We are now in Chile. After 10 painful hours (I am to this day unable to sleep on a plane) from Toronto’s Pearson Airport to Santiago de Chile’s Comodoro Arturo Merino Benítez International AirportI can safely say the flight was uneventful save for one of our tag along friends who, probably nervous, decided to have one too many drinks; so much so that we honestly thought he was comatose at one point…Beyond that it was a good flight. After our arrival, and having paid the required entry fee of $132 US for Canadian citizens I was finally able to get a sense of the scorching summer heat in the city of Santiago. Things really got interesting and emotionally moving for me after a massive family reunion filled with delicious food that lasted well into the night.
Family obligations are one thing, but there is a reason we are down here. Most people will recognize Chile for its very affordable yet superior quality wine, the poems of the one and only Pablo Neruda or maybe Isabel Allende novels. Unfortunately, not all the news about Chile has been very good of late. The country is still recovering from a devastating earthquake, a right wing government is currently engaged in a high stakes poker game with a student movement that has fully revolutionized Chile’s social movement that gives a general sense that things cannot remain as they are. We are here in the hopes of capturing all these energies and perspectives and in order to accomplish this we will begin a series of articles that will touch upon the different aspects of Chilean society. Art, music, food, science, and social movements and politics are some of the topics we are hoping to touch upon prior from our departure and we will interview the people involved in each and every one of those topics. We want to understand the current Chilean mind set.
Pablo Neruda portrait at one of his homes "La Sebastiana" – Mikhail Saavedra ©2012
I close with the words of Nobel Prize laureate Pablo Neruda in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “My speech is going to be a long journey, a trip that I have taken through regions that are distant and antipodean, but not for that reason any less similar to the landscape and the solitude in Scandinavia. I refer to the way in which my country stretches down to the extreme South. So remote are we Chileans that our boundaries almost touch the South Pole, recalling the geography of Sweden, whose head reaches the snowy northern region of this planet.”
Let us hope that technology and your reading these series of articles will make the remoteness eluded to by Neruda a thing of the past.
Mikhail Saavedra
Publisher
Somewhere in Chile, February 2012
Note: You may want to get acquainted with Chile’s National Anthem while you are here:
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