Santiago and the Lake District

Welcome to my blog! For those of you who don't know, I am spending four months living in South America as part of a medical school exchange program. For the first month, I am working at a free clinic (a "consultorio") in a not-so-great neighborhood in Santiago. So first off, I want to start with a few pictures of Santiago.

Santiago is a beautiful, sprawling city of 7 million nestled against the Andes--full of European architecture and inviting parks. (Unfortunately, though, pollution control has not been a major priority, so the views of the mountains are perpetually hazy.) This first picture is the view from the park across the street from my house.

Last night I went to see a free Placido Domingo concert (with 20,000 other people) in the Plaza de Armas, Santiago's central square. The Italian tenor is definitely larger-than-life. Here are two pictures of the square--in the one on the left, you can see the posters advertising the concert.

More pictures of Santiago to come, including some of the very cool 1.25-bathroom (the half bath works half the time) apartment I share with 6 other students.

But first, pictures from my first weekend of traveling. On the advice of Pilo, a wonderful woman who works for the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, I went south to explore the Lake District of central Chile--about a 13 hour bus ride from Santiago. (Fortunately, Chile has a system of remarkably efficient buses which are cheap, safe and comfortable, so I was able to travel overnight.) First picture is my self-portrait from Puerto Montt, a relatively unattractive port city which is an excellent base for exploring the area (that's about all you can say for it). There I ate my first meal out--pollo a lo pobre--which turned out to be fried chicken served with a mound of french fries topped with a fried egg. Talk about a cardiologist's nightmare! (But I must admit, it was delicious.)My bus had arrived in Puerto Montt at 10:45am and by 11 I had booked a hostel and was sitting on a different bus for a tour of the area. The tour centered around various views of the imposing Volcano Osorno. Here are two views--one from a boat ride and one from the beach where we stopped for lunch.

The following day I took a 4 hour bus ride to Chiloe'. (On the bus we watched Terminator 3 dubbed in Spanish. Sadly, this was the choicest of the movies I encountered in my 40 hours of bus riding over the weekend.) Chiloe' is an isolated 50 x 180 km island approximately 2.5 km of rough waters from the coast of Chile. This was a view from the window as we made a quick pickup at a rural bus stop.
Chilotes mainly survive through fishing and subsistence farming, although in recent years there has been significant migration of people to employment on the mainland. I had only three hours to explore, so I wandered around Castro, a city of approximately 18,000 people, the largest on the island. Darwin visited Castro on one of his voyages and commented on the poverty, "No individual possessed either a watch or clock; and an old man, who was supposed to have a good idea of time, was employed to strike the church bell by guess." (Quote and statistics from Lonely Planet) In these pictures from Castro you can see the coast of Chile in the distance. Apparently the sun almost never breaks through the clouds.

Below on the left is a picture of a Chiloten barbershop quartet who were practicing as they walked. On the right is a palafito, a shingled house on stilts that extends into the harbor so the fisherman can tie up to the stilts and come directly inside.

My last stop on my self-guided tour of the Lake District were the resort towns of Pucon and Villaricca, which both apparently have spectacular views of Volcan Villaricca. (It was so cloudy the day I visited that I couldn't even figure out which direction I was supposed to look. The postcards, however, were lovely.) Pucon has deemed itself the adventure capital of Chile, so it is chock-full of outfitters who would be happy to take you whitewater rafting, cayoning, or volcano climbing (they'll even lend you the crampons for your boots!). In the shadow of an actively smoking volcano, simply existing seems like an adventure to me, so I opted for vegetarian lasagna at the requisite hippie hostel. I then wandered around town and found this flower market of paper flowers.

Not long after, the city's emergency sirens went off, and although the handy "volcano meter" outside the Tourist Information center still read green, I decided it was as good a reason as any to jump town. I made a short stop in Villaricca, and found it somewhat lackluster (although the public library did have an excellent internet connection), so I was not sad when the nightbus came to take me back to Santiago.