10 things I’ve discovered/learned so far in Chile

Now I’ve been in Viña del Mar for almost a week. 

Friday Julie and I finally found an apartment to share with Jennifer, a girl from Belgium, and Thibault, a guy from France. I’m not going to tell you much about the apartment yet, you’ll have to wait until the next blog, but I will say this: James Bond, the 60s and 70s – then you might have a mental picture of how it looks :D

Saturday we went for a walk in Valparaíso and all my high expectations were met! You can see the pictures on Facebook under the folder “Valparaíso” but it was so difficult to capture all the nuances and colours of the city on camera, so the best thing would be to come and see it for yourself!

Tuesday or Wednesday we might travel to La Serena, 7 hours in bus north of Viña – but it is still not set in stone so I’ll write later about that :)

In this blog I’ll tell you the 10 things I’ve discovered/learned so far in Chile.

1. The Chilean Castilian – so far I’ve been told quite a few times that I speak a very Spanish Castilian especially because I lisp the “C” which Chileans don’t but also because of my vocabulary. For example if I want to go straight ahead I’d say to the taxi driver “todo recto” but here you say “todo derecho” which in my head means “all the law”. Julie lived in Guatemala where a car is “carro” which in Spain is a wagon, in Spain car is “coche” which in Guatemala means a pig – so what the f… is a car called?  Here it’s “auto”. Other words are for example apartment which is “piso” in Spain but “departamento” in Chile, small is “pequeño” in Spain but “chico” in Chile (which also means boy/guy in both countries).

A colectivo NOT a taxi!

2. Colectivos – with my newly learned Chilean I felt brave enough to take a colectivo my first night in Viña. Here there are 3 transport options: Micro (a bus), taxi or colectivos. Julie and I quickly learned the difference between taxis and colectivos. The problem is that they look very much alike but colectivos only go in an certain area or neighbourhood in the city and you share them with strangers. It was at around 10 PM when Julie and I took what we thought was a taxi but the driver told us to get out and take another colectivo – the problem was that we didn’t know which ones would take us back to the hostel. After waiting for at least 10 minutes in the cold night we desperately stopped another colectivo where the driver again told us to take another. But fortunately Julie insisted and the driver agreed to take us to a part of the city wherefrom we could take the correct colectivo. 

3. Taximeter – in good thing about colectivos, though, is that the price is set whereas many taxi drivers will try to con you when they see that you are a tourist. In Santiago a taxi driver did not turn on his taximeter and asked me for more than I’d been told the price would be. From that time on, I always ask them to turn on the taximeter. But then again – some have fiddled with the taximeter so it jumps to a higher price. So there are many things to watch when you take a taxi in Santiago. 

Santiago metro

Tokyo metro

4.The metro – if you don’t take a taxi, which is actually very cheap (if they don’t con you), there are always buses and the metro. But think twice before you take the metro in Santiago. The city of Santiago has a huge problem with the overcrowded metro. A survey showed that Tokyo was the city with must people per square meter in the metro during rush hour – Santiago came in second! And in Tokyo they have staff to jam people into the metro in order to close the doors!

Dogs in Cerro San Cristobal

Dog in Barrio Bellavista

5. Dogs – in Santiago, Viña and Valparaíso there are dogs on almost every street corner. I’ve been told that many Chileans buy them as puppies when they are cute and cuddly but then abandon them on the street when they are adults. They are not aggressive but it is not a good idea to pet them either. Most of them don’t pay attention to the people on the street even though one did follow Julie and me for almost 20 minutes the first day we went to Adolfo Ibáñez. I want to take them all home with me but most of all they make me think of my dog Ditte in Denmark and how much I miss her!! On the pictures the dogs look dead but they are just all sleeping :P

Dog in Cerro San Cristobal

Chilean winter

6. Winter – the dogs can easily survive the winter here in Viña, or should I write “winter” because it is no winter compared to the Danish one. So far it was been sunny and 16 degrees during the day except for 2 days were it there was a thick fog. I could easily live here! 

7. Carpets – one thing that I couldn’t live with is the Chilean furnishing. I quickly discovered that Chileans and I have different taste in how to decorate homes. Julie and I looked at more than 10 apartments Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and almost all of them had carpets on the floor – and in all of them, except for one, the carpets were dirty and stained! Eventually I had to explicitly ask the renting companies to show us apartments without carpets. For me, especially in a country with hot climate, carpets are unnecessary, gross and very hard to keep clean. Well, eventually the best apartment was the one with the clean carpets so now I live here… I might be turning Chilean slowly hehe :)

8. Living standard – as we discovered in Viña when looking at apartment is that life here is good and people’s living standard is high, but every day you still see that Chile has one of the world’s biggest gaps between rich and poor. On the street there are shoe polisher stands, people helping cars to park or washing the car windows, jugglers and other circus like people entertaining the cars the 30 seconds the red light is on and people trying to sell you plasters, seeming to be the only thing they can sell. Fire fighters are not paid and only live on donations so when you pass control points on the borders of cities or counties there are boxes asking for donations to the fire fighters. This happens as well in the supermarkets. If you are about to get 404 pesos back in exchange they ask you if you want to donate the 4 pesos (=0.05 kroner or 0.006 euros) to the fire fighters. I ALWAYS say yes – I can’t believe that people who sacrifice their lives for others are not paid by the government, but I guess that what happens when you pay 20 % in taxes! In the supermarkets there are always people bagging your purchases for you while you pay – they, as well, are not paid and only live on tips. The first time I went to the supermarket I had no idea, so I just left and thought: “Wow, great service”, but when I later found out I felt bad that I had left the boy empty handed. Generally it seems difficult to break social heritage in Chile because the best school and universities are private and expensive. I have been told that Chileans have a culture of looking at people’s surnames and thereby assessing if you come from a good family and will be a good employee. If you do succeed in breaking your family’s social heritage and getting a good education from a good university there will still be the problem of your surname. If it is indigenous an employer might not hire you which mean that many people change their names in order to get a job. The “funny” side-result is that many people now are called Michael Jackson in Chile.

9. Is everybody in love here or what? – another cultural thing I’ve noticed is the clash between youngsters living at home and Catholic tradition and culture. Many young people live with their parents because they cannot afford to live in their own apartments and in a Catholic country sex before marriage is out of the question. The result is that many young couples really have nowhere to go and do their “thang” (if you know what I mean ;) ) So they go to the public parks to kiss and cuddle – sometimes it gets a bit too out of hand and you feel liking saying: “get a room”. But I can still imagine how frustrating it must be. 

10. Cash, cash, cash – the most frustrating thing for me, so far, has been the issue of cash vs. credit card. In Denmark I never use cash, but here you almost always pay with cash. We discovered it the hard way when we had to pay for our apartment. We had to pay 2 month’s rent in advance as well as the payment to the renting company – in total 2,100,000 pesos (3,513 euros or 26,133 kroner). We thought it would be possible to pay with credit card, but no and at the ATM’s it’s only possible to withdraw 150,000 pesos each day, so suddenly we were in the shit: we had found a nice apartment but could not pay for it. Fortunately people in the renting company were so nice and helpful that they allowed us to wait until Tuesday to pay the full amount of 2,100,000 pesos. 

 - And that’s maybe the most important thing I have learned/discovered here in Chile: how nice and helpful everybody is. From the woman at the renting company, Natalia, to the owner of the hostel, Tito, to the waiters at restaurants and people in general on the street. Everybody is friendly and if you ask for a favour they’ll go the extra length to help you.