Santiago – a love-hate relationship

When somebody asks me “So how do you like Santiago?” I never know what to answer. In fact, this has probably been one of the hardest questions that people have asked me in the last months.

I hate Santiago.

I love Santiago.

I have the way that culture is quenched by the fire of materialism and the strive for material wealth.

I love the way culture is preserved in dancing and music and the warmness of people’s hearts.

I hate the sea of tall buildings that look alike, grey and boring.

I love the churches and the old buildings.

I hate the polluted air and the way all nature is quenched inside the city.

I love the mountains, the rivers and the sea around the city.

This is Santiago (Episode 2)

As I’m not able to count the days I’ve been here on my two hands anymore, the experiences accumulate and it gets harder to put them all down on paper, or as in this case on laptop. Therefore, here’s a little list of impressions of what Santiago is like.

Unit 1: The heroes of the streets

Taxi drivers rule the streets of Santiago. They have used their power to generate their very own rules that only apply to them. Such a rule is for example the ability to change lanes whenever one wants, regardless if there is a car on the other lane. It just has to let them go. And if someone is disobedient, they will be rectified through the sounding of horns. And if that doesn’t work, then the taxi shows them that they’re really serious by just driving on the other lane, towards your car. Such a situation could be brought to the point by: dodge or accident.

The other day I was driving in a colectivo (shared taxi). The driver wanted to go left at a bigger crossing, but the left lane was filled with cars. Having in mind that he can do whatever he wants, he changed into 3rd gear, accelerated and drove by those cars on the straight lane. There were like 10 cars. At the crossing he pulls the steering wheel to the left (without indicating of course), cuts off another car that has to push the breaks due to this sudden rush of the taxi coming in from the right. And the hero taxi driver manages to get into the street to the left while at the same time overtaking 10 cars, saving 10 minutes and making me hold my breath for about 30 seconds.

Unit 2: An underground adventure

The public transport of Santiago is like its blood vessel. More than 50% of the population relies on the Metro and buses to get to their work every day, get back home and get town at nights on the weekends. Actually the Metro here reminds me a lot of how a friend of mine described the metro in Tokyo to me. Down to the point: It’s so full that at some stops people cannot get in and have to wait for the next metro. On Friday I wanted to get to some friends’ place who live about 6 stops away. As I start walking down the stairs of the metro station I see that there is a crowd of people standing there, covering up the whole pathway. People were trying to get into the metro, and the line, that actually was a disorganized crowd, filled the entire room. There were about 300-400 people inside this hall inside this underground metro station. The guards only let a limited number of people to the train tracks each time a train came. So, I was basically standing right in the middle of these 400 people that were all squished up and pushing each other. Somebody got bored and started whistling, and after 60 seconds the whole 400 people were whistling, silently protesting to let more people in.

After 15 minutes I managed to get a nice cozy place in the metro, comfortably soft squished between fellow metro riders. I seem to find myself in such a place about every second day now.

Unit 3: To breathe or not to breathe

It’s bad… really, unbelievably bad. Some panorama views of Santiago will be posted in the next couple of days. Well, you actually couldn’t call them panorama views. What you see on these pictures is maybe the first row of skyscrapers, about 2% of the whole city. Behind that you can see a grey cloud, and nothing else. Above the grey cloud there’s a beautiful blue sky, but as for the 5 million citizens of Santiago, it’s a grey cloud to see, to breath and to talk about. It is truly an interesting concept to live in a cloud of dirt, wake up in it, drive to work in it, work in it, eat in it, relax in it and sleep in it.

Second week summarized

Meeting the Baha’is – Finally getting proper tasks at work – the first clear morning in Santiago

On Monday night I finally got to meet the Baha’i and some friends of the Baha’is at a farewell party for a girl from Costa Rica who is going to live in L.A. There’s something special about meeting Baha’is, cause it doesn’t matter where you are, whether you’re in a place where you have all your physical needs fulfilled or you are in the middle of the desert, it always makes you feel warm around your heart, gives you strength and happiness. Well, at least for me it does. This was probably the nicest event of the past week. Although I gotta say that Santiago is not a really nice place to live, now it feels a little more like a cozy home.

So, basically I get to see not much of the city at all. Work has been consuming all of the days. However, work is very fulfilling given the fact that I have managed to convince my boss that I can do more than copy and get coffee ;) . In fact I was extremely lucky about this internship. Little to my knowledge beforehand my direct boss is actually the head of Supply Chain Management (that includes the whole value chain, namely inbound logistics, production, outbound logistics, customer service, warehousing) for Chile and Peru, which together make an annual turnover of about 200 million euros. Actually the first day at work when I found that out was quite funny. I asked the receptionist at the company if I could speak to this guy (my boss), but the receptionist didn’t believe me at first. He thought I was try to joke with him or something. Surprised about his weird reaction of not believing me that I wanted to speak with him, I kept repeating that he was really expecting me. Eventually the receptionist just accepted what I said.

On another day, as I was working on a project together with another employee this guy told me that I shouldn’t run to my boss every time I have a question but first go to him so that I wouldn’t waste my boss’ time. Later that day my boss calls me into his office, as he said “just for 10 minutes please”, and starts telling me about his past career, his wife and family for about an hour or one and a half. So, this is a little piece of Chilenean culture. So, to summarize, BASF is a very cool company with a great atmosphere, great people and a cool, perfomance-oriented and at the same time very personal culture. And please do not understand me wrong on this point: Yes, I am officially advertising for BASF ! :) And to make that advertising more effective I’ll also upload some pics from work sooner or later

So, basically, after one week of reading virtually all articles on investopedia.com I received some “real” jobs that actually take about 80-100% of my time. Preparing a presentation for a continental supply chain meeting, doing a project of enforcing procurement guidelines for the different business units in Chile and doing some analysis about how to best ship stuff from Europe to Chile, Argentina and all the other countries in that area. Yeah baby, that’s business!!!

And finally, I was able to see the Andes from my apartment for the first time since I am here (since two weeks). Check it out! So basically, after looking at the smog for 14 days you get rewarded by this beautiful sight once in a while. Well, by midday the smog was already back, covering the city. Make sure to click on the image to get the full size impression!

This is Santiago (episode 1)

For anyone whose ever been to New York, Santiago is quite similar to it. Like New York, it’s also got skyscrapers and malls like Manhattan, coffe shops like Brooklyn and getthos like the Bronx and of course people living on the street right in between. With one exception. In NY all those different districts are nicely seperated from one another, hereas in Santiago you find skyscrapers and family houses standing right next to each other. Bank buildings, residential buildings and of course the people living on the street, all within a radius of 50 meters. Everything is mixed up. You see wealth and poverty sitting right next to each other on the bank of a bus stop, and as you walk down the streets you feel the presence of that huge gap that divides up the people.

Here’s a very short story to describe the way all wealth classes are represented within the smallest area: I was just shopping food in a huge food store yesterday. Man that was nice! Got myself the biggest bag of crisps EVER, a nice 2liter bottle of canada dry and some real nice Chilenese/Chilenean (don’t know how to say it) cake thing with caramel, yuummy. So I pack my three plastic bags (by the way, the environmental movement hasn’t made it to Chile yet) full of great food, so much looking forward to seizing my treasures at home. On my walk home I turned at a corner and I see a couple of garbage bags on the sidewalk, piled up as high as my hip. And standing in front of them there is a man, dressed poorly. One could easily see that he did not have a home or a roof over his head. He had his back turned towards me and was bowing down to get something out of those bags. As I walked closer by him I could hear that he was making noises… eating noises. After a second of contemplating, I figured he was eating out of the trash that other people threw away. Fully loaded with shopping bags of food, I was just singing songs in my head a second earlier, I felt a shiver running down my back. Unable to make a decision as to what to do in this situation I kept on walking.

This is Santiago!

Arrival

On Saturday 12th at 8am I arrived at Santiago Airport. Upon leaving the baggage claim I encountered about a zillion taxi drivers who wanted my money. 3 of them immediately went up to me and asked me where I need to go, if I’m meeting anyone, who I’m meeting, what my name is. My first reaction was: “No, I need nothing.” But that wasn’t sufficing for them. One guy kept following me, walking right behind me and asking me the same questions for about 2 minutes as I tried to walk away from him. Realizing that I didn’t have any chances to get rid of him, I told him that I was looking for a woman named Gertrud. And just a couple of seconds later I saw her standing about 10 meters away, behind a crowd of people. The taxi driver realized that and saw her too and so even before I could do my first steps (with all the luggage) he ran up to her and brought her to me. Of course he gave us an expecting look, waiting for a possible tip that we might give him… so that was my first impression of Chile.

The next day Gertrud (picture), the woman who I am staying with, drove me around in the city. We drove through barrio alto (the part where the “richer” people live) and the barrio bajo (poorer part of the city, picture below). Gertrud lives in barrio alto (left picture depicts the view out of our living room). Although I gotta say that upon my first arrival I thought it was more like the barrio bajo… full of skyscrapers as far as you can see, poor city planning and still filled with hints of poverty along the streets. It is impossible to see the end of the city, especially with the smog that allows a vision of only about a kilometer far. The city, although economically flourishing in many ways, has both extremely rich and also extremely poor people. It even has some favellas/shanty towns (those are parts of the city where people built their houses out of cart board and other stuff, basically out of trash). And the city grows and grows and grows. Skyscrapers are built at an immense speed, one after the other. You can even buy an apartment in a house that hasn’t been built yet. Next to having quite poor city planning and not the best infrastructure, the commerce is booming. When walking through the malls, one’s senses are overrun by hundreds of advertisement messages: “buy me, buy me”.

I came, I saw… and I will tidy up tomorrow

Abandoning my apartment in Germany in 4 days !

TO DO list: tidy up, do laundry, paint the walls, pack, take apart all furniture, find places to keep the furniture for 6 months, transport everything to friends around the area… everything related to moving out. To give you an impression of the work ahead I posted a picture of my room. It also gives an idea of how wonderfully cozy it was to sit on my bed and write these lines. hmmm…. so, in 4 days will be judgement day about the tidying up and the fulfilling of the goals stated in the TODO list. As of now I will return to chatting with Amrita and watching House MD.