Iquique, Chile

We´ve been sitting on the rocky shore of the Pacific Ocean, watching the waves crash on the rocks.

I keep being amazed at how nice people are to us as we travel. For example, we arrived in Iquique with only a few dollars worth of Chilean pesos. We had enough for a cab ride to our hotel, but not enough to pay for our room. So I looked at the room, told the young clerk that we would take it, but that we didn´t have the money. We would go to the ATM and then we could pay. No problem, he said. He gave me the key, told us to make ourselves comfortable, and pay later. I don´t think that many US hotels would let a person, especially a foreigner, do that.

The same clerk is letting me use the computer behind his desk to write these blog entries, and I´ve been on for several hours uploading photos! He told me I can stay all night if I want to, just turn the computer off when I leave.

Compared to where we´ve been, Chile feels much more like the US. For example: Many of the vehicles in the street are private cars, not all buses and taxis. Bikes are ridden by kids, for fun, rather than adults hauling things to market. There are motorcycles, and people in shorts. To get to the waterfront, we walked past some rundown apartments that look like the projects in any American city. They are covered with gang graffiti. Homeless people live in cardboard structures by the ocean. Some of the kids are chubby (though not like in the US!) I saw a car start by remote control. There is increased observance of safety: fire exits, runaway truck ramps, signs in Spanish and English saying what to do in case of tsunami). Babies travel in strollers rather than in blankets on their mothers´backs, and the sidewalks are wide enough to accommodate the strollers. The sidewalks are not crowded with people and vendors. Nobody is trying to sell us anything. We bought bottled water and it was cold, as in refrigerated! People go to the mall, rather than to the old downtown area. They are trying to revitalize the old downtown, but it mostly looks empty and reminds us of a Disneyworld boardwalk scene. In the showers, the hot water is actually hot, not tepid! I even had to tone it down with the cold faucet. And there is water pressure! There are marked prices in stores, lanes painted on the streets, and people use turn signals. There is more racial diversity, yet few Indigenous people. There are advertisements for credit cards, and for websites. There is a market, but it is semi-empty and looks like it´s fading the way of U.S. downtown businesses, in favor of supermarkets and the mall. In the market, there are regular toilets with toilet seats, not squat toilets like I used in Peru. The public toilets flush with a handle, not by dumping a bucket of water down them. There is a sink, and soap for handwashing!

Disturbingly, there is also white supremist graffiti. For example, we saw graffiti that said "No somos drogados, No somos comunistas, somos rapado, somos racistas.¨ This means "We are not druggies, we are not communists, we are shaved, we are racists." Another said "nacismo al poder" or "nazism to power" and another said, in English, "skinhead". All of the racist graffiti contained swastikas and another symbol that looks like a circle with a plus sign in it, extending to outside the circle.



Aside from seeing that graffiti, people in Chile have been wonderful to us. We saw a communist party office, and they were having a women´s meeting as we walked by. There is delicious seafood. It´s amazing to see the ocean on one side, and huge sand dunes if we turn and look in the other direction. Chile is an extremely long country, and in a few days we will begain to travel south!