Santiago: Week 1
This is me and Ivonne's Husband Jorge outside the Chilean Presidents house. At least I think that's where this is. This was our first day in Chile. Jorge took us on a tour of the city. We went all over, from the Supreme Court Building to Plaza de Armas to Santa Lucia. We walked what felt like the whole city. The first thing we saw was the "White Palace" in Santiago. This was the home of one of the country's richest families. In the 60's they donated it to the state. For a while it was used to house visiting dignitaries. Now its a kind of museum. My father was completely entranced by the hand carved wood floors, but pictures weren't allowed in the building.
The place was pretty amazing though. All the floors were hand carved in different patterns, the stairs were three different kinds of marble, the ceilings hand painted. I suppose this is what happens when someone has more money than they know what to do with, but it was pretty impressive.
Okay, I promise not to dwell on this, but it drove me crazy. My father could not pronounce Jorge's name. Now I'm not exactly fluent in spanish, and I'm sure my accent stunk for what I did say, but I MADE THE EFFORT!!!! My father butchered Jorge's name for the first 3 or 4 days and then just gave up and called him George. This was a recurring theme during the trip. When we got to the south he not once managed to pronounce Puerto Montte correctly.
In La Plaza de Armas in Santiago on a Saturday. All over the square there were artists and painters and dancers. It was also the day of a big futbol game and every once and a while a spontaneous cheer of "Chile Chile Chile" would erupt.
We were actually lucky, we just happened to be there on the day of a national craft fair. It was in the courtyard of a museum right off the sqaure. There was some really amazing stuff there, stone carvings, belts, shells, some of the nicest stuff we saw the whole trip (and believe me we became very familiar with the craft fairs ( I started calling them crap fairs) Unfortunately since it was the first day we didn't buy as much as we would have otherwise. The plaza (though not the craft fair) was where my father bought the painting that he finally managed to hang in the living room.
This is Santiago from the top of Santa Lucia, one of the two hills in the city (San Cristobal is the other). The white streak in the background is the Andes. They're kind of hard to see through the smog. I think the smog was the most prevolent view of my time in the city.
Off in the distance on the left you can see the building shaped like a cell phone. This was the building of a big communications company, they did it on purpose. This isn't the best angle but San Cristobal (where you can really see it) was too smoggy for decent pictures.
This is me at the bottom of Santa Lucia.
Here we have our first picture of my father, somehow we got him out from behind the camera. The little hellion on his shoulders is David. This is probably the closest he ever got to sitting still.
Me in front of the wine barrels. Good Wine too, to bad I couldn't sneak off with a few of those. I'll give Chile this. They do make good wine. We came home with the legal limit.
This is the first of the family pictures. Here is Monica in the front with Karen and Denise (left to right) at Monica and Dani's apartment. That's Andres in the background playing Frogger.
Family picture number 2. From left to right this will be Karen, Denise, Eva (my grandmother's cousin and how I'm related to this bunch in the first place), me and Monica.
Monica *THOUGHT* we wouldn't take her picture if she hid behind her hair... She was wrong.
This is all the family that was there that night. From left to right we have...
Jorge, Phil, Monica, Karen, Andres, Denise, Eva, Ivonne, David, Dani, and me. This picture only
took 3 tries after we figured out how to use the automatic timer on my camera. And thanks to the
wonders imaging programs I managed to take the giant expanse of table out of the front of it too.
This is San Cristobal. My grandfather quips that this is the "Only Virgin in Chile." It's certainly the most famous. This is the picture that you will see in all the guidebooks, the middle school social studies books, or the "Visit Santiago" type brochures. Of course their pictures are somehow missing the radio towers, smog and tourists... This is also the home of the zoo, that favorite attraction of David and Andres. Unfortunately Andres' leg wasn't healed enough to walk through it, and it was too hilly for the chair, and while I'd carry him up the one flight to his apartment, or even up the four flights to Vivi's apartement, I don't think I could have handled carrying him through the zoo.
This was dinner at Vivi's house. We got really good at taking the bus to Vivi's house. The only problem was knowing when to get off, and then figuring out how to walk to where we should be after we got off 6 or 7 stops too early. I'll say one thing for the buses in Santiago though. You could get just about anywhere you needed to go and there was no problem waiting for buses, 2 or three come along in any given 30 second period. I think by far they are the most prevolent vehicles on the road. They also cost next to nothing to ride. A bus ride costs 80 pesos. This tranlates roughly to less than a quarter. Students ride for even less. Their fare was somewhere less than a dime.
Anyways, from left to right we have
Jorge, Phil, Andres, Vivi, Valy, Deby, Ivonne, David and me.
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