miércoles, 23 de febrero de 2011
Después yo llegue en Santiago.
First word of advice to any Gringos headed to Chile or anywhere else in Latin America: Fly LAN Chile, best airplane experience I've had since a Delta pilot gave me plastic wings in first grade. As if the 44 different on demand movies and other in flight entertainment weren't splendid enough, nothing quite compares to landfall on the Chilean coast during sunrise in the southern hemisphere. The landscape looks as if the mountains and the sea went through a nasty divorce and a family-court judge had to draw a line down the center to end the vicious competition for property. Except in this case it's the massive and barren Andes meeting the vast Pacific Ocean, all expressed as one of nature's more beautiful love children.
The landing in Santiago was extremely smooth. As an expression of their appreciation the Chileans made a nostalgically old gesture by applauding the pilot's handiwork. The Arturo Benítez Aeropuerto de Santiago is about the size of the Providence airport in Rhode Island, and is constructed a good distance northeast of downtown Santiago. It is surrounded to the south and to the east by a semi-sprawl of shanty houses mixed in with apartment buildings. The most interesting observation I made while driving through these areas to downtown was the presence of television satellites fixed to the side of the shanty houses. In my opinion, this confusion of priorities is fairly hard to understand, but I suppose one does have to watch those all important fútbol matches.
After a fifteen-plus hour travel experience I was hard pressed to switch into Spanish mode when I was initially greeted at the airport, but not too long into the day I found myself more comfortable both listening and speaking the language. By far and a way my reading skills are the most proficient, next is my listening which is about 80% proficient with Spanish and American taught speakers, and maybe about 50% with the native Chileans. Last place goes to speaking, which although understandable, is both awkward structurally and grammatically incoherent (so too is my English as I'm sure many of you will point out). At this moment, the eve of my second day in Chile, I am happy to report that I feel more comfortable in each aspect of Spanish than I did yesterday. I hope this trend continues.
The transition from the less developed neighborhoods to the commercial district of downtown Santiago is fairly smooth with a "natural" progression of increasing building density and gradual rise in the quality of construction. By the time I arrived at the hotel I scarcely noticed I had reached a major city center. Santiago has many buildings that are twenty to thirty stories tall, but they are fairly dispersed throughout the city so the city appears smaller than the six million population would suggest. The venue for my first Chilean meal was picked by Lise-Anne, the director of George Washington's Latin America study abroad program. She took us to an observatory restaurant with a 360 degree rotating floor in a downtown skyscraper. From the vantage point we could see most of the city, a brief outline of the impressive mountain range obscured almost entirely by dust, and a half completed concrete frame of the tallest building in South America. The city beams of ambition, a welcome idol in difficult times.
At any rate, I saw an Alfa Romeo Brera today on the street, which is interesting because Fiat hasn't had an American presence in decades. Anyways, hopefully every subsequent blog can be concluded by as meaningful an automobile anecdote as this one was.
Buenas Noches,
Charles
"Don Juan"
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