< Continued from page 2

In Santiago, the Plaza de Armas takes up the block at Paseo Ahumada and Monjitas. The plaza and surrounds were built according to Spanish custom of locating the most important functions of church and state facing the plaza. Accordingly, the Metropolitan Cathedral stands on the original location of the first church, and the pink Post Office, the National Museum of History, in what was the Real Audiencia building, and the Townhall of Santiago are here, too.


I can see many of these on a Walking Tour of Central Santiago. Representing commerce, but not quite as grandly, the shops on the Paseo Ahumada add contrast.

I want to spend several hours in the huge Museo Chileno de Arte Pre-colombino on Bandera. The museum occupies the former customs house and showcases over 4000 years of pre-Columbian history. I'm particularly interested in the Mapuche and Aymara collections, but there are also collections for Chancay, Moche, and Nazca cultures in the northern Andes and Maya and Teotihuacan cultures in Central America.

Depending what's scheduled at the Teatro Municipal, opera, ballet, concert or other showing, I might try to get tickets or merely tour this national monument. Following the 1857 inaugural presentation of Ernani, by Giuseppe Verdi, the theater burned in the Great Fire of 1870, was rebuilt and re-opened with another Verdi favorite, La Forza del Destino. Since then, the theater has produced great works of musical history, including the ones I saw from high up in the balconies.

When I was a student in Santiago, I knew the bus routes and thought nothing of hanging onto a strap on a micro, or bus, but now I'll enjoy the faster and less confusing metro. Santiaguinos are proud of the metro system and it it will get me to most of the places I want to go. (See large scale metro map.) I'm going to explore the neighborhoods I frequented before, and see if I can still find my way around. Accordingly, I take the metro along Alameda when it becomes Providencia, now an upscale shopping district with many hotels and restaurants, with a stop at Los Leones. I might even ask for a tour of Santiago College, where I was once a student. Providencia becomes Apoquindo and leads into the very upscale neighborhood of Las Condes.

On my way back to the centro, I stop for a walk down the shady streets of the bohemian Bellavista neighborhood for a look at La Chascona, Pablo Neruda's Santiago home, where, if I had an appointment, I could see the interior of the house, his collections of books, nautical material, butterflies, and walk through his gardens. Next, I head for San Cristobal in the Parque Metropolitano, or City Park. You can't go to Santiago and miss a ride up the funicular to the top for a terrific view of the city, however, you should plan this for a clear day or before the smog builds up and obscures the city scape and the mountains beyond.

San Cristobal is named for St. Christopher, but it is a large white statue of the Virgen Mary that stands at the top of the hill looking out over the city. Although many exhibits of endangered animals of Chile, such as the puma, condors and chinchillas are here, I pass by the zoo, the Jardin Zoólogico de Santiago, and make only a cursory stop at the Museo de Vino because I will be touring wineries later on. If you haven't got the time to do a tour of the wineries, you'll get a taste of Chilean wines here at the Museo Enoteca. There are restaurants here, but I skip them too, since I am having a traditional Chilean dinner with friends.

Santiago has an abundance of restaurants, from the most basic to the finest gourmet experience. Ethnic restaurants as well as fast food imports from the US dot the streets, and it's hard to choose between the restaurants serving authentic Chilean cuisine, but tonight we will eat the comfort foods of my childhood in my friend's home. We begin the evening with the traditional Pisco Sour, toasting each other, of course. My hostess has prepared cazuela, a broth with a hunk of meat, corn still on the cob, and potatoes. Though it's not what Chileans would consume as a regular meal, she's indulged me withhumitas, ground corn and spices steamed in corn husks, bifstek a lo pobre, steak and a mound of fried onions served with rice and a fried egg. I forget calories and cholesterol. She knows me well and for dessert, serves torta de mil hojas, which is a confection of layered wafer-thin pastry sheets coated with manjar, thick sweet caramel. Replete with fine wine and all this food, I can barely waddle down to the car for the drive back to the hotel.