Molué-Santiago

Eating, Shopping, Mailing (and a little more Pablo)

October 3, 2007

On the last day of September, a Sunday as it happened to be, we enjoyed the warm hospitality of the Baeza family at their country ranch in Olmué, located near the foot of Cerro Campana about 30 minutes inland from Viña Del Mar. Our association with them began back home, where we met Rodrigo and Maria Paz's teenage son Mathias while he was living in Piedmont and attending high school as an exchange student. Lynn had also met Maria Paz when she came to visit at the end of the school year. 

Based solely on this brief and indirect relationship, they invited us first out to dinner and then to their ranch for a Chilean asado (barbeque) on the weekend - both quite marvelous experiences. 

Mathias' dad Rodrigo tends the grill for his nephew and a friend.

Group photo with almost everyone: Anna, Rolf, Mathias, Maria Paz, Lynn, Rodrigo, & Carmen (Rodrigo's sister-in-law). Missing are Tom (playing with the other boys?), and Marcelo (Rodrigo's brother who took the picture).

Views of the orchards on the ranch; on the left of the row of trees are almonds. The right picture is a field of kiwis. Both crops are exported to the USA.

After the party we drove for about 90 minutes to a hotel in Santiago, arriving early enough to connect a laptop to the hotel's internet service and prepare to attend a meeting of Anna & Lynn's mother/daughter book club. The ensuing skype video conference worked well and Anna and Lynn got a big kick out of talking with and seeing their friends from back home.

For the next several days, we tried to fit educational &informative sightseeing into the itinerary of a short re-visit of Santiago. It was difficult to do much on that score, as we were also occupied with logistic issues best (or only) dealt with in the big city environment of Santiago. So after subtracting the time spent retrieving packages that had been mailed to us via the ContactChile office, mailing home seven boxes of  completed schoolwork and souvenirs (4 trips to the post office), and an entire day spent on driving to Argentina, we barely had time to visit the Cerro San Cristobol (big hill with various parks and a great view from the top), and Pablo Neruda's Santiago house. Of course there were several long shopping excursions wedged in as well. 

Regarding that excursion to Argentina - Tom and Anna stayed in the hotel to do schoolwork while Lynn and I took a 6 hour drive to and over the border, motivated by the desire to keep Lynn "legal."  In Chile, residents of the US (and I think most "friend" foreign countries) get an automatic 3 month tourist visa upon entering the country. Staying longer requires either a work visa (which means you must have a job or relatives in Chile), or a complicated extension process that both guidebooks and Chilean residents warn against attempting. The recommended approach to staying longer than 3 months is to simply go to Argentina and back once every three months. Tom, Anna, and I did this while we were skiing in Portillo, only 10 kilometers from the boarder.  Lynn couldn't because she didn't have her new passport yet (we applied for it before leaving going to Portillo, but there was a 10 day delay to actually get the passport). I had to cross while we were in Portillo because I had come to Chile 12 days before everyone else, and my three months were about to expire. Muy complicado. So now, back in Santiago, after retrieving the new passport from the US embassy, we got to enjoy a little jaunt back up to Portillo just to cross over the boarder and back again.

The process of crossing the boarder and returning took the twins and I almost 3 hours when we did it back in mid-September, as there were a lot of holiday travelers the week of "Diez y Ocho."  This time it still took Lynn and I more than an hour and a half (measuring from the moment we reached the first border crossing station to when we finally had completely re-entered Chile). About one hour was spent just traveling between the Chilean and Argentinean crossing stations, which are separated by a half-hour drive.  

Two things made me nervous about the second visit to Argentina: firstly, leaving our children alone and unattended in a foreign country; and secondly, the Argentinean customs agent who wouldn't smile and asked a lot of questions. Without having the children along, it was difficult to explain all the random things in the truck and why we needed it all (we had unpacked a lot but couldn't find space enough in two hotel rooms for everything). Fortunately, he eventually decided to leave us alone and let us "go visit our American friends in Mendoza for the day," with our duffle bags full of school books, our box of minerals in egg crates and assorted science lab paraphernalia, and our tent, sleeping bags, and camping gear for 5. Also, as he grumpily informed me, our 20 liters of extra fuel for the pick-up, carried in a metal can in the back, was explicitly illegal as non-export/import vehicles are forbidden to carry gasoline across the border in anything other than the primary fuel tank. But he didn't make us dump it out or arrest us, either.

Even more importantly, this humorless guardian of proper international commerce and transit was out of sight when we cleared the customs station and promptly turned back towards Chile. "Oops, my wife forgot her purse!" was my rehearsed but unneeded explanation for our queer behavior.  Our re-entry into Chile, which I'd been led to believe can be even more of an ordeal, passed smoothly, and we lunched at the cafe in Portillo before driving back and arriving at the hotel before 4pm. Tom and Anna had a nice quiet day to do schoolwork, and they actually managed to get a lot done. So they told us.

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In Santiago, Pablo Neruda's Santiago house, "La Chascona," seemed worth a visit since we enjoyed seeing his Valparaiso house so much and also since it was located in the Bella Vista neighborhood. Bella Vista is loaded with good restaurants, lapis lazuli factories, and too many art, craft, & jewelry shops to shuttle Lynn and Anna through in much less than two hours.  "La Chascona" means the woman with the tangled hair, and Neruda built and named this house for his third wife, she having had a wild head of flaming red hair. 

Pictures of La Chascona. The most interesting items are inside, but the interior is unfortunately off-limits for tourist photography. The eclectic mixture of art and furnishings is both visually entertaining and rich in historical significance. 

This is the view from a featured picture-window of La Chascona. When the house was built, the Sony-Erricson "looks like a cell-phone" building wasn't there to block the spectacular view of the Andes, which is now often blocked anyway (like in this photo) by Santiago's horrible smog.

A beautiful old house located in the Bella Vista neighborhood not far from La Chascona.

We also re-visited Cerro San Christobol, some of the nice parks, an artisan market featuring the work of indigenous Chilean peoples from all over the country, and the fine restaurants of Vitacura. And we unpacked and packed and mailed lots of boxes, too. I like meeting people from other countries, but I think I prefer doing it at a barbecue vs. the police station or post office!

-Rolf