I don’t want to brag, but I can’t say I was sad to leave Canadian winter behind. Winter isn’t all bad, but if I never had to hold a snow shovel, I think my life would be at least a little improved.
The lead up to this trip felt kind of extensive. Flying with a bike is a pain. The bike has to be partially disassembled so that it will fit into a giant box, and it also has to be very well packed so that the airline doesn’t totally destroy it. I was not confident in my packing abilities, so I got a local shop to do it. I’d rather pay money than arrive at my destination with the remains of what was previously a bicycle.
Of course, arriving at my destination ended up being its own sort of odyssey. My flight out of Regina got delayed. Then it got delayed again. Then it got delayed for a third time, and at this point there was no hope of making my connection. I was booked onto a different flight, but it didn’t leave until two days later. So that was all very exciting and obviously I was thrilled. Shout out to the people who hung out with me and let me crash with them in an undisclosed Canadian city (undisclosed so that no one gets salty about me not visiting them on my unexpected two day layover, ha).
But I did eventually make it to Santiago. The Chilean one. I think there are some others.
Anyway, I’m in Chile.
My bike made it to Chile in one piece and at the same time as me! Sadly, the same cannot be said for another passenger’s rather important custom made wheelchair. Air Canada is really outdoing itself lately, what with abandoning essential mobility devices and delaying people by 48 hours and such.
(For more about this wheelchair story: https://globalnews.ca/news/9417590/air-canada-lost-wheelchair-broken-replacement/)
Now that I’m finally in Santiago, I have settled in for a two week stay in this lovely city. I am making yet another attempt to learn some Spanish. I have previously attempted this in Colombia and in Regina, and it has been neither totally successful nor a total failure. I have definitely learned more Spanish than I learned French in ten years of public school core French classes. So now I can say impressive things like ¿DONDE??? and ¡No hablo Español! and I’m sure this is really only a few steps below fluency, kind of like how getting a first aid certificate is only a few steps below being a doctor.
(I hope it’s obvious I’m joking? I’m joking, y’all. My Spanish is no bueno and I am not a doctor.)
I actually can speak in complete sentences, but every time I talk to a real live Spanish-speaking human who is not my teacher, my brain melts out of my ears and I am reduced to the vocabulary of a toddler. Which is unfortunate because in reality I have the vocabulary of someone who is at least three and a half years old.
Other than Spanish class, I have been pursuing thrilling activities like procuring a prepaid SIM card, attempting to buy produce at the grocery store and doing it incorrectly, and fixing the disc brakes on my bike (truly my biggest accomplishment to date).
Okay, so I have also been doing interesting touristy things, although at a rather relaxed pace because I’m here for two weeks – so why rush? I took a salsa class, which I was surprisingly not totally terrible at, and I also visited the Museum of Memory and Human Rights.
For those unfamiliar with Chilean history, on September 11th of 1973, the country experienced a coup orchestrated by General Augusto Pinochet, who overthrew Chile’s democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende. Following this, the country came under the control of a right-wing military dictatorship, under which the constitution was rewritten and any resistance was met with violence and oppression. Pinochet and his government implemented neoliberal economic reforms under the advisory of foreign-educated economists.
You can probably guess which country backed this coup, which also happens to be the country the aforementioned economists were educated in. Take a wild, crazy guess. Their president at the time had a name that rhymes with ‘Nichard Rixon.’ Canada shares a land border with them. So maybe that narrows it down, who knows.
Anyone opposing the government and their policies did so at great peril. During the regime, over 3000 Chileans died or went missing, and 200,000 went into exile – about 7000 of them came to Canada. People with suspected ties to the resistance were detained and tortured, and the fate of many people is still unknown to this day.
I don’t want to pretend to be an expert on this history. I do want to learn more about it, though. A lot of the museum exhibits were not translated into English and my subpar Spanish didn’t get me too far. I encourage anyone whose interest has been piqued by this brief summary to do more research, and I will leave you with this link to Salvador Allende’s farewell speech, shortly before he died on the day of the coup in 1973:
Chile is a country with a complicated history, and I hope I will come to understand it better over the course of the next few months.
Hasta luego, mis amigos.
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