Cities II- a helping hand to let you in

Beginnings- a June 08 flashback about August 07.
Josh and getting under the city’s skin

Swaddled in wool, watching the coloured walls close in. I am? I’m lost.
Wondering whatever it is that I am doing out here. Why I make life quite so complicated: each plan a new challenge.
Alone in the house with Chileans, not quite liking this Chile I’ve know so far. Or at least, feeling a mere observer in this Chile- a spectator not yet integrated into the seams of the show. Wannabe actor left watching the puppets, not yet given access to the puppet master’s secrets.

And I called Josh, and we met. And he let me into a bit of his city.

This new Santiago was sweet, sweet like candyfloss, candyfloss as big as my head. Wide smiles walking thorugh the ‘parque forestal’, watching as childplay and clowns thaw santiago’s bitter winter chill.
And we walk and we talk, watch jugglers and observe paintings. Marked by food drink and sweet stops the day passes amicably, heralding the yellow and teal dusk and then finally nightfall.
And the run! Quick! The Cinema, we’ll miss the showing! My first meeting with the biografo cine-arte, soon to become a staple fix in my life. I can’t quite remember whether we even watched something that night, just that we did watch for the rest of that semester.

The biografo arthouse cinema in Lastarria, symbolises a lot of my first semester in Chile, right down to providing a soundtrack. I believe I watched, mainly with Josh, every single film they showed over a three month period- the vast majority of which was French. Which explains why one of the main songs that come to my mind when thinking of Santiago is Edith Piaf’s “la vie en rose”.

The cinema itself says a lot about the area its in. Lastarria is polished bohemia for those with cash, a paved pedestrian gateway that provides an entry to and condenses most of Bellas Artes. Lastarria is a small venue of Parisian influence with faded grandeur and red velvet sears roughened by use and time. It is overpriced shops selling packaged street-culture, whilst the real-deal is sold, at a price, albeit reduced, on the pavements outside. It is bookstalls and wonderful bookshops crammed to the rafters with condensed thought and dense prose in a country with an estimated 80% functional illiteracy rate. It is Turkish coffee shops and free wifi in (internet access in Chile details).
It is a bubble of café culture squished between the alameda and ….

As happens in such a small city centre, each microcosm blends into the next, an invisible line in the sand which time’s tide washes around in everchanging ways (corny?)
The Parque forestal is, for a start, neither a park nor a forest. It’s a slightly forlorn strectch of green and trees which runs from Plaza Bauedano to before the central market- no more than just over 1-2km wide by now more than 200 m wide. It does however have joggers and dog-walkers and enough canoodling couples- on a sunny day I’d say at least a couple per 2m2 – to be defined a de facto park. Whilst generally unremarkable on a week day, on Sundays it shows up some of Santiago’s contradictions and tensions, and the highly ritualistic way that they are expressed. On a Sunday, the stretch of the ‘Parque’ form Baquedano to the Bellas Artes musuem is home to children and xclowns and puppet shows and candy floss men.
On the other side of the main road, however, it becomes and informal flea market with people selling vegetarian burgers in amongst the handmade jewellery and low-priced real-street clothing. The square around the museum becomes an exhibition playground for jugglers, acrobats, break dancers, drummers, people doing aerial silks in the trees; all with a few beers going round and a the occasional whiff of weed in the air. Basically Camden or convent garden before the money and the polish and the onset of the “packaged alternative lifestyle”. Its generally full of middle to lower class youths and it shows up the seams of youth counterculture and informal sector, albeit one that maybe dresses up (or down?) mainly on the weekends. It is a ritualised place, and seems to be home to ritualised confrontation with the authorities.

[this is unfinished and will be continued]