Made in Chile

Having agonised over the summer whether to do a blog about my South American year abroad, I have come up with the following conclusions: blogs are self-aggrandising, pretentious and utterly tedious. Therefore, the stand gives me the perfect excuse to catalogue my experiences for posterity (pretentious alarm ringing already); without (hopefully) being burdened by the same traits of the similarly-named reality TV show from which this piece gets its title.

Santiago. Rather different to San Diego, the city my grandma still thinks I’m in. Therefore, just to clarify, I am not living in a whale’s vagina (anyone who has not seen ‘Anchorman’ should stop whatever they are doing and watch it). Santiago is an immense, burgeoning metropolis of about 8 million people, plugged into the bellybutton of Chile.  The full body of Chile stretches some 4300 km; in Euro-centric terms, that translates as a country stretching from Edinburgh to Baghdad but only being as wide as the UK.

Santiago is what I imagine Los Angeles to be like, replete with pleasantly modern, functional architecture. However, I suspect this is principally due to the fact that everything in Chile has to be periodically rebuilt after the earthquakes that tear through this region on a generational basis, rather than its inherent wealth. It is certainly car-orientated, with concrete highways sweeping into the distance – an embodiment of Chile’s expanding economy.

Whatever foreign investment may be flowing into the country, it clearly doesn’t stretch to printing out bus timetables, as Chilean buses simply do not have them. This means that when you turn up at a bus stop then you have literally no idea when the next bus might come. I mean, I know the same could be said for the UK , but at least there is pretence of a system. When I brought this up with my Chilean colleagues at the law firm I’m working at, one of them beautifully summed it up: ‘Es suficiente para nosotros que hay búses en la calle’ (‘It’s enough for us that there are buses in the street’). 

       An arrow of outrageous fortune found its target in my living arrangements, courtesy of a chance conversation on the St Andrews house party circuit. Not only have I landed on my feet but I have done a triple somersault with an incorporated half twist and still landed it to the applause of the Olympic judges. When I got into a taxi at the airport, armed with only a hastily scrawled address on the back my plane ticket, I did not expect it to be transformed into my own room, a swimming pool and staff (a couple of adorable Peruvian women who, whilst wearing heels, just about come up to my elbow). Not to mention a generous, tight-knit and intensely interesting family to live with. Blas, the father, is cousins with the current President of Chile, Sebastián Piñera. His father ran for the Chilean Presidency against Salvador Allende (the first democratically elected Marxist Head of State), who in turn was to be prised from power by General Pinochet. As you can imagine, he has some stories to tell; especially about forming part of the official opposition to Pinochet´s dictatorship, an act of almost unimaginable courage.

Before this turns into a Chilean political history lesson, I have also been out in Santiago with some real-life Chileans.  Sleep is obviously not a valuable commodity in Latin America, as I was picked up to go out at 1am. We went to a bar with great live music in a barrio called Bellavista. I tried the traditional drink ‘Piscola’ which is a mixture of the traditional Chilean drink ‘Pisco sour’ and the ubiquitous Coke.  Another social outing consisted of a rooftop BBQ with a group of British Council Assistants who are teaching English at various institutions in Santiago and beyond, among them a fellow St Andrean, Jon Ho. St Andrews students we may be but we were abysmal at lighting ‘el asado’ (our attempt was essentially lighting lots of newspaper on fire and then lighting a bag of charcoal and hoping it would magically turn into a BBQ).  Some Chilean expertise rescued us from our primordial failings, and the smell of chorizo sausages was soon floating over a glittering Santiago sky scape.

St Andrews, clinging limpet-like to a damp corner of the Scottish coast, seems so distant geographically and culturally even after 5 days here.

But therein lies the value of a year abroad. 

 Written by James Penn, understand writer