Santiago

 

Santiago:  founded in 1541, downtown core with neoclassic  architecture  and winding streets, capital city for centuries, currently a modern metropolis and the largest city in Latin America with a population of 6.3 million. I am overwhelmed. There is no way I can do justice to this place in a single blog entry after having merely wandered its streets. (However, there is even less way that I can post blog entries about my other life, my life at home.)

I arrived safely at Santiago airport after a 10 hour direct flight from Canada. I am on my way to go sailing. I like having the wind blow me around. I like the traditionalism and tranquility and cleanness of sailing yet cannot ignore the fact that I have flown so far to do so, polluting the atmosphere with jet fuel, possibly contributing to non-reversible climate change that will prevent my grand-children’s grand-children from having the luxury to sail, or even, should things get bad enough, fly.

I make it to my hotel on a public bus, check in, then immediately go back out into the heat – dressed now in shorts and sandals, sunblock and sunglasses – and book a seat on another bus, two days hence, to take me from here to the port I will be sailing from. After that I negotiate the subway downtown and successfully find the Museum of Pre-Columbian Art, my stated goal for the afternoon, only to find it is closed on Mondays. I like this in a way, it gives me permission to mosey about, almost aimlessly, with my camera. Like the woman in Carol Sheild’s Encounter, however, I find myself searching for something to remark upon and finding the most remarkable thing is the unremarkability of it all. Even in the old downtown I pass a Starbucks, and a Burger King, and two Bank of Nova Scotias. The red, blue and yellow playground equipment tucked into a city park looks like it could come from Toronto, maybe does. The colonial architecture is distinctly non-North-American but so similar to so many other European and South American cities I have been to that it hardly gets a note. Even the Farmacia’s, the palm trees, the many shoe-shiners and peanut-sellers, do not strike me as exotic.

Drawn to water, as ever, I check my map and head towards the Mapocho River. I am expecting to find the reason the city was built here, the original transportation system, but instead there is a mere silt filled stream that one could kayak down if they didn’t mind bumping and grinding the whole way. I take my first self-portrait and continue on. What gives me the right to choose to travel here? It is a huge privilege. What are the associated responsibilities? I head to the top of the hill to see the statue of Mary looking out over the carpet of city below. I wish I had her serenity, wonder if it is the open space around her, or the time that she has, that has given her her perspective. ‘I hope you find what you are looking for,’ my friend Pam commented before I left. I hope I do to. Maybe on the boat, with space and time about me, I will find at least a bit of Mary’s peace. At the moment I feel, instead - as usual - as conflicted as the ‘graffiti girl’ I saw on a random wall far below.

At 7 pm, the sun still high in the sky, I decide to head back to my hotel. The subway trains, running every 2 minutes, are full, and the platform is lined with employees in neon-yellow pinnies who help jam even more people into each car. I stand and watch this process for a couple of cycles before participating. 6.3 million. Wow. 

Our tour visits the cemetery where coffins are stacked so high that there is a sidewalk half way up.

My second day in Santiago I go on a three hour guided walking tour in the morning through 5 markets and the cemetery and it is so fantastic that I sign up for the afternoon one which focuses on architecture and neighbourhoods. By the end I have been given a smattering of Chilean history, politics, culture and current issues. I am starting to feel at home here. It is with a certain reluctance that I board my bus and leave. 

Running Away

Rick, my life coach, says I am running away. He says I am running from my fears. He doesn’t think I ought to go. He says that part of our life’s purpose is to learn about ourselves. He says that if I go away too often then one time when I come back there will be nothing left here. I guess he doesn’t realize how little I have here now. I feel I ought to be able to make a life for myself here, but, for whatever reason, I am not. What I have is not enough. I could perhaps, like, if I were someone else maybe, succeed. But me, here, now… I am not succeeding. I am not thriving. I am barely surviving. It scares me. It is not what I want, what anyone would want. It is not healthy on several different levels. But, as though depressed, which I currently claim not to be, I seem unable to ‘snap out of it’. I am definitely not learning anything useful here/now about myself. Rick says that my running away is a drug, a crutch, an addiction. We sit and talk for hours, literally, but he doesn’t realize, perhaps, how sick I am.

I have hot and sour soup with Geoff. He starts off by asking about work. Well, a job was posted at MCS for the coming semester but I didn’t even get an interview. (Seriously?) I feel kicked in the teeth. He asks about the cottage by the river that I am first on the waiting list to move into. The list has just been scrapped. It is all a mess. 

So I am boxing up my stuff, again. I will be moving out, again. But not moving into anywhere. Given my age and culture this intrinsic instability is trying. How can I be 50 and of no fixed address? 

I will go. I have run away before. More than once. Quit my job. Left my lover. Gone. Overnight almost. But this is the first time I will have left without a destination in mind.

Rick thinks I should stay. ‘The hardest thing to do is stay,’ he says. ‘But,’ I ask, ‘just because it is the hardest thing does that make it the right thing?’ (I have no self-esteem. I have so little, in fact, that I am amazed I even exist. How can it be that I have not been completely transformed to dust and drifted away insubstantial and unnoticed? I am a ghost.) ‘You are a wonderful person,’ Rick tells me, ‘You have great qualities.’ But then we laugh because we both know I am currently incapable of believing a word of this. It would be easy to stay. I could carry on, doing nothing, keep the status quo going until I die. (A wee bit of me is hoping to find something astonishing when I go, a person who can excel at life.) To be fair to Rick I think that what he means when he says staying he means staying and working on things, bettering them, as opposed to staying and continuing on on the same fruitless path… but that, I firmly believe, is simply beyond my current capabilities. I don’t know how to express my gratitude for the gift of time that he has given me. 

A sprinkling of snow is glittering in gentle sunlight as I head to the river and the hills across the ice are visible yet muted, like a watercolour painting. The world is three lazy strips of grey, purple and white, so beautiful my heart aches. How could I possibly want to leave this place?

‘You don’t really want to run away,’ Rick states. ‘Yes,’ I contradict him, emphatically, ‘Yes. I do.’