This month seems to have flown by! We arrived on June 7 and we’re cutting our stay here short by 3 days to leave on July 3. We’re heading to the Atacama Desert in northern Chile for 4 days and then La Serena, on the coast, for a week and a half. Overall, our impressions of Santiago are nice.
The city is huge, but it doesn’t feel overwhelming. It is clean, safe, and easy to navigate with great (but often jam-packed) public transportation. Buses and subways run all over the city. It’s also very bicycle friendly, and we rented bikes regularly to get around town. (The city bikes, run by a company called Itau, are integrated with Uber, so we didn’t even need to install a new app to access bikes.) Most places we walked around felt calm, although the larger supermarkets and shopping areas were hectic and crowded.
We love all the parks in Santiago. There are so many across the city, and many have their own, unique character. One of our favorite things to do was visit a new park and just wander around. I also loved seeing all the dogs in their little shoes out for walks in the chilly weather. There is a wealth of public art all over the city, and I started seeking out sculptures from a local artist named Hernan Puelma Urzua. Murals adorned buildings everywhere we went. Oh, and Andrew got a geocache here!
So many apartments in Santiago seem to use the same floorplan (at least the ones available on Airbnb), including the one we rented. It has a small living room/kitchen with no eating area and is an absolute pain to cook in. The bed is hard and the bathroom is tiny with an absurdly high tub to step into and out of to shower. The couch is too short for one person to lay fully out on, there are no living room chairs, side tables, or coffee table. But we are grateful for it, the nice neighborhood (we’re in Providencia), the price, and Andrew’s dedicated office space in part of the converted balcony. The best part is the building cat who loves a cuddle in the lobby or outside.
It was strange at first to have a front desk in the building staffed by someone who buzzes you in and out of the gate each time you come and go, but it was nice to have familiar faces throughout our stay. Apartments here (at least in this part of town) are commonly in a large building block surrounded by green space fenced in with an entrance gate. Ours had a large common room on the ground floor that was often hosting kids’ birthday parties, and kids were able to play and run around the protected outside area. It seems like a nice, practical way to create dense, urban housing that is family friendly, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it on this scale anywhere else. Kudos to Santiago.
Andrew found a gym we could join for the month. The owner, Sonny, was from the U.S. and eager to help us settle into Santiago life. We also met a trainer at the gym, Douglas, who offered to meet us for coffee once a week so we could practice Spanish and he could practice English. (We had hired a Spanish teacher online before arriving, but during our first meeting with her, it was clear it wasn’t going to work.) Having Douglas to practice with was a huge benefit, and it was nice to make a local friend.
The food here has been pretty unremarkable. We still haven’t figured out what “typical” Chilean food is (aside from chorrillana), and our favorite meals have been from other cultures (ramen, Mexican, Indian, and a frozen pizza from the corner store). However, we have lots of options to buy groceries near our apartment, which is nice.
Our Spanish is still limping along but we keep working on it. Not many people we encountered in Santiago speak English, which is good for practicing although a little stressful. But, hey, that’s one of the reasons we chose to come. We tried finding a local bar where we could get friendly with the bartender and practice speaking, but happy hour culture isn’t strong and the bars don’t really get going here until we are in bed. There also isn’t much of a cafe culture here. People seem to think instant coffee is perfectly fine, and we even struggled to find decent ground coffee in grocery stores to make at home. We started going to Starbucks to buy ground coffee. All that to say, there weren’t really cafes we could hang out in and try to chat with locals. (Starbucks seemed to have tourists or students studying.)
We attended one meet-up of a group called Santiago Speaks, intended for people who speak an array of languages to get together at a different bar each week and practice whatever language they’re trying to learn. It was okay, but the group we sat with kept speaking in English and seemed a little impatient with our hobbling Spanish. Plus we’re old so the bar was too loud and crowded; we didn’t attend another one after that first try.
Overall, Santiago was a nice home base for a month of working, settling into life in South America, and taking fun side trips.
