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When we first got to to Santiago, the TV’s in the Metro were playing Coldplay songs in constant rotation. I am already not a fan, as I think their songs are really unoriginal and downright formulaic, and it didn’t help to hear the same three four of them mixed with loud train noise over and over. Then one day, Coldplay was thankfully gone, replace by old Eric Clapton videos. When I say old, I mean Clapton back when he was cool, with long hair, playing Bad Love and Leila. Yeah. Then, a few days ago, Clapton was gone and I am treated to Beyonce wearing some skimpy gown and singing some sappy song on the mornings when I foget my iPod.

Speaking of the Metro, which I know I have been rambling about, but it really is brand new and pretty interesting, the city has placed a lot of art galleries within the Metro stations. This sounds really crazy if you imagine most American public transportation stations with some kind of art displays, but it seems the Metro here was originally designed to have this kind of thing and it’s really nice. The stations are all different, but very cleanly designed and modern, and there is actually space reserved for these art displays, so it makes the stations a kind of underground community center. You can see informations about all the displays they have at the Metro Culutura website.

In one of the newer stations, there is even a free movie theater that shows historical films most of the time and has a film series every Sunday for only a hundred pesos ($.20). So far I have seen some very good movies, but that came to an end last sunday when the regularly scheduled one was unavailalbe, so they showed a subtitled High Fidelity. I am really tired of this movie. I hate it when supposedly realistic movies have self-absorbed, oblivious losers dating beautiful galmorous women, and this movie has it in spades. Yes, the movie has lots of amusing moments whenever Jack Black is on the screen, and I never realized how much real stuff about Chicago is mentioned, but the ending is stupid, takes too long, and doesn’t really resolve the problem that is the premise of the film.

I am writing this post from beautiful moonlight Mendoza, Argentina. I would have posted about the journey beforehand, but the last two times I did that, it ended up not happening, first becuase of a freakish week-long snowstorm, then becuase the bus was full, so I couldn’t get a ticket. So, I didn´t want to jinx the trip again by posting before I actually got here, especially since it was getting down to the last hour. My three month tourist card expires tomorrow, so if I hadn´t made it, I would be facing a very steep fine right now.

Mendoza is the first big town you reach after going through the closest pass through the Andes from Santiago. If you have ever been to Boulder, Colorado, just imagine a copy of that town where you can actually afford *everything* in the town (even those really big geodes and authentic looking Buddha statues). Yes, everything in this town is incredibly cheap. Stuff costs about the same amount in pesos as it does in dollars, but an Argentinian peso is about a third of a dollar. So it´s easy to figure out if you are paying a fair price : you just look for somethign that would look right if you paid for it in dollars. Plus at the end of the day you have only spent a third of the money you would have at home.

But wait, there´s a catch. You see Mendoza is actually vey dangerous. The sidewalk is very uneven, and I have almost twisted my ankle literally three times, becuase I was staring at one of the many ravishing young women and stepped over about a 6 inch drop in the pavement. Luckily, my tongue wasn´t hanging out at the time like that womanizing wolf in the cartoons, becuase I would have bit it really hard when my mouth snapped shut.

Mendoza has lots of plazas and pedestrian malls like those pictures of Europe, and you can see the mountains from this town too. I never realized how nice it is to see forested hills or craggy mountains from anywhere in a city until I returned to Charleston from Chicago for the first time.

I spent most of the day walking around, then I took a tour of two wineries. One was really big, and as usual with this kind of stuff, the thing that captivated everyone´s attention was the the bottling and packing line. As part of the line, individuall bottles were filled, placed in bloxes, and then the boxes were stacked 6×6x6 on a palette and shrink wrapped, all completely automatically. They also had a wine testing chemistry lab. You can tell it was a laboratory becuase there was a man in a white coat doing absolutely nothing. (Zing!)

I at a delicious steak on the pedestrian mall, and now I am going to go to the central plaza and see what happens there after dark , before I catch a bus back at midnight.

Just writing all that stuff about Santiago made me notice some other things to tell.

Santiaguinos smoke like chimneys. I think some of the younger physics professors don’t, but pretty much everyone does. You can also smoke in many other places that you wouldn’t expect, like any restaurant, public space in academic buildings, and government buildings. I was in a bank past closing time because I was waiting for a fax from the US, and as soon as the customers left, all the employees started smoking in the bank!

They are also very shy in Santiago. Everyone seems lost in thought on the metro and they don’t even acknowledge invasions of personal space or bump-ins. I got many mystified looks when apologizing for bumping into someone, or hitting them with my elbow, etc.

The Metro is brand new, very clean, and very crowded. You can tell the mtero is new, becuase the Santiaguinos don´t seemd to have figured out the proper way to board and exit the train. They often try to get on before everyone has left so that there is a big jam at the entrance, and it ends up taking even longer. Oftentimes, there are situations where the train is full but plenty of people are waiting to get on. Then the metro station becomes a shoving match, with the people on the train bracing themselves to avoid being crushed by onslaught of people being pushed from behind into the train. Eventually equilibrium is reached, and the doors slide closed, slicing a thin line between the lucky and the unlucky.

Looking back over the blog entries, I see that most of the info I have given about Santiago has just been incidental to whatever story I was telling about myself at the time. Since I promised this would be a real travelogue (travelblog?), here’s some info to give you an idea about what it’s like day to day in Santiago.

Chile is a very civilized country. Except for rent, which is phenomenally cheap, the cost of living is about the same as in the United States. Food is slightly cheaper, and electronics are slightly more expensive. Oh, and books are outrageously expensive! No one seems to have an explanation for why the Lonely Planet South America on a Shoestring, which costs 22.50 USD, costs 38,000 CLP ($73) in Santiago! The two shelves of books my roommate has must have cost a fortune.

They have Coke and Pepsi in Santiago, but also local flavors of pop. These are called hilariously in my opinion: Kem, Bilz and Pap. All three of them taste terrible. There is a sign on a bus stop down the street for something called Kem X-treme, but I haven’t seen it anywhere else, so it must not be doing so well. The corporate spokesthings for Bilz and Pap are red and yellow…..aliens? teletubbies? It’s hard to tell, but they sure seem to be enjoying themselves. Yes, like most Latin American countries, Coke is much sweeter and less bubbly here.

Santiaguinos dress very conservatively. Men over 40 are usually wearing at least a knit sweater with a tie, and usually a business suit. Women also wear business suits during the day. Remember it’s been winter here, but I haven’t seen many girls in skimpy outfits at bars and dance clubs. Apparently all the skimpy outfits are inside establishments called Cafe’ con Piernas, (Coffee with Legs) which are coffee bars, but with mirrorred walls and scantily-clad waitresses for men to ogle, which they come all the way from other countries to do.

Chile is still a very Catholic country, and does not have any kind of divorce law. I wish I had the words to ask if this results in a lot of marriages that persist in name only, and how socially accepted this is.

Santiago is very polluted, and at one time was the most polluted city in the world. Regulations have helped ease the conditions somewhat, but it can be very cloudy in some areas, and apparently there are some days when it is not recommended to go outside. Apparently the micros are big part of the problem, and they are slowly being replaced with more modern buses, but any pollution that is created doesn’t blow away because of the proximity of the Andes just to the east. This keeps a lot of the pollution from dispersing, so that it stays close to the city for quite a long time. Since the weather has gotten warmer, it seems that the cloudiness has gotten a lot better. I use the Cerro San Cristobal, visible from my window to judge the pollution that day. Sometimes I can see it it completely, but sometimes it’s almost totally obscured. Gross.

On Thursday, I called up a now ex-friend (keep reading) and asked her if she wanted to meet for a drink in one of the cozy little places near my apartment. She said that she was already going dancing at a club in Las Condes called Static and invited me to go with her. This was not for few hours, and I haven’t been getting up very early so I decided to see how I felt and call her back. At about midnight, I was feeling tired enough to go right to sleep, but she just kept shouting “No, no, no, I am going on vacation tomrrow; you have to come.” I had recently decided that I should try to make decisions as if it were twenty years later and I were looking back on the situation. Forty year old Joe would want me to have as much fun as possible, consequences be damned. (Hi forty year old me. How’s Vanessa?) Anyway, I figured I should go, but I should have smelled trouble when I couldn’t find Plaza San Enrique on a map. No matter, I set out on one of the trusty micros eastward to Las Condes, the easternmost comuna in Santiago. The people all kept saying the plaza was much farther, until someone told me to get off and take another one down Avenida Las Condes. A middle-aged man was waiting at the bus stop, so I struck up a conversation with him. Soon, we were joined by another man in a very nice suit, who spoke some English. When I told him where I was from he said, “Ah, Chicago! Lake Michigan, Windy City, wonderful!” We went through what I was doing in Santiago and what I thought of the city and Chile as a whole. He asked me if I understood quantum mechanics, and I replied that although some people say that no one in the world understand what it “means”, I understand how it works. “Amazing”, he replied, “here is a man all the way from Chicago, he understands quantum mechanics, and here he is waiting for the bus with us! Imagine!” I think he was very drunk.

Eventually, we started to lose hope that a bus would come, and they started trying to bargain with taxi drivers to carry all of us to our destinations. The man in the nice suit had only 500CLP ($.90) on him and we had a good laugh at his expense when he tried to explain why he was dressed so nicely and had barely enough to ride the bus home. Eventually we found a taxi driver willing to take everyone at the bus stop for the price we offered, plus a woman who said the would have her husband pay when she arrived at home. Everyone got but the two of us, and guess what! he husband wasn’t home. I felt really bad for the taxi driver, since I had seen this one coming a long way off.

We arrived at the Plaza, and I noticed that the club was in one of those large pre-frabriacted buildings that, in the US, are so common on industrial farms. I remember her saying that the place was very modern, but I thought that meant it had cutting-edge design, and interesting lighting, not that the whole thing had actually been assembled last week. Oh well, if I had fun dancing, it would be worth it. I handed the guy the 3,000CLP entrance fee, and for some reason he handed it back to me along with the entrance.

Since it was only about 2:00am at this point, still early by Chilean dance club standards, the club was almost empty and it was easy to see that my friend was definitely not in there. What was there were some 16-18 years olds dancing with each other awkwardly to terrible, terrible music in front of video projection screen showing a live conert by Moby (?). E_____ said that they were leaving before midnight and I would be sure to catch them if I got there after 1:00.

So, she stood me up. At that point, I began to review my history with this girl. Since I was in a foul mood at this point, the meditations took the form of the accusatory second person…

We hung out the a few times at the Residencia with the other Chicago guys, and we went to Kama Sutra, where you amused me a great deal with you girly antics [as detailed here]. Despite your claim of being bored with this country because you had already been inside three discoteques and to La Serena [a town out in the desert], you seemed eager to go to the places I wanted to go, so I was glad to have some company. You agreed to go to Cerro San Cristobal with me, but it was rainy that day, so I asked you if wanted to go to a movie instead. You agreed, and then emailed to cancel a few minutes later because some other people did not want to see the same movie as us. I did not understand what this had to do with you, me or our plans. Hmm……

Later, I asked if you wanted to go to the Caijon del Maipo, and I was not exaggerating when I said it was one of the most beautiful places I had ever been. You seemed genuinely excited, and I said I would call you to make sure you woke up. At 10:30 the next morning, you were not answering your phone, and you continued not to answer it until I stopped calling around 1ish. You never apologized for this until I called, not you, but someone who lived with you, and asked them if they wanted to come over and have some spaghetti that I was making. I got an email shortly where you said that you were sorry and that “[someone] should have figured it wasnt gonna happen!” Did you mean that I should have figured? How would I have known this? That you should have figured? Well, then why did agree to come along in the first place? This same email requested that I bring the spaghetti to you, and that you would help me eat it. Presumably, I would put all the spaghetti in a pot, carry it on the micros which you don’t even ride, and then carry it the last four blocks, or pay for a taxi myself so that I wouldn’t have to carry it. Woman, what are you smoking, or what have you been smoking for the last few weeks since this behavior started? Hmm…

Now, I am at a club in the middle of nowhere, where you begged me to come over my objections. This night is going to cost me about $20 after I take a cab ride home. And you’re. not. here. To paraphrase King Lear, I am trying to think deeply wherein I may have offended you. I wouldn’t have though twice if you hadn’t just said you didn’t want to do these thing. But why would you act the way you did? Do you treat everyone the same way, as if their time and convenience had never occurred to you, or is there something special in my case? I hope it’s the latter, but I’ll probably never know, since I don’t plan to see you again. I wonder if I should try to get revenge on you, by devising some invitation that you can’t resist and then stranding you somewhere where it will be amazingly hard to get back. No, you don’t seem like a worthy adversary, I don’t have a vengeful personality, and if you couldn’t be bothered to go to such a beautiful spot as Caijon del Maipo, even after I told you how great it was, you would probably just not show up anyway.

To be fair, she could have shown up, realized that the club was lame and left really early. I did try to call, but one payphone did not accept any coins and the other had a non-functional “3″ button so it was impossible to call her number. Oh well, it’s not like I was going to get much done the next day at work anyway.