santiago de chile

cathedral and main square in Santiago

I have been utterly confused about the time since I got here. Having crossed the international date line on the long night flight from Auckland, I arrived about 5 hours before I left, as Santiago is 16 hours behind (or you could argue 8 hours ahead in terms of effect on your brain).
Having been in touch with people in London (now +5 hours) and Hong Kong (+12 hours) recently it’s been a right kerfuffle. So I’ve used all that as an excuse to catch up on sleep and spent lots of time with my head down, and waking up at peculiar hours.
The first day was grey and drizzly and quite cold, a bit like Auckland. The next day there was a riot (an annual event that no longer seems to have much purpose but both sides feel they need to go through the motions) and so the whole place closed down mid-afternoon. The third day, however, was gloriously sunny and clear and the city looked very fine in this light, especially when I went up to the top of St Lucia, a hill in the centre, from which (the pollution having miraculously dispersed) there is a great panorama of the sweep of the Andes, snow capped and craggy, rising thousands of metres on three sides.
This is Santiago’s main asset. The city itself feels like many Spanish provincial capitals, with a mix of baroque and beaux arts set piece buildings and traditional and modern apartments and shopping centres. Some of the most recent development is quite well done and shows that Chile is now one of the most prosperous countries of South America. There is a small but very well presented museum of pre-Columbian culture and art, with examples from all the main civilisations of central and south America. There are also in or near the main square museums of national history and of Santiago’s history house din historic buildings themselves and again well presented, though without English captions (which is more my problem than theirs – after Aus and NZ I am struggling a bit). The baroque cathedral is also worth a look, though very much what you would expect.
Santiago gets a bad press in the travel guides but I thought it was fine for a few days.