Comfortable (but not too comfortable) in Chile

I feel sad today.

We're leaving Santiago tomorrow and I'm not ready to go.

Before we got here I had no expectations, maybe even low expectations, of the city.

Lonely Planet told me, "Santiago might be dirty and loud, and it might not match the grandeur of Buenos Aires - but it is cultured, quirky and ambitious."

Well, my first impressions of Santiago went something like...



Holy cow, are those mountains?





What a pretty neighborhood (Providencia & Ñuñoa)!



What a pretty street!





What a cool (and clean) apartment!



And a real kitchen! With a gas range, dishwasher, and a washer-dryer to boot. We're back in civilization, folks!

And then (drumroll please)...



A real smile on the other side of the table as a steaming, fragrant platter of perfectly seared Eastern Island tuna and octopus appeared in front of us at La Mar restaurant.

Not so shabby, Santiago. I wonder if Lonely Planet has been to BA recently, because what I remember more than the "grandeur" was a whole lotta this:



Lots and lots of formerly grand, and now broken, sidewalks.

As we settled into our flat in Santiago and went about daily life, I discovered...



There are roses...



Everywhere.



Plus, there's a real, 100+ year-old, central market called La Vega. According to Liz Caskey, a surprisingly young sommelier, chef, and local food-and-wine guide, La Vega stretches for 24 acres of...



artichokes,



as many as *nine* different varieties of avocado,



chiles, which Chilenos call ají, the most Chilean of which is the rocoto pepper.

You can buy nice salsas made with rocoto and other peppers in little 200-peso (about US$0.40) sacks. I created a tabla for E with a selection of salsas (including rocoto), fresh carrots (1/2 kilo for another US$0.40), cancha (toasted corn), and toasted habas, or fava beans.



Habas in their fresh form are abundant and have an attractive luminous, fuzzy skin...



One other wonderful thing you can get at La Vega is fresh merkén, a fabulous Chilean invention of smoked cacho de cabra chiles and dried coriander seeds (some versions may have cumin?).



Markets aside (and I highly recommend buying Liz's US$27 eatwineguide for its glossary and market intro), we couldn't get enough of the ceviche in Chile...



at the afore-mentioned La Mar,



at Astrid y Gastón, Gastón Acurio's mothership restaurant in the whole AyG, La Mar, Tanta, Madam Tusan stable of restaurants,



and at the old school, slightly weird, and very yummy, Barandiaran restaurant. Be very, very careful with their pisco sours, by the way. They come out of a plastic soda-counter juice machine and hit you like a Mack truck.

The life-blood of all of this Peruvian ceviche is leche de tigre. If you haven't yet tried it, you are in for a treat. Of course, everyone disagrees about what goes in it, but it's some combination of lime juice, aji (chili), ginger, and maybe cilantro, black pepper, and fish juice of some kind. It jump starts all of your senses at once. Awesome and invigorating.

We ate more Peruvian food in Santiago than any other type of cuisine. Maybe we should go to Lima, E mused. Then he asked a (Peruvian) waiter at Barandiaran if Lima was safe. The waiter kind of shrugged his shoulders and made a "weeeelll" sound. Hmm.

We were also happy to find an abundance of French bistro-style restaurants, among which my favorite was charming Le Flaubert where we had a simple artichoke salad followed by delicious beef with rosemary and rock salt. Yum, yum, yum.





To my surprise there is are also a large number of Basque restaurants in Santiago. Proportionally, I'd say as many as there are Japanese restaurants in NYC.

Apparently, Basque descendents are at least 10% of the Chilean population. Basque folks were some of the first European settlers of Chile, arriving en force as traders and entrepreneurs in the 18th century. They were successful in business and married well too, so their descendents are supposedly well-represented among Chile's "elite."

The Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno once said, "The Jesuits and the Republic of Chile are the two great feats of the Basque people."

Interesting.

I would add that a minor feat of the Basque people in Chile is machas a la parmesana (razor clams au gratin). Oh my god, so friggin' decadent, but so, so good.



If the very charming waiter at the (all-smoking!) restaurant Txoko Alavés hadn't suggested it, we might have missed out on this delectable dish. It's one of those things where the magic of the texture -- the firmness of the razor clambs, the chewiness of the baked cheese -- harmonizes magically with the rich flavors -- pink clam juice and parmesan sweetness.Yay!



And, of course, the waiter won my heart when he ran back to the kitchen and brought out a raw clam to show me what a macha was.



Did you know there are Palestinians in Chile too? They first started coming to Chile in the 19th century, and there are now about 500,000 Palestinian descendants in Chile, making it the largest such community outside of the Middle East. There is a professional futbal (soccer) club in Chile called Club Deportivo Palestino and a prestigious social club called Club Palestino founded in 1938. Interesting! Arab Chileans in general make up 5% of Chile's population.

(Sorry, I'm a data nerd. Can't help it.)

One tasty biproduct of this immigration is Bombón Oriental, an Arab sweets shop in the Lastarria neighborhood of Santiago. Besides having a charming old-fashioned sign, their windows are filled with decadent and intriguing cakes.



After much deliberation, I settled on this delicate, multi-layered poppy seed and orange rind glaze cake. Really a nice afternoon treat. There was another cake with walnuts and manjar that had me drooling too ;-)



All of this culinary diversity is kind of a surprise.

For years I've thought about Chileans as the "Germans of South America." I think my Chilean macroeconomics professor planted this seed in my head. He said that Chileans were so "German" he could only hold down one full-time job in Chile, whereas in Argentina he had two ;-)

Without getting into the whole German migration story, we didn't find Santiaguinos to be "German" at all (I'll let you infer for yourselves what that might mean). Maybe this has to do with the influence of all of these other cultures (Peruvian, Basque, French, Palestinian).

If anything, I would describe Santiaguinos as...

Very funny, in an understated and kind of cool way. People were busting my chops right and left, and I couldn't help laughing. For example, after I answered the immigration officer at the airport in lugubrious Spanish, he told me, "In Chile we speak more cortito" (i.e., short). And then he taught me a new word, altiro, which means "right now!" in local slang.

Irreverent and not-all-that law-abiding. Taxis would pull crazy u-turns, crossing eight lanes of traffic to pick you up if there was no cop in sight. Unfortunately, they also cheerfully ripped me off right and left without hesitation too.

Goofy! Before our trip, a friend described Chileans as "the wooden people." And it's true that people have their poker faces on walking down the street. But oddly enough, there are Santiaguinos juggling in traffic, singing love songs on the bus, and walking tight-rope between city trees next to stoplights to earn a few bucks.



Lovers...of people and dogs. I got piropo-d up and down in this town. Big wet kisses out the window, I'm telling you. I also saw a fair amount of shnugging in public parks. But what really cracked me up was people's sweetness toward dogs.

In Santiago, dogs are just walking around free, as if they were independent people. In a city of 5+ million people. You'll see them ownerless and leashless standing next to you in the crosswalk, waiting to cross. Even more so, you'll see them taking siestas, flat on their sides, like pancakes, particularly at 3pm in the afternoon. One dog I saw in a perfect state of relaxation flat on his back in rush hour foot traffic. Clearly, people treat these dogs well, otherwise how could they be this relaxed?







People seemed relaxed in Santiago too. You can feel that there is money in the economy right now. It's like good blood flow. People are cheerfully walking their children to school, taking ballet classes, riding bikes. People's houses are well cared for... You don't do those things when you're desperate for work.

Where does this money come from?

This is something that made me nervous about enjoying myself too much, or allowing myself to be too charmed by the life in Santiago.

That blood coursing through the city's veins comes from mining. According to the CIA World Factbook, copper mining alone accounts for 1/3 of government revenue. There are smart people in Chile. They don't want to suffer the same boom-and-bust of nitrate mining in the 19th century so they're hedging against this exposure...

The Chilean government conducts a rule-based countercyclical fiscal policy, accumulating surpluses in sovereign wealth funds during periods of high copper prices and economic growth, and allowing deficit spending only during periods of low copper prices and growth. As of September 2008, those sovereign wealth funds - kept mostly outside the country and separate from Central Bank reserves - amounted to more than $20 billion. Chile used $4 billion from this fund to finance a fiscal stimulus package to fend off recession. (CIA World Factbook)

That's nice, but I still feel nervous. On some level it's a visceral nervousness. Last weekend, we went on a very strange tour to El Teniente outside of Santiago. El Teniente is the largest underground copper mine in the world.









We took a bus deep into the heart of a mountain of solid rock, 6 km into the heart. (The guide said there are 3000 km of tunnels inside the mountain.)



Once inside this cold, damp, dark, heavy-feeling place, we saw the enormous "crunching" equipment for breaking down large rocks into smaller rocks (which get broken down into smaller and smaller rocks before the copper is extracted).



...and then we saw the little "crystal cavern," a pocket of water that had remained sealed for 4,000 years in which massive crystals had grown (the one we saw was more than 2 m long and almost 1 m wide) in this rare environment.



After seeing this, I don't know why, but I just wanted to get out of there. Like I had done something wrong. There's something about drilling into the core of this mountain that felt like a real desecration, in the same way that deep water oil drilling seems so deeply disrespectful. It feels dangerous. Not that the mining itself puts workers at risk, but that interacting with these massive mountains in this way seems really dumb.

Some other things made me nervous too...

Although all the guide books reassured me that Santiago is one of the safest cities in Latin America, while we were there students were burning buses and coordinating protests across the city, which somehow felt like terrorist events. The students are protesting inequality in education and demanding free education from the government.



This tension may have been one of the reasons the police (called the Carabineros de Chile) in Santiago seemed so spooky. I saw them on powerful motorbikes and horses rushing aggressively around the Parque Forestal as if to scare and scatter people.

But it's also the Carabineros' uniforms, which are highly militaristic, and their logo, which has two crossed rifles and the words "Orden y Patria" (order and the fatherland). To me, the logo looks like "keeping people in order, with guns."





This creeps me out because it resonates with the belief of former Pinochet supporters, that the human rights abuses of his regime were necessary to keep order and restore the economy that was faltering in Allende's hands.

Pinochet rejected the idea of an activist state and instead talked about the need to modernize Chile, with the exclusion of political liberties. Inspired by the works of Hayek and Friedman, and working with the so-called "Chicago Boys", the military government introduced an austere and extremely radical neo-liberal economic plan. For Pinochet, this model of development meant freeing market forces, privatizing vast segments of the economy, the reversal of both Frei and Allende's land reforms, and withdrawing the state from its previous role in overseeing economic and social change. The economic liberalization model, however, was coupled with severe political repression and human suffering. (Oxford Dictionary of Political Biography)

I learned something new about Pinochet too. Apparently he was thought to be a supporter of democracy and constitutional government...until he wasn't. He held his cards close to his chest until he saw the opportunity to seize control. Of course, the opportunity was provided by my fabulous country, as CIA documents declassified in 2003 show.

Why Chileans don't hate us Norteamericanos baffles me. But actually I'm not sure that Chileans don't hate NAs. Maybe they just hold their cards close to their chests. People called me gringo in Chile, which was sort of a shock. Gringo, to me connotes the edgy us-and-them dynamic in USA-Mexico relationships. I was walking around Santiago thinking it was all just "us," but people kept reminding me how we gringos get better technology, get better education, have more in general than they Chileans do.

It's gradually sinking in for us that there may be no place on the planet where us gringo-gweilos are welcomed with open arms.