Two sides of Chile

The Two sides of Chile

When my family visited a couple weeks ago, I had the wonderful opportunity to show them the Chile I know, but also to experience the other richer side. We dined at nice restaurants where a meal cost more than $6 (not something you can find in Melilpilla), and the last two days of their trip, we spent in a luxury hotel in Las Condes, Santiago. We even came across people who could speak English. That, I was truly not used to. I am not going to talk about their trip; you can read it in my mom’s blog at www.mukilteomusings.blogspot.com. Anyway, the last morning in the hotel, I had to leave for Melipilla to go back to work. This was a very depressing time of course. It was pouring rain, and I had to leave this amazing hotel at 6:30am to go back to my cold house and my job. But everything was fine and I quickly got back to the routine. Then just last week, I was reminded of the incredible economic diversity of this country. Carlos came into my house with his usual emphatic “Hey Lucas, ho are jyu?!” Then he yelled, “Vamos a tomar vino!” Well, ok, I couldn’t really say no to that.

So we hopped in his pickup and went to “El bajo”, which is a rural area about 2 minutes from my house, where the people are poor. It was absolutely dumping rain and the streets were flooded—some of them with several inches of muddy water. He took me to his friend’s uncle’s farm. Arturo is an old Chilean cowboy, without any teeth I can see, and who is rather difficult to understand. In fact, most of the time Carlos had to translate to and from toothless old Chilean cowboy Spanish—because Arturo could not understand me either. I assume he had probably never even seen a non native Spanish speaker before. We tromped through his muddy farm into a shack where he had a fire going. We all sat down around the fire and made mulled wine, drank mate, and ate pork sandwiches. It was great. We talked about many things, including Indians, and Carlos kept asking me if there are still Sioux around. I gave my standard speech on North American Indians—how yes they are still alive, and no they do not live in teepees and attack the white people. But trying to elicit sympathy for them is tough, as Carlos’ friends kept on telling me how poor and violent the Mapuche Indians are in Chile. “Why can’t they just better themselves?” is a phrase I have heard more than once here. I usually just nod and try not to say anything, because I am not usually up for trying to explain 500 years of complex history and anthropology in Spanish. As I watched the rain pour and sipped my mate and drank my nice hot spiced wine in this shack with an old cowboy, I suddenly realized how incredibly different this is from Las Condes in Santiago, and even from my own home 3 blocks away. This would be way way out of my mom’s comfort zone, I thought. But it was like camping, and that hot wine sure was good.

A few days later, when the sun and mountains were out, I returned to “El Bajo” on my bike to find some chicha for a birthday barbecue I was going to have. Again, chicha is more or less grape cider. I arrived at one home that had a crude sign saying “Se vende chicha.” I hesitated, not really wanting to just walk into someone’s house, but then someone saw me and I said I wanted to buy some chicha. I’m sure they had never had a gringo on a bicycle before. This ancient woman came out to greet me and took me inside her chicha hut. It was just a dusty shack, but it had posters all over the wall of Che, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Allende (I think), Jesus, and numerous other liberal figures. I thought that was pretty cool. She poured me nearly 3 liters of chicha into a random plastic pop bottle she had. This cost me a grand total of $2000CP, or about $5 USD. She wondered where I was from and what in god’s name I was doing here. Nice old lady, I thought. I cheerfully took my chicha (or as a friend later called it, “peasant juice”) and then biked on home.