I have the good fortune to have a well-connected aunt and the even better fortune to have my well-connected aunt contact her geographically desirable friend on behalf of her niece despite her niece’s apparent general apathy towards planning her upcoming trip to Chile. The best fortune of all is that the connection of my well-connected aunt was Sandra, a very kind lady who volunteered to pick me up from the airport in Santiago and help me out for the day. What better welcome could one ask for? And I was very lucky that Sandra was there because, on top of the incredible evaporation of anxiety that comes from being taken care of when entering a foreign country, as it turned out there were several things not going my way. First of all, I had neglected to buy my ticket from Santiago to Puerto Montt. I was supposed to leave the night of the day that I arrived in Santiago. Normally this wouldn’t be such a tall order, but as Sandra’s mother explained to me, I arrived on the crucial days when the Chilean vacation zones changed, which meant that a significant portion of the country’s population would be trying to come home from vacation, while the other another portion wanted to leave. Sandra was very worried when I told her that I hadn’t bought my ticket yet. Indeed her worries were well justified. She spent a long while calling up various bus companies and systematically received answers that there would be no vacancies until Sunday, Monday, Tuesday… not very promising. But in the end it turned out well. We went to the Tur Bus ticket booth in Provedencia, the part of Santiago that Sandra’s mother lived in, and they miraculously had a spot on a bus leaving that evening. Yay!

Once this crucial detail was taken care of, I was able to much better enjoy and notice the city of Santiago. The first thing had struck me when leaving the airport was the sunlight. I had come from Paris which was wrapped in dreary winter grey, but Santiago was full of sunlight and that happy summery feeling. While on the road from the airport to Santiago sienna colored mountains sprang up from every side. It was a very lovely drive, and then suddenly high rise buildings appeared in front of us. Santiago was decidedly a very modern city. Sandra pointed out an unfinished glass building as the tallest in all of South America. This city with all its sky scrapers, square city blocks, and Starbucks, could have been Anywhere, North America. I definitely got a very California vibe from it. Sandra told me that the Santiago Chileans were great consumers and that there were many large American style malls. Indeed, we went to the Paris mall to look at a couple of electronics that I needed and I saw many stores that were straight out of American banality; Duncan Donuts, TGI Friday, Burger King. One’s instinct when visiting a new place is to be revolted by such horrible homogeneity. After all, we travel to get away from home, to see new places. Also, when we think of the rest of the world, we have a tendency to be horrified when other cultures want to take part in our Western-style comforts and consumer culture. But to be honest, I was so pleased that Santiago was that way. I needed to go to the mall and give in to my horrible Western consumer instincts, and in some weird way it was comforting to feel like I recognized a part of my own country when I was so far away from home. Sure Madagascar may be deliciously backwards and Starbucks free, but there is no way I could have bought a new camera so easily in Antanarivo a few hours after getting off the plane.

After a lunch of delicious empenadas, which are large fried pockets of dough filled with a mouth-watering combination of meat and onions or melted cheese, we went for a quick driving tour around the city. Sandra and her son Hanival pointed out some of the important landmarks to me such as the Monedad which is a beautiful white house and, like the White House, the president lives there. We saw the muddy river that runs through Santiago, as well as the the picturesque hill upon which Santiago was founded. We stopped for a moment at Pablo Neruda’s house which is now a museum and admired the colorful murals that adorned the walls of that street. It was a quick tour but it made me want to come back and explore the city better.

After a beer to fend off the day’s heat and a quick visit to introduce me to here eldest daughter, Sandra brought me to the Tur Bus drop off point. It was a bus cama, which means super fancy seats that are as large as an airplane first class seat and recline all the way. I was really excited to be traveling in style as it was 14 hour trip that I could do my best to sleep through. I sadly said goodbye to Sandra who was the most wonderful hostess one could hope for and geared up for the next part of the trip. I had seen one Chile and, with my inherent consumer cravings fully satiated for the moment, I was ready to see a whole other one. 

I think that the hardest things to adjust to when one goes to a new place aren’t the most salient differences but the unexpected surprises. For me, the hardest adjustment I had to make when moving to the ZeehondenCrèche wasn’t to learning seal care or living in basic dormitory conditions, instead it was to the unexpected ruralness of my surroundings.

My dad kindly offered to drive me up to the North Sea coast where this teeny tiny village is. I did not realize how rural it was until, with four hours left of the drive to go, we entered farmland and didn’t leave. The thing about the Netherlands is that it is extremely flat. This flatness lends itself well to bicycle riding and wind-energy harnessing, and another thing that it allows one to do is see your surroundings for miles around. In my case, traveling up the Dutch coast, I saw the horizon as a line unbroken by signs of civilization. The only signs of life were the multitude of cows and sheep. No clusters of houses indicating the possibility of towns to be seen. The flatness of my surroundings also eliminated the possibility that these catchments of civilization were hidden. No, they just didn’t exist.

Finally we arrived to Pieterburen. It appeared as if by magic, I blinked and suddenly the road was lined with houses, blocking my view of the cows and sheep. This is where I was going to live. Now I’ve been to some remote places like the Arctic tundra and the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, but somehow because I expected them to be remote, the shock was pratically nonexistant because I expected these places to be in the middle of nowhere. I guess one of the things that surprised me the most was how surprised I was. I consider myself a relatively well-traveled person, how is it that this teeny town in a developed country felt so completely new to me? I know I have seen this type of town before, but I probably didn’t notice because I didn’t have to live there, I was just passing through (which, as I mentioned before, only takes an eye-blink).

The point of is, don’t let yourself become complacent! I think that the reason why I was so surprised in the first place is because I let myself be lazy when it came to researching Pieterburen because it is a town in the Netherlands. Hello, I grew up in a town in France! How different could they be? It turns out, very different. From my belated research I found out that Pieterburen has 300 inhabitants, which is about ten times less than my town in France. Maybe therein lies the difference? In any case, I guess I realized that I have much higher expectations for towns than I thought I did. For instance, I did expect the town I would be living in to have a store. I also did expect to be surrounded by animals, after all I am working at a seal center, I just did not expect the majority of these animals to be livestock.