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.
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| Yungay |
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| 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.
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| "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 2nd
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.
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| Maddie, during the happier times |
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| 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.
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| La Virgen |
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| Church under La Virgen |
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| 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.
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| Entrance to Los Dominicos |
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.
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| Casa Verde Limon |
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| Stairway to our hostel...classic Valpararaíso |
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| 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.
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| Park right outside our hostel |
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| Salvador Allende and I...best friends |
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| Grupito! |
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| One of those houses is my future home |
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| 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!
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