Life in Santiago

I have been living here for almost a month, and I am starting to feel comfortable navigating the city. I have finally started to learn some of the street names and I am able to find my way to a number of places. In my opinion, Santiago may not be the most beautiful city I have ever seen, on cloudy days especially the city smog and other inevitable city stuff such as street litter become more noticeable to me. Plus recycling in almost non-existent and that it is common to see street dogs risk their lives crossing the busy city streets.

But of course, there are also a lot of great things about Santiago. For example, as I have written before, I love that you can buy almost anything you could want on the street. I love that at 3:30 AM it is possible to find someone making and selling fresh, homemade mini pizzas on the street which you can buy for like 50 cents. The city streets feel so alive to me during the day with all the hustle and bustle and the people out on the street trying to make a living. I also enjoy the circus street performers that you often see putting on shows in intersections during the brief red light moments. There are also some nice parks, green space is very important to me. There are plenty of nice places to visit in general.

I have decided to try to visit as many tourist spots as possible during my free time. This past week I have managed to walk to Plaza Italia, explore a statue park which is very close to where I live, and one day I walked to La Chascona, one of the three houses in Chile owned by Pablo Neruda. Today I walked up to the top of Cerro Saint Lucia, a big hill located in the center of the city that is home to a number of beautiful parks all the way up. It's really a very nice place. There are a number of different paths to take, and along the way you can see fountains, waterfalls, small parks. And the view of the city from the top is great. For the first time I really noticed how much of a sprawling city Santiago really is. It's filled with small to medium sized buildings that they don't really come together to form a clear skyline like that of Chicago. It's more just like a extended area splattered with buildings and houses that stand between the large, rolling hills. Here are some pictures I took from Cerro Saint Lucia.

The other day I took advantage of the great light given by the setting sun and I took a few pictures from my tiny balcony. Here are two of my favorites.

The other day I saw a show on TV about design in Chicago, it was mainly about the architecture in the city, but also talked about the city in general. After watching that I definitely felt a little homesick. I do miss Chicago quite a bit, it is just now starting to hit me. I really miss the lake, I loved living close to it. I feel a strange almost magnetic pull from large bodies of water. I am amazed by their mystery, their power, yet I am also comforted by their cyclical nature. Maybe someday I would like to live near the ocean. Although to me, a lake is a lot less scary than the ocean. Anyways, although Santiago doesn't have a large body of water and it's architecture certainly doesn't compare to Chicago's (at least aesthetically), I have already found some parts of the city to love.