I leart a new word the other day from Julio: SANTIASCO. It´s a play on words, combining the name of Santiago and the spanish word for disgusting: asco. And I guess it´s a pretty accurate discription of the place; Santiago is so heavily polluted that there are days where you can´t see the mountains, the Andes that normally tower over the city. It´s congested and agressive and it´s bound to drive you crazy. I saw a stray dog yesterday, standing alone on the side of the Alhemada, barking aggressively at the traffic. I turned to Julio, and said in my very awkward spanish "this is a war that the dog can´t win." The capto-facist policies of successive governments gets to you too. Pinochet sold off almost every public service there was to private enterprise, cementing the class differences and making the user pays mentality standard in even the most basic of services.
I saw my first instance of street-crime in South America the other day, which given my summed time here is pretty fortunate considering the continent´s reputation. At first I thought they were just messing around, when the lady yelled "chucha tu madre" but when the guy kept running and the women after him, I had to reassess. Wearing sneakers versus the lady´s high-heels, the kid easily speed off; so can I say to any woman (or man for that matter) reading this, be this a lesson to you: high-heel shoes are really stupid!
But there is something else in SANTIASCO, that I am yet to fully understand, a humour mixed in with the disgust that makes the place bareable for its 11 million or so inhabitants. Is it forebearance? No, this is too restrained. I´ll have a think about this and let you know about any working conclusions I may come to.
