Lost on Cerros and Partying Santiago Style

Friday in Santiago was my chance to explore the city a bit more on my own, so although to be perfectly honest, there isn't that much for a tourist to see. I did a little walking from the hostel around the center and the parque forestal (stuff I'd already seen the day before) before heading up to Providencia, the neighborhood of the Stanford center and what Annie from the Stanford program refers to as the "upper east side" of Santiago.

This neighborhood was full of fancy buildings and businesspeople and bookshops, although it didn't really excite me all that much. The real reason I came up to that neighborhood was to get access to the teleferico, or gondola, up to the Cerro San Cristobal, which is the highest point in downtown Santiago and home to the 70-foot statue of the Virgin Mary. I got a decent view of the city, although the combination of clouds and smog made the view slightly less than inspiring.

Normally you can access the summit of the cerro either by the gondola from Providencia or a funicular train from Bellavista (next to my hostel) although the funicular is closed for repairs until December. So once I reached the top, and had a chance to look around, I figured it made more sense to descend the 1000-foot hill on foot rather than take the gondola back to the wrong neighborhood and have to schlep back from there. This all went fine for a while, the train was pretty steep but that just meant I would be down and off this hill all the sooner. I was utterly alone, and saw only one couple of teenagers who were probably looking for a discreet location to smooch. About a third of the way down, however, the trail flattened, and suddenly I had walked for about 20 minutes and not descended one bit. I started worrying that I'd made a wrong turn, or worse, that this trail didn't actually go to the bottom and I would have to climb back up to the top of the mountain. For most of this time I could see the skyscrapers of the downtown, although eventually the trail curved behind the mountain and I lost sight of them which prompted me to turn around. At this point my thoughts turned towards separating my cash and ATM cards into different pockets as well as slipping the memory card of my camera into the coin pocket of my jeans so as to avoid losing all were I to run into some less than welcoming people. Just after that, as I was backtracking, I ran into a man who didn't look too mean, so I tried asking him for directions on how to get to the bottom, and he reassured me that I had been going the right way all along, and it was just around the bend. I felt a bit silly turning around again, but I persevered, and after another 15 minutes of walking I came to an intersection with the trail to the bottom and another (presumably more direct) trail to the top. All told it took less than an hour and a half to get down, but it sure felt like longer!

Money back in the wallet and nerves calmed, I grabbed a quick shower before heading out to the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art and then to meet Raul for dinner. The museum was fine, and small, which was good seeing as it closed only 30 minutes after I got there.

Earlier, I received a facebook message from a girl who either through Raul or Matt heard that I was Jewish and visiting Chile, and invited me to go to a Kabalat Shabbat service at a local Reform congregation. Raul, partly out of curiosity and partly out of hospitality, offered to come along, which was nice because ultimately the girl who invited me in the first place didn't show. This was a very different experience than the ones I'd had in Buenos Aires, as the Jewish community in Santiago is much smaller than the Argentinian one. The only Reform congregation had recently lost it's synagogue to some sort of development project, and although I didn't get all of the details, the whole thing seemed really depressing. Now they were meeting for Shabbat in a hotel's meeting room, using photocopies for siddurim. About sixty people showed up for the service, which really surprised me for a service in a hotel, but it was ultimately nice and welcoming. Since we arrived early we shmoozed a bit with the rabbi, who was actually American, and some of the other attendees including two American girls on study abroad--one of which attended my same middle school, Welsh Valley. The service went on pretty long as we patiently listened to the rabbi's somewhat inarticulate explanation of Shabbat T'shuvah (the one before Yom Kippur), which was made even less convincing by his poor knowledge of Spanish, before heading out to get on with the fun part of our night.

We stopped by the house of one of Raul's friends, Rodrigo, to pick him up before grabbing dinner at none other than Burger King. This was after much protest from yours truly, seeing as I hadn't come all the way to Chile to eat American corporate garbage, but they insisted, and it was about the only option we had. Having swallowed my shame at American cultural exports, we got in the subway, met up with a third friend, Cristobal, and went to a birthday party. The birthday party was for one of Raul's friends, who is actually Nicaraguan. Raul jokes that due since he participates in an intercambio, more of his friends are foreign than actually Chilean, and at this party I met kids from Brazil and France among others. Spanish was the language of choice though, so I was able to hold my own at least a little bit. Cristobal and Rodrigo had both spent summers working at American ski resorts (thanks to the opposite seasons), so their English was good, and one of the Brazilian girls was the daughter of a diplomat and had actually spent high school in Boston, where he was a consul.

After blowing out the candles, we left in a taxi for Bellavista, this time to actually see what there was of gay nightlife in Santiago. There were four of us, which was a fun number, and helped when we realized that most of the clientele at the Bunker discotheque were quite older. We danced for a while and then watched a slapstick drag show, staying until about 4am. Then it was a walk back to the hostel, sleep, and off to the bus station to head to Mendoza.