Saturday reflections

I took this picture from my hotel room in Santiago, so that's presumably my hotel in the reflection (and a teeny-tiny Kathleen with a camera in there somewhere.)

I have to be on a bus to the airport at 6 am, so I'm glad I scheduled an extra day to just rest up and enjoy the last of the warm weather for a few weeks. I already saw most of what I'd like to see in Santiago when I was here in 2018, so apart from walking to the mall to buy a case for my Copacabana sunglasses, I mostly sat in the beautiful gardens and did as little as possible.

Random things I saw in Santiago

A building in Santa Lucia Park, one of the buildings of the Universidad de Chile, the ornate roof of the National Museum of Fine Arts seen from Santa Lucia Park, and statues inside the museum (which had a much more interesting collection of modern art, textiles and photography than the exterior led me to expect.)

Urban poetry

A fence behind the large golf course that lends its name to the neighborhood behind my first hotel in Santiago -- El Golf.

These are just garbage bags, but the pink looked so tropical that my jet-lagged brain first saw them as some kind of strange flowers.

Geometries

I posted a picture of this building in Santiago a few weeks ago; here's another view, without reflections.

I really love those balconies.

Urban poetry

The top of Cerro San Cristobal in Santiago is a Catholic shrine. The large statue of Mary is visible for miles, and the path up to it has the Stations of the Cross.

I don't know why these racks were empty. The waxy ghosts of the hundreds of candles they used to contain were a little eerie, even in the bright sunshine of a summer day.

Welcome to the working week

Selling fruit in Chile in the summer is not quite the equivalent of selling water by a river, but there is a similar abundance, with fresh produce for sale everywhere.

This is the Plaza de Armas.

Sunday bird blogging

Okay, not great bird pictures. I took these my during my first, jet-lagged, walk around Santiago, and though I have no idea what kind of birds these are -- one is probably a dove and the other looks like a small parrot, but I can't get more specific than that -- I think the photos are kind of cool. So here they are.

I've had a mad, bad week -- mucho stressful as I'm confident they don't say in Santiago -- and could not focus on anything more intellectually challenging than old episodes of The Great British Baking Show in the evenings. Then I thought I had to stay up and do system testing after midnight last night, which was grueling because I was already so tired. At midnight, I logged in to find that I hadn't read to the end of the email -- the work began at midnight; the system was available for testing starting at 3 am. (See comment about mad, bad, mucho stressful week above.)

So I did not finish Santiago. I'll probably be sharing pictures of Chile well into the Northern Hemisphere summer, and may not finish Antarctica before I leave for Africa at the end of August.

Air conditioning

Old and new in Santiago

Iglesia de San Francisco

The interior of the church is above; I absolutely love that ceiling.

It's one of the oldest colonial-era buildings in Chile, consecrated in 1622, though it's suffered its share of earthquake damage, and is on its third or fourth bell tower. The current one dates from the 1800's.

Saturday reflections

The lobby of the Hotel Singular in Santiago.

Urban poetry

Two men sleeping outside the church of San Francisco in Santiago.

I admit I walked past them the first time because it seemed so rude and intrusive to take a picture of them -- you need a certain ruthlessness to do street photography and whatever ruth is, I apparently have way too much of it. (In the US, it's actually legal to take a picture of anyone you want on the street as long as it's not for commercial purposes, but that didn't protect me from being assaulted by a crazy man who really didn't want his picture taken.)

But I loved these faces -- even better in black and white -- and after thinking about it, I walked back and took the picture. I did leave some money in their jar as a thank you.

Down to the river though I know the river is dry

Behold the mighty Mapocho.

My first day in Santiago was pretty typical. I was tired from the overnight flight and I walked around for several hours trying to stay awake. I was too mushy-brained to have any particular destination in mind, but since it was quite hot I thought I'd head in the general direction of the river. I could see on the map that there were several parks along the banks, and I thought I'd find a nice shady bench and enjoy the breezes from the water.

I was not expecting this -- a thin trickle of water in a concrete arroyo, barely enough to get the soles of my feet wet.

A few days later I took this picture from one of the bridges downstream. A few more tributaries had entered the main river at that point, but the water still didn't cover the entire riverbed. The Mapocho does flood its banks from time to time so it's not always this pathetic; still, it wasn't exactly the cooling oasis I had been hoping for.

Sanhattan

Sorry to jump around like this -- I'm going to finish Santiago this week if I can. Here's a cityscape from the rooftop bar at the W, where I stayed on the first pass through Santiago.

Sunday bird blogging

Here's one last Chilean bird -- an austral thrush in Santa Lucia park.

The beak and eye ring look like its close relative, the American robin.

Data processing, Inca style

This lovely object is a quipu, the Inca record-keeping system. 

The pattern of the knots on the various strings -- 586 in this quipu -- probably represented demographic data.

But I want to wear it as a necklace.

More arte precolombino

These striking statues are chemamulls, created by the Mapuche, one of the indigenous peoples of Chile.

They were placed over tombs to assist the dead in their journey to the afterlife. Which in Mapuche culture meant a trip to the Blue Land in the east for chiefs and warriors, while everyone else went to the west to eat bitter potatoes beyond the sea.

I love the faces, but they do look as though they've already had all the bitter potatoes a chemamull could stand.

Saturday reflections

I posted a version of this already: the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolumbino. I took the first one with my phone, which often works better in low light. You don't get the detail but you also don't get all the noise.

But the fancy camera version came out better than expected, so here it is.

Urban poetry

I love the pointed roof in the middle of all those horizontals.

Santiago doesn't have much in the way of dazzling modern architecture, but I did find the mix of Old Colonial-Sleek Modern-Scuzzy Generic Urban kind of charming. And this made me smile.

Saturday reflections

I always love modern glass reflecting older buildings; here's a Santiago version, taken near the Plaza de Armas.