Climbing an Urban Mountain

On the right you can see a section of my commute to class every day along the Pacific coast. It doesn’t get any better than that… Also visible in the bottom left corner are some micros, which as I mentioned before, are the exciting transportation system I use.

My family is pretty amazing, and getting to know them makes me think about what I’ve taken for granted living in the US. My Chilean mom was telling me about how difficult it was for her, at my age, to buy something as simple as a sweater or a pair of shoes. Everybody in Chile had to buy necessities on credit during the Pinochet years, and no one could get a good job unless they were in the military or had military connections, no matter how much education they had. That’s why my Chilean parents moved to Canada in 1986 (2 years before the dictatorship ended), and only moved back 2 years ago. Victoria, their daughter, was born in Canada. Ximena, my Chilean mom, was also explaining to me that only people of my generation or a little older in Chile are now able to plan for their retirement. So maybe in the future the culture will become more like the U.S. in that children will not be automatically obliged to take care of their elderly parents in their homes, as they are now. This seems to be a big controversy here; e.g., this morning I was watching the Chilean equivalent of Judge Judy, and the two women with the disagreement were sisters arguing over who will take care of their mother. And in a satirical newspaper my family showed me, there was an ad for the website www.yanoquierovivirconmisviejos.cl, or www.idontwanttolivewithmyparentsanymore.cl. Which actually probably addresses the opposite concern: young people who get married and can’t afford to move out. Both are big issues here, and seem like funny problems…but, I guess, only until it happens to you.

Yesterday I finally got to climb up into the cerros (the hills) of Valparaíso, with their jumble of colorful houses. Elizabeth and I were amazed again and again as we reached the top of one very steep incline only to discover that around the corner, the hill continued. The streets are ridiculously steep; I felt like I was walking almost straight up. It was not easy! I admire people who live there, they must have really strong legs. And excellent brakes on their cars. Many of the houses have stairways leading up to them that are extremely narrow and vertical. All of it is very photogenic. It took us about an hour of climbing to reach the top of one cerro (there are many), and I at least was exhausted, but the view was worth it. We could see Viña del Mar to the north, and Reñaca and Con Con, which are suburbs north of Viña, and the whole city of Valparaíso, and the Pacific Ocean of course. In the opposite direction we could see the snow on the tops of the real mountians in the distance. There was a rainbow around the sun and it was all beautiful. Then we walked all the way down, which was hard on the knees!

One thing I’ve been meaning to share is this video that our program directors showed us during orientation when we talked a little bit about Culture Shock. It shows the differences between Italy and the rest of Europe, but they told us it also applies to Chile versus the United States. Besides being very funny, it’s also pretty accurate. I would amend two things: you don’t acutally have to wait long for the buses here, usually not more than a minute, because there are so many of them. And while Italians have a thousand different ways to order coffee, no one here drinks real coffee because it’s too expensive for some reason. The only thing readily available is Nescafé—instant coffee. So that is one aspect of US daily life that I miss. For Chile, I would replace the variety of coffee with a variety of bottled water: for example, when we were climbing the cerro, we stopped to get some water in a tiny store almost hidden between the houses, and I figured they would have one kind of bottled water maybe. Acutally, when I asked, the woman wanted to know if I wanted mineral water, gasificado or sin gas (carbonated or not). I don’t know, water is water to me.