These are the kinds of views you get from the top. Yep, that’s a rainbow.
And that’s also a perro de las calles — a street dog, which I can’t believe I haven’t written about yet. Street dogs run free in every Latin American city I’ve visited. People sort of take care of them, by giving them clothes and such as here, but mostly they amiably fend for themselves, wagging and sniffing through the streets, not bothering anyone. It’s not an easy life, I don’t think, but also not a bad one for a dog. (I say they don’t bother people, but one did sneak into a bar Dan and I went to last night, and sat patiently at our table. The waitress laughed and lured it out the door with a piece of bread.)
There’s a huge statue of Mary at the top of the hill.
But the main attraction seems to be the hike/bike ride itself. And also the mote con huesillos, a sugar-shock of a drink made of wheat berries and dried peaches. It’s a trademark Chilean treat apparently.
We took an alternate path down, Zorro Vidal, which made the return trip a lot faster.
We spent the afternoon tooling around Barrio Italia, a neighborhood to the east of where we’re staying. If you’re ever in Santiago and have even the slightest hipster tendencies, this is the area for you. The main street, Avenida Italia, is lined with dozens of century-old courtyard houses that have been converted to mini-shopping arcades. Most of them contained a few artisan shops organized around an impossibly cute cafe serving pastry and gourmet empanadas.
Then Dan and I did something really cozy, which was to go back and sit in Parque Forestal, right near our apartment. He sketched the Escuela de Derecho (Law School) on Pio Nono, built in 1938 and designed by architect Juan Martínez Gutierrez, while I wrote in my journal. The Parque Forestal isn’t anything grand or show-stopping, but it’s just what you want a city park to be: Verdant but not dark; offering good people watching; surrounded by active uses.
Last stop for the day was the Museo Arqueologico, which was the closest to seeing Precolumbian stuff as we were going to get given that the Precolumbian Museum is closed for renovation. It was essentially one room, but it had some cool stuff, including this fantastic angry-face pottery from around 1000 AD:
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