We’re back in the bustling city of Santiago. We’ve been tactfully avoiding the Law of Inconvenient One Way Streets by finding these long stretches of bike paths that take us to different sections of the city.
Yesterday we took the metro out to the area called Las Condes, which almost feels like it’s own city. The people there aren’t protesting – they’re probably the wealthy ones. Amongst the leafy streets and un-graffitied apartment blocks, we found a store where we bought a tent and sleeping bags for our imminent desert escapades.
We ended the day at a screening of Almodóvar’s “High Heels”, which I was only able to follow (no subtitles, not even in Spanish!) because I snuck out and read the wiki plot summary in the first few minutes. I’m so far away from actually being able to understand fluent, fast Spanish …
Today, we visited four different museums, at a cost to our wallet of … nothing. Entry to the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, the Fine Arts Museum, the National History Museum and the open-air sculpture museum on the banks of the river are all free. I think the first is the one I’d recommend highest – it’s a deep dive into the dark side of the Pinochet dictatorship and how the people came together to protest the human rights abuses during it, and ultimately bring it to an end. The displays are sensitive and comprehensive. Seeing some of the photos of the water trucks mowing down protesters makes me realise why some Chileans are reminded of the dictatorship in the police response to the current protests.
Here’s our final insight into the protests – something we’ll be watching closely on the news from now on. While it’s only a Wednesday, the streets near the epicentre were still heaving with people and police vehicles were shooting water and tear gas. (I’m always confused about the presence of police here. It really doesn’t calm things down. It only triggers a more heated and destructive response.)
Someone turned my stolen iPhone on today in Santiago, so we leapt on our bikes and peddled our way down to what we found to be, when we got there, the dodgiest block in the dodgiest suburb of Santiago. It’s a market filled with thousands of phone shops, and it was closed. We scooted out of there empty-handed, and we’ve been ignoring the spam texts sneakily trying to elicit passcodes and the like. Cyber security vigilance! (Read it in a Mad Eye Moody voice, if you feel like it.) You can’t have enough of it.
So, so, so very excited to bring stories from the desert shortly.
VRPS
[Santiago]
The Two Swords 