Life with the Lopezes

The further I get away from home, the more I feel like home is everywhere.

As promised, Catherina and Alexis met with me yesterday to show me their Santiago. I will get into more detail about our day together later in this post, but in the interest of continuity, I´d like first to tell you a little about my solo exploration of Santiago which happened the day before yesterday. But before I do anything, I just wanted to thank you, Catherina and Alexis for a truly wonderful day of joy and laughter with your family. I have never experienced the kind of hospitality your family has shown me from a total stranger before and it was both staggering and inspiring.

On my first whole day in Santiago, I decided to brave the subway system having been told it was the cheapest and easiest mode of transportation in the city. There is also a comprehensive bus system in Santiago, but I decided to avoid it. Like in any city, I am always a little apprehensive before I step on its subway system. The image always flashes in my head of me standing in some far away burrough of the city with a bewildered look on my face.

But the fear was unwarranted...

Once I had the subway system figured out, I felt like I had the keys to the city and Santiago was opened up to me. My first stop was to the Plaza de Armas and Mercado Central. These are basically just the city centers but always promise to be somewhat interesting. They are also the heart of the city and visiting them is a nice way to get a feel for the place you are in.

It is said that Chile is the first South American country to earn status as a first world country. I have not been to many South American countries, but it is not hard to believe this to be true. The infrastructure in my experience has been excellent. I could easily see myself living happily in Chile if I could speak Spanish. The type of shopping that is here seems suggest the people also have a lot of disposable income. I met a Chilean fellow on the bus ride down from San Pedro who did imply that to some degree, this is more perception than reality and there is a hidden poorer face of Chile, but even if this is the case, Chile is still a hop skip and a jump ahead of much of the world in terms of liveability.

Santiago´s Plaza de Armas had its share of shopping and cathedrals like most do. One feature I did enjoy that was unique to this Plaza de Armas was an outdoor art gallery. The gallery here in Santiago was much better than others I´ve seen in my travels. The art featured here was less "factory art" than I´ve seen. The artists here all had their own voice.

I did meet one artist who had painted something that I liked very much. It was an unfinished painting of musicians who I recognized immediately as Charlie Parker and Miles Davis in one of their Blue Note sessions. He needed a day to finish and laquer the painting and I had made arrangements to meet with him to purchase the finished painting. Unfortunately, I was not able to make it to our arranged meeting time. I searched the plaza for him hoping to see him today, but he was not there. Such is life...

While wandering the Plaza, I stumbled on a group of buskers in the Subway like none I´ve ever seen and I enjoyed their music very much. The group was called Son de la Calle and it consisted of a hand drummer/lead singer, a sax player, guitar player, and an upright bass player. All of the players sang back up. The singer had an authenticity that I both admired and envied. His voice was totally unique, and it was perfect. No other voice could possibly have passed through that throat, past those teeth... No other voice could have risen from this man´s body and emanated from his weathered and suntanned face. This man could not have possibly existed anywhere other than where he was. He might as well have been carved from the stone upon which he sat. Just perfectly real, natural, and authentic... like a wild cactus in the desert.

Needless to say, I bought a C.D. and donated a few pesos more. Here were men who truly deserved to continue to play for a living.

Sunday came and I called spoke to Alexis just before noon. Alexis offered to pick me up at my hostel. Their home was not far from where I was staying. Our first stop was their beautiful home. They live in a large apartment in the middle of the city across the street from Santiago´s Metropolitan Park (like NY´s Central Park). Alexis and Catherina have a web technology company together that they run out of their home. Their office resembles that bridge of the Nebuchanezzar of the Matrix with their super computer and mulitple LCD screens arranged side by side.

Alexis is a renaissance man of sorts. He is successful in his field, but his interests do not stop there. He took me on a guided tour of his insect samples; on the side, he is an entymologist. His walls were covered with hundreds of samples of local insect species, some of which he collected and cataloged himself.

Alexis also has a keen interest in robotics which I´m sure his boys Roberto, Ricardo and Octavio have no problem with. I played with the boys in Alexis´s office with a robot for a little while until Alexis walked in with instructions for the boys to unhand the equipment; "it´s not a toy," he said.

In fact, the robot, despite being manufactured by Lego, was a quite sophisticated example of robotics. Alexis, showed me its sensors which operated on sonar and the software that he used to program the robot.

Soon, Catherina entered the office to greet me in her friendly, easygoing way. We chatted about friends, family, her travels to Seattle and other places, the friends she had made internationally in her travels. She showed me pictures from her Facebook profile of her Seattle visit. When we got to her photos of her visit to the Seattle aquarium, she showed me what I found to be a very clever thing she did: she tagged her photos of the fish to her friends. Specifically, she had shown me a fish she had tagged to link to her friend from India. I suggested that since her friend was Indian, and probably believed in reincarnation, the fish could actually have been him, just in a past life. Catherina and Alexis both had a hearty laugh and it was in this moment that I knew I was in good company. As the day passed, I felt a bit like the U.S. American boy in Bernardo Bertolucci´s The Dreamers; lonely in a foreign country, grateful to have been taken in by a local family, wide-eyed, envious, wanting nothing more than to be adopted into this wonderful family.

And adopt me, they did. For a day, I was a Lopez. I truly felt that I was like a brother or a cousin. Although they had known me only for a day, they treated me like one of their own, or like an old friend. It wasn´t only Catherina and Alexis who welcomed me into their lives. The boys and their oldest, a girl, Sophie, also welcomed me with open arms. I had flashes of my own nieces and nephews while playing with the kids. They were so fearless. There was no feeling out period for them; they reached out to play with me almost instantaneously like I was one of their relatives.

We headed off to a Chinese restaurant in their area, the Lung Fung, where I snapped the picture above. It is said to be the nicest Chinese restaurant in the area. Alexis explained that the Chinese actually have about a century of history in Chile since there were Chinese brought in a slaves in the 1800´s to build infrastructure, not unlike the railroad workers of the early United States. He explained the Chinese community of Chile has been there for generations, but they remain very isolated from the rest of Chilean society; despite the majority of the local Chinese being native born Chileans, their first language is still Chinese and they still speak Spanish with a Chinese accent.

Chinese food by way of Chile is much like Chinese food found in the States. The typical plates are there: Sweet and Sour meat, Mongolian Beef. Dinner is served family style where the courses are brought out on one plate to be shared by all in the family. If there is anything that is different, I would say the sweet dishes have less sugar in my estimation.

From there, the Lopezes took me to a couple of must see parks in Santiago.

Ste. Lucia Park:

Japanese Garden:

Metropolitan Park:

The sites were wonderful and I was grateful to have had a chance to visit them, but in truth, what I relished the most from my time with Catherina and Alexis´s family was something else.

I have spent my time in S. America looking for authentic experiences, and what they gave me could not have been more authentic. They gave me the real South America. The real S. America to me was sitting in the office of Chilean professionals talking. It was sharing food with the Lopezes in a Chinese restaurant in the city listening to Catherina tell me stories of the birth of her children. It was flipping through a poem book that her children had contributed their writing and art to that was published by their public school where they are educated. It was joining in on a chorus of laughter with the family when someone said something funny. It was sitting with Catherina and Alexis late in the evening and watching the season premiere of True Blood on HBO eating Chinese food leftover from lunch. It was, if only for a moment, being a member of this beautiful Chilean family.

The further I get away from home, the more I realize that home is everywhere.