Dan and I arrived in Santiago around 9 a.m., and took a minibus to our apartment in Barrio Lastarria (45 minutes, about $10/person). A bonus: Turns out our landlord/host is gay himself. He runs a biotech startup and doesn’t smile much. The apartment is smaller than it looked in the online photos, but it’s cute and clean. The heat? Provided by a space heater. Central indoor heating systems are unusual in Santiago, I’m discovering, because their heating season is so short and relatively mild.
Still, it’s definitely winter — which is what I wanted! The high was 57F, and the low is 36F. Brisk. It started to get dark around 4 p.m.
One mystery: Why isn’t it even colder? We’re pretty far south of the equator, during their winter solstice. About as far south as Johannesburg, South Africa. But then I checked, and the latitude is 33S, which is about equivalent (in the northern hemisphere) to Texas/New Mexico/Georgia. So mystery solved.
The first thing we did was climb to the top of Castillo Hidalgo (above), which was built as a fortress in 1826 and is now open to the public. It’s a kind of crazy wedding cake of a park, with a tangle of stone stairs, ramparts and greenery leading up to a precarious summit. You get to the top and can see much of the city, and the rugged Andes that surround it. Santiago’s setting really is stunning, at the bottom of a big bowl of mountains.
We strolled back down through the Parque Forestal, which was peaceful, and then headed across the heavily channelized Mapocho River (“pobre rio!”) into Bella Vista section. Apparently this place bumps with nightclub-goers ’round about 2 or 3 in the morning, but when we were there it was just some quiet low-rise buildings. Sort of like Cleveland’s old East Bank of the Flats if you visited in the afternoon.
On to another highlight, La Vega Central (central field market), where we encountered some nice fruits and veggies and Dan’s dream: “Picklemundo.” Our landlord/host told us the nearby Mercado Central, which sells fish, is a tourist trap, so we didn’t go there.
And how can you resist something called the Zona de Quesos? (We did, partly because of the line.)
But maybe the most alluring thing about the market were the dozens of tiny stalls around the edges, selling ridiculously cheap plates of local fried food. We’ll be back soon for some of that.
Last stop: Plaza de Armas, the city’s main square, for some great people-watching. My favorite part of the scene here was a lady (below, in turquoise) dressed like she was on break from her office job, proselytizing to the point of hoarseness as she paced back and forth in front a bench of half-interested spectators. She often raised her fists in the air.
After a single afternoon, I don’t have enough of a feel for Santiago to try to sum it up. It certainly doesn’t do much to try to be alluring to tourists — which I liked. There aren’t many fancy shops or leafy neighborhoods. It’s smoggy and a little dirty and sometimes a little run-down. It feels like a really big city that happens to have a spectacular setting.
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