Providencia, Santiago
By Laura Closkey
11 Apr 2004 2:06 pm
Happy Easter!
Here in Santiago I’m staying with Macarena who I met in Nepal a year or two ago. Santiago is famous for it’s smog and with good reason. One of the main tourist attractions is to walk or cable car your way up to Cerro San Christobal for a view of massive Santiago and the surrounding mountains. I’m not sure why they want to send the tourist up there because mostly what you see from this mountain is the smog over Santiago. Note to self: invest in the natural gas industry in Chile. At some point these people are going to have to deal with their air pollution.
Macarena lives with her mother and sister in Providencia, Santiago (read: the nice part). Providencia is the clean part with wide streets and beautiful homes and plenty of western businesses. Macarena is hilarious and full of spunk as is her friend Daniela. Maca and her mom and sister are close. Here at a REAL HOME I’m thoroughly enjoying my own bedroom room and bath. Lunch is the main meal of the day and begins out back with pisco sours in the beautiful garden. Funny thing, here I am, finally connecting with some regular Chileans and what we do doesn´t seem so foreign. We´ve been to bars that would easily fit in Manhattan, we been to gigantic shopping malls with Calvin Klein and Esprit shops, we´ve eaten sushi and had chai latte at Starbucks. (Friends from the CA, sorry about the non p.c. stop at Starbucks, I couldn´t resist). BTW, we went to see Monster with Charliz Theron and were just so struck by the sad story and the amazing performances. Maca, Dany and I have been talking about this film for days.
Jude and I also saw the movie. She did such a good job portraying the hard kind of woman you sometimes meet in bars. It was hard to think of her as a South African native. She deserved the Oscar.
Hey Laura,
Joe & I have been talking. You want to go to Brazil. I can introduce you to some people. I go there every year.
David Segrest