Signed up for a day of cycle touring around the city of Santiago today. There was a morning tour and an afternoon tour – and an expensive lunch in-between (seafood lasagne, which was nice, but a bit pricey). The morning tour focused on markets, immigrants, and culture. The afternoon tour focused on parks, history, and politics.
Here are a few cool murals we checked out along the way (the first pertaining to a Nobel Prize winning poet, Pablo Neruda, who had lived across the street and whose portrait/profile is on the right). The second being about politics. Click to enlarge…
I peddled with different people during each session, but I had the same guide. He was a guy from Washington DC who went to Georgetown University, and later The American University, where he studies languages and international relations. He spent a year here as an exchange student and then returned years later to keep his Spanish up to speed while the job market remains soft in the U.S.
Talk about putting me to shame: he spoke English, Spanish, Russian, and Czechoslovakian (his first language) fluently. He also knew a enough of French and German to get by, he said. Nevertheless, it was refreshing to spend the day talking with someone who knew Santiago and Chile well, as well as Washington DC (which he could use to draw parallels), and spoke perfect English – giving me the inside scoop of what life in Chile is really like.
The rest of the morning group and most of the afternoon group were Brazilians. Unfortunately, the tour guides didn’t have Portuguese in their repertoire so the Brazilians had to follow along in either English (as some were more comfortable with) or Spanish (as most were more comfortable with). On the afternoon tour I was the only English speaker, so I had my own guide. The rides weren’t huge or taxing, and the ground was mainly flat, but it was fun to peddle around town and see a few new things, anyway.
One of the interesting aspects of the ride were the dogs that would run along with us. Like many countries, Chile seems to be full of stray dogs – but unlike other countries I have been to, these dogs are all well cared for. They all get veterinary attention by volunteers and have had their rabies shots (I’m told), they look well fed, and strangers will yell at them as though they are their own dogs if they misbehave. Some dogs even have had dog houses installed for them by volunteers in city parks. Evidentially, the affection for the strays dates back to Chile’s agrarian history.
So yes, we had different dogs run along with us for the morning and afternoon tours. One dog in particular is said to join the tour from the same street corner every day (and can obviously tell time). The dogs would get quite competitive and snarl at other dogs that tried to join us, but passersby would simply yell at them to cut out the snarling.
