Santiago de Chile

I was initially going to have about two hours at the airport as a layover between Miami and Buenos Aires. This ended up being the case anyhow, but my stay in Chile tuned out to be a little longer, since the airline changed my flight to Argentina. I now had most of the morning to explore Santiago. As I got on the bus to the city center I ran into a French girl who was bacpacking for one full year. The bus buzzes in towards the city, and the sun cast a beautiful orange light on the mountains around us. After about 20 minutes we hit trafic. The congestions on highways in Norway can not compare to this chaos. The buses are going in to the curb and out again without even looking in the mirrors. Bumper to bumper was the recipie the rest of the way to the last station the bus would take us to. From there it was butt to butt, when we took the completely packed metro to the city centre in the middle of rush hour. We did actually not make it on the two first trains that came because they were so full. The one we did get on took us to the station next to the French chick's hotel, and I walked from there and in to the city center, using the sun as a compass to be headed in the right direction. I walked through parks, looked at countless statues of men on horses. There are two other things I could see a lot of, churches being one of them. The churces are old reminders of the missionaries that came over to Chile with the conquistadors of the 16th and 17th century. The other thing I could see a lot of was universities. All over the city there were gigantic buildings that were universites of all kinds. One of the biggest was the Santiago Chatolic Univercity, with the nice inscription over a window: "Religión y Ciencia". The reason why they have so many universities was easier to understand when I realized that almost all of them were private universities. Over the decades the government has not been providing sufficient education, and the people with money have created enough of a demand for the private schools to pop up one after the other.

As the sun climbed higher on the sky and the temperatures rose, the streets got less crowded and far more quiet, a delightful result of people working in the office buildings. I realized that they are far away from the sun on this beautiful fall day, both in heart and in mind. The temperatures were still very high, but as the winter is aproaching here in the south, the temperatures will fall, and the leaves that have already begun to change color will be covering the streets with multiple colors.
Santiago is a beautiful city, but there were evidence of the recent earthquake that struck Chile. It was only a couple of days before I got there that they started using the terminal buildings, and not just tents on the parking lots. There were still a few tents left around the airport. The electric system was still down, so they had stretched out some cables with a couple outlets for people to charge their electronic devices. The line was long, and so were the "trains" of workers that walked around to fix everything. They had closed off most of the gates, and along most walls they had put up temporary screen walls so that the workers could do their jobs. There was not a single information screen working, and the speaker system was down. All of this worked against me, but I was in controls of the situation. I thought.

On the way out through customs I asked if my clock was running correct, since I was not 100% sure wether or not I had traveled into a new time zone. They told me everything was fine, and I first found out when I showed up at my gate for boarding that Chile was one hour ahead of Toronto. Or that is, I talked to several people and everyone's phones and cameras said that they were the same. My camera however did say that Santiago was ahead. Not that it made any difference what was to blame, I missed my flight to Buenos Aires. LAN Chile, the airline I was flying, was very nice about it and gave me a boarding pass for the next flight to Buenos Aires. The only thing I was upset about was that I could have spent an hour more in the city. The extra time at the airport gave me some time to type this blog post.