South America #3. A few more days in Santiago

The weather here continues to be Kerangesque, even though the nights may be a bit cooler. The city will look a lot better when spring gets into full gear and the deciduous trees which are everywhere in the parks and along the street get green.

I have started to know my way around, helped by the rectangular grid that the place is based on…so different from Ho Chi Minh City or Varanasi. But still, google maps does get me home safely.

This weekend I did a couple of hilltop excursions.

Just around the corner from where I’m staying is the Santa Lucía Hill. It’s about 70 m above the surrounding flatness and is so named because it was on Santa Lucía’s Day in 1540 Pedro de Valdivia, the coloniser who set up the city, won it from the local inhabitants in battle. Soon after there was a chicken pox outbreak, and the priests used the summit to get closer to God to beg for an end to the spots.

It’s a nice climb up on winding paths and fairly treacherous steps, through gardens and trees in a fairly wild state.

At the start is this fountain…

A rather splendid staircase…

And further up a sepulchre for a writer, poet and politician of the early 19th century…

It’s quite a jolt to come across such names here: Bernardo O’Higgins, someone called MacIver…the list goes on.

At the top is a nice view of the city, the mountains.

Later in the day I went to the Fine Arts Museum, which has a collection of 19th century marble statues, and a heap of highly political installation pieces. The main hall is a stunner…

One statue that caught my eye was this one…

Who was this clearly distracted bloke, immune to the charms of the undistracted chick? It turns out that this is Odysseus, the clever, crafty, eloquent hero of Homer’s Iliad. He had the idea of the wooden horse.

After the war had ended he set out for home, but the gods weren’t all that pleased with him and he ended up in a 10 year…er…odyssey, getting blown past the sirens, kept captive by Circe, the enchantress who turned half of his men into pigs, then an episode on the island of the one-eyed giants named the Cyclops. One of them, Polyphemus, asked Odysseus his name, to which the clever tyke answered ‘nobody’. When the Greeks later blinded the giant in his one eye he screamed out that ‘Nobody’ had blinded him, and the other giants ignored him!

The episode depicted in the statue is when our hero is shipwrecked on the island of the minor goddess Calypso. She has the hots for Odysseus, but all he can think of is getting home to his magnificently faithful wife Penelope. Calypso does manage to have her wicked way with him (hmm how the tables are turned) but after seven years of trying to break his desire more completely, she lets him go.

The sculptures in the exhibition are mostly late 19 century works. I’m constantly amazed at the skill of the artists who do it.

On Sunday I went to the hill of San Cristobal, a much higher mount than Santa Lucía’s.

It’s about 300m above the city and takes an hour or so to walk up the road to the top…or you can get the cable car, or the funicular. I decided to go one way up on the cable car and walk down. There was a big cycling day out, and on the road up, and down, there was a plethora of Lycra and sweat.

The views from the top are huge…

and the statue of the Blessed Virgin at the top is colossal.

In the nice chapel at the top there was a fair bit of supplication going on.

The walk down was pleasant, although being buzzed by the ciclistas who were getting their reward for the effort of getting to the top, put a little edge on the possibility of being a target while ambling on the roadway.

There are all sorts of entertainments in the street near the Plaza de Armas. This golden bloke has done his thing every day that I have been in the plaza. Drop some cash into his box and he’ll give a wink and move. I did drop some money in the hat in front of Odysseus and Circe, but there were no winks there!

One doesn’t have much eye to eye contact with people in the street here, but there have been exceptions. While I was walking along the street a few days ago I was eyeballed by a hatchet faced woman who spat out ‘gringo’ with a beautifully rolled r, and about as much venom as could be injected into a two syllable word. I thanked her for her interest, although she was well past by the time I had regained my composure. It was clearly a term of disparagement, but why? Did she think I was an American?

So I researched.

Very early on, in Spain, it may have been a a development of ‘griego’ meaning Greek, ie a foreigner who spoke another language, as in ‘It’s all Greek to me’. Another couple of guesses come from the time of the US vs Mexico war (a dispute over the border when Texas was admitted to the Union) around 1850, where the Mexicans may have shouted ‘green go home’ in reference to the opponents’ green uniforms. Or a reference to the US soldiers singing ‘Green grow the rushes O’ as they marched along. Whatever the origin, I’m pretty sure that the woman was giving me a hard time for being American(!), as Wikipedia suggests that it mostly applies that way in Chile. In fact the USA is sometimes called Gringolandia! Where have I heard ‘go back to where you came from’ before? Nothing much changes eh?

On Monday the museums were closed, so I strolled in an area know for its muriels and graffiti. I may have missed the majority, but some were interesting…