Surviving Santiago

Well, our first day in Santiago was a bit trying. Delta lost Cain's bag—you know, the important one with all of the expensive and difficult to replace hiking gear. I'll go ahead and say what everyone was thinking, now that we're home and have sufficiently recovered from the experience—at least it wasn't Jack's bag! Yes, that could have been an ordeal. I don't recover as easily or gracefully as Cain seems to.

The city is a little "danky" (a new word that I am using to indicate dinginess and general stank ... you'll learn of its etymology later). We passed some nice slums on the way in from the airport. The placement of poverty and affluence were completely opposite from our American cities. The poor folks are on the outskirts of town and the affluent folks are in town. We saw lots of trash tumbling down the banks of the Mapocho River from the slum towns. The water was disgusting, prompting us to nickname it the MaPOOcho River.

So after a hot day on the less than fabulous streets of Santiago, we settled into the Hotel Orly to try and make some progress in the search for Cain's luggage. I lay on the lop-sided bed trying not to roll off into the floor as I wrote in my travel journal while Cain cursed the intuitive-texting feature on my Blackberry. "Uncle Saul" from Brothers & Sisters tried to make us feel at home with his presence on TV, but he was muttering jibberish in Spanish and turned out to be some spy guy on Alias and not our beloved "Uncle Saul" after all.

Santiago rests in a valley with the Andes to its East and the Chilean Coastal Range to its West. The city is strikingly flat with the occasional mountain springing dramatically upwards in the middle of it all. Cerro San Cristobal, or Mary Mountain as I like to call it, is home to a huge sculpture of the Virgin Mary who keeps vigil over the city. She puts on a fierce light show at night. But she's a bit of a nag when you're walking around the city looking for a bar and trying to have a good time. W.W.M.M.T.? What would Mother Mary think?
The city is very smoggy in the mornings until the sun finally burns it all away. It can be difficult to see the surrounding mountains at this time. Phil and I both mistook snowcapped peaks for really beatiful clouds until our vision focused a little and we noticed the huge mountain supporting the "cloud." It was eery that something so huge could blend so discreetly into the smoggy atmosphere.

The stray dog population is ridiculously large. Yet they all seem very well-fed. Clyde is easily skinnier than these dogs. Of course, I know that weight is not necessarily an indication of health. I did see an abcess on one dog. Cain said that he had hoped I wouldn't see it when I mentioned it to him. Got to love him for trying to shield me from the harshness of life. It was pretty cool to see how the dogs have bonded together in packs. You could watch them rounding up their posses as the sun set and they geared up for a night of plundering the trash cans for food. They are remarkably kind and well-adjusted for strays. A few of them let me pet them. But for the most part they wish to be ignored and prefer to socialize with one another instead of with humans.

After one day in Santiago, I am yet to be impressed. I'm sure part of that has to do with the loss of Cain's luggage and the uncertainty of how we'll spend our second day here. We have a four-hour van tour set up with our new travel buddies tomorrow. So hopefully we'll learn something interesting and find out that Santiago has a little more to offer than what we've seen so far.

Art with a Capital A

I've been unusually busy Jackpacking around the country this winter. And as attempted with the European trip, I'm going to try and capture some retrospectives on the New York and D.C. trips we took in December. And I'll intersperse some European retrospectives along the way, as there's plenty yet to be told.

I just got back from a trip to D.C., where art, architecture and history crept from every crevice and pore in the city. My top priority upon arrival was to visit the National Gallery of Art and check out the Rauschenberg exhibit. Since we were traveling with a group and I had a business meeting on my first day there, I had to make some concessions and postpone the pilgrimage until day two of the trip.Rauschenberg is one of my top three artists (in the company of Van Gogh and Jasper Johns). He has perhaps had the most immediate impact on my visual aesthetic. He is hybrid graphic designer, fine artist, sculptor, painter, and social activist. 

The National Gallery's exhibit does a great job of telling the story of Rauschenberg's evolution as a printmaker. The exhibit begins with more esoteric subject matter being told through his early trials and mistrials of printmaking. It then evolves to showcase an artist in control of his medium, one broadening his palette to include powerful symbolism juxtaposed with mundane scenes of everyday life and highlighted in dramatic color in dynamic compositions. It is this later work that has always fascinated me. The juxtaposition of a huge blue JFK with an astronaut in the background connects fragments of our collective history without telling us exactly how we should feel about that particular period in time so that, as he intended, the viewer is as involved in the art as the artist himself.

Robert Rauschenberg: Retrospective I

One of the great surprises of this trip was that a friend of ours has recently begun working for Ted Kennedy's office. We were able to tour his office while he and the other Senators were home for the holidays. His office was like a national treasure of history. The very juxtapositions that I so admire in Rauschenberg's works were echoed in the mementos displayed on Kennedy's walls. His brother's dog tags, a letter from Rose correcting his grammar, and paintings that he had made of his boat. 

The understated intimacy of the space was remarkable. His family's work and legacy belongs to this nation, yet the same humble care that we take of our own children, parents, cousins, aunts and uncles is a current running palpably through the stories and mementos on display in one of our longest serving Senator's office. There was something very reaffirming about the experience. It seemed his moral compass was well-tuned, despite his length of service in a tough political arena.

Ted Kennedy's Office: A National Treasure of History