Ramblings from a trapeze in the sky: Santiago: an sample and summary

Santiago is a dense city divided by invisible lines, unspoken rules
and silent scars. The relatively tiny city centre is a place in which
each microcosm blends into the next, before the different classes
sprawl out up to the Andes and down to the Sea.[Via the martime
mountains]

The middle and upper classes tend to the North East, Andean
foothills liftng the leafy, glass-buildinged suburbs out of the city’s
smog. The poor tend towards the South West: each metro stop taking us
deeper into Chile’s poverty/indios divide, until the train tracks give
out and one carries off into the shanty towns by bus or on foot.

Whereas most of the ‘Centro’ is shunned by the well to do, the
Cine-arte Biografo in Lastarria is symbol of the centre’s tiny nucleus
of left-ist gentrification: Bellas Artes. 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,
while the real-deal is sold 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 Wi-Fi
in a country where the national plague is Nescafe, and the internet is
quite recent and never a given.

It is a bubble of café culture squished between the six-lane traffic
artery 'Alameda' and the mercado central. Faded velvet seats and dusty
books squished between the traffic roar and living hand to mouth, each
10p sale at a time, whilst the tourists dine on overpriced oysters,
king crabs and scallops; as human rights protesters (and I was once
one of them) get tear-gassed outside.

A Greenish belt between Lastarria and Mercado central the Parque
Forestal is neither park nor forest. It's a slightly forlorn stretch of
grass and trees which runs from Plaza Baquedano to just before the
central market - around 1km long by 200m wide at most. It does however
have joggers and dog-walkers and enough canoodling couples - on a
sunny day I'd say at least one couple per 2m-squared – 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 ways in which they are expressed. On a Sunday, half
of the 'Parque', from the central metro station Baquedano to the
Bellas Artes musuem, is home to children and clowns and puppet shows
and candy floss men.

On the other side of the main road, however, it becomes an informal
flea market with students 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, and drummers; all with a few beers going round and the
occasional whiff of weed in the air. It is generally full of middle to
lower class youths and it shows up the seams of youth counterculture
and the informal sector, albeit one that maybe dresses up (or down?)
on the weekends. It is a ritualised place, and seems to be home
to ritualised confrontation with the authorities.

Sundays become buying 50p t-shirts in the pedestrian fleamarket
bohemia, whilst running away from the motorbiked police. Selling
original works of art at £1 a pop outside the gates of the national
art museum; police buses driving into the acrobats and over the
non-violent banners, as the stones, whistles and heckles fly on past.