Sometimes I Feel Like All I Do is Climb Hills and Spend Money

On Friday, we went to a little town on the outskirts of Santiago called María Pinto to take a look at rural clinics and ask questions about how they work. Our first stop was at a little house for the most amazing lunch. We had salad, empanadas, sopaipillas (basically just fried bread), and pevre, which is basically a really mild salsa with tomatoes, onions, and cilantro. It’s really, really simple but it’s delicious. It was really the first time I got to have fresh vegetables and it was a welcome change. The desert was “1000 Layer Cake” and it definitely almost killed me. But it was delicious. 

Sopaipilla

Grapevines outside the house we ate lunch at

Honestly, my only complaint of what was otherwise a really interesting trip was how quickly we had to move from one place to another. Luckily, the second clinic we went to, a rural post, didn’t have any doctor’s hours that day and it was empty so we could walk around freely, but first clinic we went to was a SAPU, which is a primary care clinic where the majority of patients are unable to pay, was pretty crowded with patients and people waiting for a consult. I really didn’t like that we were a big group of people, a lot of us speaking loudly in English, walking around and taking pictures of the hospital and asking teachers what exactly we should try and capture for the assignment we’d have to turn in later. I mean I understand that there are certain ways that these types of trips have to be done but it still felt a little uncomfortable. The clinics were pretty amazing though. The post that we stopped at is run completely on money they receive from the government, and they were recently able to build a little room in which they can do small, mostly topical surgeries. I think my favorite part was seeing all the bulletin boards full of prevention tips and education pamphlets in both the SAPU and the post. In a rural area where health care isn’t always readily available, I think that’s the most important thing to focus on.

Education posters!

The new small surgery OR at the rural post

I never really understood how great public transportation is until I completely depended on it. It’s pretty easy to get around with the metro system here, but it can get really irritating during the morning and evening rush hours…people are really pushy and I’m really not so there are times where I get pushed on and off the metro just by sheer force of busy people who apparently have more important places to be than I do. 

My metro stop

What I love about the metro in a city as gigantic as Santiago is that every stop is like a whole new world. On Saturday, we took a quick metro ride to Santa Lucía, which is kind of a double whammy as far as things to do. On one side of the metro station is a huge market with artisan crafts, bags, touristy things, and lots and lots of lapislázuli, while on the other side is Cerro Santa Lucía, which is a small hill full of dangerous stairways, fountains, gardens, and towers. Needless to say, the marketplace was overwhelmingly amazing. We walked around four pathways full of stores on both sides until we got hungry, but when we left the marketplace we realized that there were at least 20 other pathways we didn’t know existed. I had to physically restrain Claire. It was horrifying. I swear my wallet started crying.

One teeny tiny part of the marketplace

After lunch, we went to Cerro Santa Lucía. I was a little bit scared after our last experience with climbing a hill especially because it was again an unseasonably warm day. Luckily, this cerro had absolutely nothing on Cerro San Cristobal, which was a 45-degree incline the whole way up. This hill had some stairways with uneven stairs but with railings and it was pretty much a flat climb all the way through. That being said, everything that this hill had to offer was absolutely gorgeous. It was kind of like Pablo Neruda’s house…there were a lot of random things in random places but somehow it all fit together beautifully. There were little wooden statues, tiny fountains that were trying really hard to be spectacular, and an absolutely beautiful view from the top. The view was similar to Cerro San Cristobal but zoomed in since Cerro Santa Lucía is nowhere close to as tall as Cerro San Cristobal.

The little fountain that could

For some reason, every picture Claire and I took that day looked like a couple picture

Claire wouldn't let me take the elevator. I was upset

Tower!

Gahhh, I love this city

On Sunday evening, Maddie and I met up with a Chilean girl, Mané, we had met while we were eating dinner at Patio Bellavista. She and her friends are design students at Católica and they’re doing a project that involves designing a non-alcoholic cocktail to be sold abroad. Maddie and I were kind of like their guinea pigs as far as trying the different cocktail recipes they had come up with and it was SO much fun! It was really nice to just be able to sit around and speak Spanish without the pressure of being in class or communicate with an authority figure. Mané and her friends were really fun and easy to talk to, and I’m glad that even though we’re only here for a short amount of time we were able to make some friends outside of our program.

On Monday, Maddie and I FINALLY got our public health internship assignment. All we’d known until then is that we were going to work for MASIP, which is a pilot program that’s the only one of its kind in Chile. It’s an organization that works on alternative, all-natural birthing processes with women with low obstetric risk as a way to make the whole process more comfortable and improve the quality of care these women receive, especially in public hospitals like the one MASIP is in, Sótero del Río. 

MASIP...stole the picture from the website. It's fine.

The director of the program, Claudia, was able to meet with us and talk to us a little bit about the options we would have as interns for MASIP, and as soon as she started describing our project the looks on our faces were priceless. Never in my life have I felt so nerdy. It sounds like an unbelieveable opportunity. Right now, Claudia is investigating the role of the father in birth, which is especially interesting in a country like Chile that is still so masochistic. With Maddie and her anthropology background and me and my gender studies background, the project almost sounds too perfect. We have to opportunity to interview expecting fathers as per their role in the whole pregnancy and birth process and research any possible hormonal changes that the father undergoes during the birthing process, which is an area that has yet to really be investigated. We’re also lucky enough to be involved in a conference on comprehensive, safe, and quality care for families and during the birthing process. Our university set up the conference and they’re bringing doctors and maternity experts from Argentina, Brasil, Canada, and Uruguay. It’s a two-day conference that Maddie and I get to go to for free; the days are long and the topics are complicated but I think I’m at least the same amount of scared as I am excited. 

Two Weeks Worth of Exploring

To be fair, I knew I wouldn’t keep this very up to date! So, fair warning, this is going to be a super long post.

The day after we got back from Valparaíso/Viña (round 1), a law professor from the local university took us around three different neighborhoods in Santiago, one lower middle class, one middle class, and one extremely upper class. It was really interesting; outside of the tour I really doubt that we would’ve seen the not-beautiful/downtown side of Santiago. Barrio Yungay is the lower middle class neighborhood and Lo Curo is the upper class neighborhood and we went directly from Yungay to Lo Curo…the difference was unbelieveable. 

Yungay

Not a super clear pictures, but those are houses in Lo Curo. 

Lo Curo was so shocking and honestly a little bit disgusting. We’ve been told in class that the upper class in Chile is made up of like 15 families and from seeing Lo Curo it’s easy to see why there is such an incredible gap between the upper and lower classes here. The entire neighborhood is full of gated communities. I think the part that really got to me was the separation between Lo Curo and the rest of Santiago. Everyone who lives in Lo Curo has a car, so they don’t take public transit like the rest of Santiago, and the entire neighborhood is situated up on the hills.

The longer I’m here and the more we learn and see of the health care system and the differences between private and public care, the more evident it is the vast effect the Pinochet dictatorship had on this country. The gap between poor and rich is big here, that’s true, but it’s big in other places too. What sets Chile apart, at least in my mind, is the way this gap has become normalized. The classism here is just another part of life, people, including our teachers, acknowledge that Chileans have class biases, and the openness of it all seems to make it okay. Honestly, Chile really is better off than most of the rest of South America in more ways than one, and I’ve been surprised by so much of what I’ve seen here, so it makes sense that it’s a proud country. I just find myself getting frustrated because my time here is running out but I can see so much that I want to change…7 weeks is nothing.

"Sanhattan"

On Tuesday’s and Thursday’s, we only have an hour and a half of class at the IES center (as opposed to Monday’s/Wednesday’s when we have hours upon hours of seminar at the university), so we all usually try to do some kind of Santiago exploration. Last Tuesday, a big group of us went to Cerro San Cristobal, which is the 2^nd highest point in the city with a beautiful statue of the Virgin Mary at the tippy top. You can see the statue from almost any part of Santiago, so we were all excited to go and see it up close. There’s a funicular, which is like a cable car elevator for hills that runs both up and down the hill. The walk up the mountain is supposed to be gorgeous, so we decided to walk up the hill and take the funicular on our way down. And then I almost died. The hill was SO steep and the smog in Santiago makes it hard to walk at all, much less walk on a surprisingly warm day up a really steep hill for over an hour. Maddie and I fell way far behind the rest of the group and we took at least 15 breaks…a family with a baby in a stroller passed us. It was a really sad display.

Maddie, during the happier times

Slowly dying

 As difficult as the walk was, the scenery on the way up was beautiful and the view from the top of the hill was absolutely incredible. You can see the entire city of Santiago and the mountain range that surrounds it. There’re a couple churches at the summit, one under the statue of La Virgen and one off to the side. My favorite part was this area in between the churches where people could light and leave candelabra’s and thank you’s to La Virgen. It was gorgeous. Well worth our almost-death.

La Virgen

Church under La Virgen

Wall of thank you's and candelabra's

After class on Thursday, I spent all my money. Maddie’s madre anfitriona told her about a really authentic, Chilean marketplace in Los Dominicos, which is the last metro stop on the line that I take to and from class everyday. Everything there was so gorgeous, and I was able to take care of most of my souvenir purchases for friends and family. I also bought a lot for myself because I have no self-control when it comes to authentic little pottery and leather bookmarks. The market is outdoors and since it gets dark early, most shops at Los Dominicos close around 6, which gave us only 2ish hours there. So we know we’re going back, especially since it’s SO close. Honestly, I say now that I don’t need to buy anything else but I know that as soon as I’m back there I’ll want everything all over again.

Entrance to Los Dominicos

On Friday after class we went to downtown Santiago to look at some historical stuff, which is exactly what my nerdiness needed on a Friday afternoon. We saw the presidential palace, the original city plan in the plaza, and the old Congress building (there was a Congress pre-Pinochet and once Pinochet disbanded Congress, the building stopped being used. It’s now used as offices.). And then Friday night Becki, Steph, Claire, Maddie, and I left on a bus to spend the weekend in Valparaíso (round 2)!

Group in El Centro

Ex-Congreso 

La Moneda: Presidential Palace!

We stayed in a hostel called Casa Verde Límon, and it was exactly what I expected the first hostel I stayed in to look like, especially for a hippy dippy town like Valparaíso. There was a spiral staircase and a TRAPEZE in the common room. All five of us stayed in two adjacent rooms, one with a bunk bed and the other with a bunk bed plus another normal bed (which I took because bunk beds freak me out). It was SO much fun, it was nice to have people to talk to at night/not worry about waking up my madre anfitriona or the cat or Stanley. Although we kind of cheated all weekend and spoke a lot of English. Oops.

Casa Verde Limon

Stairway to our hostel...classic Valpararaíso

Our room! Plus Claire

We went for the weekend kind of without a plan, all we knew is that we wanted some more time to walk around Valparaíso leisurely and see some more of the graffiti and artsy little shops they have. In that regard, mission accomplished. We walked around ALL DAY Saturday up and down the hills in the town and we found a teeny marketplace that sold basically everything for under a dollar. The problem was a lot of what we were looking for were more Chile-specific than the stuff at this marketplace, which was mostly earrings and scarves, so we hopped on a bus to Viña to check out the marketplace along the shore next to the casino there. It was exactly what we were looking for, so many little things like bracelets, pendants, alpaca socks…you’re welcome, friends. The weekend was so much fun and I loved just being able to travel and discover new parts of a new city with new friends. Usually, new things scare me but here I love them! The weekend also solidified my goal to live in this Valparaíso for at least a year of my life.

Park right outside our hostel

Salvador Allende and I...best friends

Grupito!

One of those houses is my future home

Group in Viña after successful shopping

This past week was basically seminar hell, we were at Católica for so long almost every day I swear it felt like I lived there. We did finally get to tour a public and private hospital! My public health internship while I’m here is with MASIP, an organization that’s part of the public Hospital Sotero Del Rio that works with women at low obstetric risk to improve the conditions in hospitals for pregnant women pre-labor, during birth, and post-birth. I’m so excited to start working there Monday, but honestly the tour of Sotero Del Rio and the private hospital connected to Universidad Católica on the main campus kind of bummed me out. The private hospital was SO much nicer than the public hospital in every possible way. Every part of the private hospital looked new and clean, even though it hasn’t really been renovated recently. In contrast, the public hospital had one new building that looked completely different than the rest of the hospital…the differences were way more evident than we’d ever been told in class. I guess that makes sense since our seminar is taught by health care professionals who probably wouldn’t want to tell us just how different private and public facilities are as far as quality because that would basically be saying that those who can’t pay for private health care don’t get the same quality care as the people who can, which is a standard no one wants to admit to.

All in all, it was a successful couple of weeks!! I’ll try and be better about updates so I don’t have to try and remember what I did two weeks ago…still no promises!

I'm From the Wrong Valparaiso

IES planned a day trip for us today to Valparaíso and Viña del Mar. The two towns are only 15 minutes apart but they are polar opposites, which is a common theme in Chile. From top to bottom, Chile is like five different countries. There are deserts in the north, like San Pedro de Atacama, and icy mountains in Patagonia in the south (both of which I really want to visit, but since it's winter Patagonia is too cold to go to). The east side of Chile is mountains while the west side is the Pacific. The more I learn about this country, the more I love being here. I think it's because it wakes up a wanderlust I never knew I had. The country has so much more to offer than I thought, and while I'm here I have to take advantage.

Functioning clock made of flowers in Viña del Mar

Yesterday we talked about Valparaíso and what we'd do on our visit there: a visit to La Sebastiana, one of Pablo Neruda's 3 houses, a walk about the port town to see the colorful houses that that line the hills, and a quick stop in Viña del Mar. We looked at some pictures. and now that we've seen the real thing, never have I been more able to say that pictures don't do something justice more certainly than I can with Valparaíso. It is the most peculiar and most beautiful place I think I've ever seen, and I think it's because it's so unexpected. It's kitschy, it's colorful, nothing matches, the houses are shaped in ways that I didn't even think possible, there's graffiti everywhere that's more beautiful than the modern art in most museums, and if I had to uproot my life and move there I would do it without a second thought.

Our first stop in Valparaíso was La Sebastiana, and it took my breath away. I usually don't like poetry, but I've read Pablo Neruda for a long time. "Poesía" is still my favorite of any poem I've read. Being able to visit two of his three houses is something I was so looking forward to, but I never expected La Sebastiana. It's five floors and we each got a personal audio tour, which was nice because it let us wander around at our own pace and it pointed out all the little things that Neruda had in each room of the house. It was a beautiful house and Neruda set it up so that from each window he had a beautiful view of the sea or the hills. Each floor of the house was essentially composed of a single room packed full of things that Neruda "saved" from antique stores or things he couldn't bear to part with as he moved around the world, such as a carousel horse from Paris set up in his circular living room to look like it was still on a carousel and antique Chinese doors that he used for his wardrobe in his bedroom. The house is also full of windows that look like windows that you would find on a ship since Neruda loved the sea but hating traveling on it. Writing about La Sebastiana is really frustrating, and I don't know how to do it justice in words. Just go see it. It was unbelievable, I would die to live there.

The bench of Pablo Neruda in profile outside La Sebastiana

La Sebastiana!

Claire and I outside La Sebastiana overlooking Valparaíso

The hills!

After La Sebastiana we had a chance to walk up and down the hills of the town and take pictures of the scenery. I don't do really well with organized tours, especially when there was so much to see...and I ended up wandering away from the group (with a few others) because I saw some interesting houses and wanted a picture. And then we got in a little trouble, but it was bound to happen. We caught up, we just took a different route of getting there! Excitement combined with a tight schedule makes me more spazzy than usual and a few of us decided right then that we would take a weekend to come back and do Valparaíso (and Viña del Mar) justice.

Gangsta's in Paradise...literally

Indian street art!

We had lunch in Viña del Mar at a beautiful Italian (I think?) restaurant. Since lunch is the most important meal of the day in Chile, it was a two hour meal with three courses and it was delicious. Since we were on the coast, I ordered the salmon appetizer and tilapia entre. For dessert I had homemade ice cream and a few of us decided to try a typical Chilean flavor: lúcuma. It was soooo good, like a less sweet version of butter pecan. It was a really heavy meal in the middle of the day, so I was immediately tired. Also, since the meal was so long we only really had about 20 minutes to hang out on the beach, which was gorgeous. Even though it's winter, it was SO HOT throughout the day but since all of us were expecting it to be cold none of us were really wearing beach clothes. It was still nice, though.

Ice cream! The lúcuma is the yellow

Beach in Viña del Mar 

Both cities were beautiful in their own way, but Valparaíso was definitely my favorite. Viña del Mar was very picturesque, but it was still a resort town. I've never seen anything like Valparaíso and I don't think I ever will again. I'm so glad that we have time to go back and stay for longer so that we can spend more time exploring the city. And buying the kitschy crafts that they sell by La Sebastiana and in the plaza, because that's exactly the kind of stuff I hoard.  

We're going on a tour of some "historical" sites in Santiago tomorrow for a couple hours, I'm assuming including La Chascona, another of Pablo Neruda's houses. I'm excited!