Santiago, Chile

Modern Chile

March 20, 2008

- Rush

In many ways, Santiago resembles Los Angeles. It is a sprawling modern metropolis spreading out to fill the valley floor defined by the surrounding mountains and covered in a thick blanket of smog. The smog is so thick in places that it almost obscures the snow-covered mountains of the Andes located nearby. Unlike Los Angeles, it is perhaps the cleanest city of its size (population 6 million) that I have been to, with the exception of Singapore. The city is well planned with easy to access and use subway lines, and a modern grid street system with some pleasant park and plaza areas amidst the modern sprawl. The centrally located Cerro Santa Lucia is one of the highlights, a several hundred foot high mountain with a old fortress on top that provides great views of the city and the smog.

Being such modern city, it offers just about anything you could hope to find in the cities of the United States (and in many cases for the same price), Starbucks, McDonalds, department stores, etc.; in many instances it is hard to imagine that you are actually in a foreign country. Despite the conveniences that this offers the city has a genuine lack of culture due to the encroachment of modernization. There is an excellent museum showcasing artifacts from the pre-Colombian periods in the Americas, but in terms of present day tradition there was very little to be seen. Another intriguing sight was the general cemetery, a gigantic city of the dead with amazing mausoleums from all the prominent figures in Chilean history. The cemetery complex spans a huge walled enclosure with named streets and alleys crisscrossing the expansive area and lined with ornate and commonplace structures in varying states of maintenance and disrepair. It is an almost haunting experience to walk through the buildings filled with corpses.

By far the highlight of my time in Santiago was going to see the Chilean soccer team Colo Colo play Boca Juniors from Argentina in a game for the Copa de Libertadores de America. The game was nearly sold out, with all the cheap tickets selling out long before game day, forcing me to by the middle grade tickets for 11,000 pesos. Our group intended to get to the stadium well in advance to claim some good seats since there were no assigned seats and the tickets were sold on a general admission basis by the section. Unfortunately this never happened as the group was delayed while coordinating dinner arrangements. We arrived at the stadium about fifteen minutes before kickoff and waited in line to get in from the parking lot. Three of our group members had already entered but the security staff wouldn´t let the rest of us in because our seats were on the other side of the stadium and they said that we couldn´t walk around inside the stadium because the two sides are separated by fences and not connected.

Following some negotiations we ended up getting a police escort through the back alleyways and access gates to the other side of the stadium. We passed through several police checkpoints manned by police in full riot gear where everything people tried to carry in was confiscated, that is except for my liter of soda that I managed to openly carry through 4 checkpoints. At the final checkpoint the police actually patted everyone down and I was sure they would confiscate it but as they patted me down I simply held the soda bottle out and the white plastic bag must have camouflaged it because they failed to see it and I passed right through.

After this whole fiasco we had missed the first fifteen minutes of the game and the score was already 1-0 Colo Colo. There was another score later in the game and it never really got close with Colo Colo holding on for the win. In our section with the more expensive seats, things were rather tranquil, but in the cheaper seats at the ends of the stadium, enclosed by fences topped with barbed wire and staffed with riot police in the stairways at about 10 foot intervals, the fans were much more energetic, waving flags and jumping around in a sort of controlled chaos.

Things after the game were a bit chaotic because since the game started at 9:45pm, the metro was closed, forcing everyone to scramble for the insufficient number of taxis to leave the stadium. We waited for over 30 minutes and finally with the help of a policeman we were able to get a taxi back to the center. It was a great experience to go the game and hopefully I´ll have a chance to go to one in Argentina or Brazil as well.