What´s BIG in Chile

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1) Mountains Mountains are massive. It sounds obvious, but I don’t think you can actually grasp the concept of massive until you have seen some really big mountains. In Madrid you can squint on a sunny day and catch a glimpse of the Sierra. In Santiago, due to the pollution, it looks like there are no mountains, just a grubby sky over the city. So your eyes go up, and up and up… and high up in the sky, what looks like cloud is actually snow on top of the mountain. Magic.

2) Palta

Otherwise known as avocado. It’s everywhere. There are huge mounds of it in all the market places, fruit shops and wheelbarrows of it being sold on the street, for those emergency “just-run-out-of-palta” moments. The national dish (unofficially) is a completo - a slightly soggy hotdog with fresh tomato and palta slapped all over it with a spatula, topped off with liberal helpings of mayonnaise. Due to the colours of these three ingredients, this is known as a completo italiano. I still haven’t decided if it’s healthy or not.

3) Pablo Neruda

Twentieth century Chilean poet whose unmistakable profile is everywhere in Chile. He has three houses which have been preserved and opened as museums, and as he was an avid collector of everything , they are pretty fascinating places to visit. He collected glasses, bottles, dolls, anything related to horses, books, butterflies, the figures that go on the front of big boats… He was obsessed with the sea, and so created his houses as if they were boats, including the uneven floor, which makes you feel like you are sailing.

Ironically, Neruda was terrified of the sea, hence his bringing it to dry land.

4) Salsa

Bring it on!

5) Graffitti

A stroll through the streets of Valparaiso would have you believe that everyone is an artist, there is elaborate, poetic graffitti everywhere, often quoting Pablo Neruda, who made Valpo his home. There is even an open air gallery here of paintings created on the side of buildings by commissioned artists. Colours swirl across the cracked walls, inlaid with sparkling mirroed mosaics. Even the streets have tiny bits of coloured glass pushed into them, which catch the sunlight and make walking round this city just that little bit more enchanting.

In Santiago, where there are fewer readily-available graffitti sites, would-be artists have become a little more ingenious, reorting to rocks in walls and even the enormous cacti and aloe vera.

6) Sea Lions

Bigger than you think.

7) Freshly-Squeezed Fruit Juice

Apple, carrot, melon (two varieties) orange, tuna (not the fish, it’s the spikey fruit of a cactus), chirimoya (custard apple), strawberry, kiwi, banana, and any combination thereof. Curously, palta is not on this list.

Sand Dunes

Enormous. And very, very sandy.

9) Onces

Literally “elevenses”, onces is tea and cake taken at around 5pm. Please don’t ask me to explain that one. Just enjoy the diabetes-inducing sugar rush

10) Reggaeton

The most annoying latin pop/dance music in the world. And inevitably the one that gets stuck in your head for days on end…