25 september 2024

Months ago, we contracted with the Academy of Sciences for a trip to Chile and Easter Island, with an extension to Patagonia. The day of our departure finally came very early today, with a flight from SFO to Atlanta at 7am, a scheduled 6-hour layover, and an overnight flight to Santiago.

<crabby alert> You might remember the days when an airplane seat included a pillow, perhaps a blanket, plus an in-flight magazine with a crossword puzzle and cheery articles about tourist destinations, and maybe even a movie. Our plane’s “entertainment system,” the source of all in-flight content, didn’t work, but the air conditioning put in extra effort, so the flight was chilly and tedious.

However, thunderstorms around Atlanta caused us to be diverted to Nashville, where we saw our long layover disappear. Delta managed to get the plane refueled, back out of Nashville, and into Atlanta in time for us (maybe) to have made the Santiago flight at its originally scheduled time. But by then the weather-related chaos had delayed the flight by over two hours. The good news is that our checked luggage made it, and who wanted to arrive in Santiago at 7am anyway? We rolled in around 10am on the 26th.

This is our first trip to Chile, and in our very under-slept state, two perceptions stand out so far. The first is that drivers in Santiago (a busy city, duh) honk their horns a lot, sometimes almost to the point of carrying on a conversation.

The second is that the area of the city where our hotel is located has lots and lots of tall buildings (again, duh) with interesting shapes, rooflines and balconies.

Oh, a third perception: Along the busy, pleasantly-crowded sidewalks, we’ve seen some interesting street art — one large metal sculpture of an archer with bow and arrow, one somewhat somber group of a few ~10 foot-high stones huddled around a space . . . threatening whatever might be there, or protecting it? Sadly, I couldn’t get good photos.