Cementerio General
Santiago has one of the biggest cemetaries in Latin America, with about 2 million people burried in it. It's still an active cemetary - at the entrance, in fact, there's a scrolling screen listing the times and locations of the dozen of burrials that happen there every day (a lot like the arrivals and depatures screen at an airport). At the same time, though, people treat the cemetary like a combination of a park and a history museum. Tours pass through and stop to comment on the presidents burried in it, vendors sell snacks inside, and families stroll along the pathways. Here some of the things that I thought were the most interesting...
This looks like an apartment building, but is actually a multi-level structure housing hundreds of burial slots. In this cemetary, like in much of Latin America, the most economical way for families to pay for funerals is to buy one of these spaces. They're a little longer than a coffin, so when the first person dies, they get burried in a coffin and put inside the spot. After a few years, when their body has decomposed, they pull the coffin out, put the bones in a smaller box, and put the box in the back of the slot - leaving room for the next coffin.
Here's another set of rows of this type of grave.
And here's a close-up of what the individual spaces look like. They have the names of the people burried in there, and many also have carved stone vases or shelves to hold flowers or other things the people burried in there would like. There are toys on children's graves, for example, and one widow visits her husband's grave every week with a can of beer to leave for him.
I took a picture of this grave in particular for my Croatian grandma - there are a surprising number of Croatians living (and burried) in Chile!
There are also a lot of Italians. This is a 15-story mausoleam built just for the Italians living in Santiago. It's designed to look like a shopping mall - complete with a functioning elevator - because the Italians were the ones who brought that type of building to Chile (and, apparently, that was the collective achievement that they are most proud of).
This is the grave of "Carmencita," who many believe to have been a young girl who was tragically killed but who was, according to cemetary records, actually a middle aged woman who died of natural illness. She is one of Chile's many "animitas" - people who some consider saints, but who aren't recognized by the Catholic church. There are similar graves and shrines all over the country of hundreds of different animitas, where people bring flowers and pray for different things. If the animita grants their request, the people buy plaques that say "Gracias por el favor concibido" ("Thanks for the favor granted") and leave them on the grave or shrine.
There are a couple of other animitas in the cemetary. High school and college students are particularly found of asking for help on their exams from a president who did a lot of educational reform. They used to scratch their requests into the stone, until the family put up a sign asking them to stop; now, they slide their requests on paper under the entrance to his mausoleum. There lots of other shrines of animitas throughout the country - there are so many along a main highway, in fact, that the government is having trouble moving forward with a project to expand it. No Chilean workers are willing to move the shrines for the contruction for fear of being cursed.
Rich Chilean families have a long history of trying to out-do each other with their elaborate, expensive mausoleums. Here is a super modern one from a Middle Eastern family.
This is one designed to look like an Aztec temple.
Here we've got a vaguely Indian-inspired palace.
And this one is faux-Egyptian.
Saint George's
While I was in Santiago, I got to visit and stay with my friends who are teaching English with ChACE (the Chilean off-shoot of the Notre Dame ACE program that I just graduated from). Most of them teach at Saint George's College, a gigantic K-12 school with more students than my college. While I was there, they had a huge fundrasier on campus, so I got the chance to get a tour and meet some of their students. Here are a few pictures...
This is the entrance...
..and here's the map of the school right inside the entrance. That's how big it is - it needs a map.
The fundraiser was a big deal, as well. There were thousands of people there, buying homemade jelwery donated by artsy families, eating hotdogs and sandwiches from vendors, listening to the live band, and going on rides like this little ferris wheel.
Reunions!
As fun as it was seeing all of those amazing sites in Santiago, my favorite part of the trip was catching up with some amazing people.
Here's a bunch of people from my ACE year getting pizza.
Here are representatives from three different Gulf Coast ACE communities posing in the ChACE apartment in front of the Chilean flag. I had my first-ever Thanksgiving away from home in Pensacola with Johann (right) and visited John (middle) in Mobile, Alabama all the time during ACE. It was so cool and fun (and random) to be able to see them again...in South America!
Even more randomly, I realized right before I left that two of the girls I studied abroad with in the Dominican Republic are currently in Santiago, Chile, teaching English with another program - and I got to see them for the first time in over three years! We met up for ice cream and reminiscing about our crazy adventures in Santiago, Dominican Republic, and it was just wonderful.
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