Friday, February 3rd to Sunday, February 12th

I did it. I found an apartment in the right centre of Santiago. When I was living in Chile with my family in 2010, my mom used a company called ContactChile to help get a short-term rental in the city. Thankfully, the company is still around. They offer lots of services now, but they still help foreigners find rentals.

I'm sure companies like this exist everywhere, but they are quite useful. Landlords can list their properties on the site, thus ContactChile is a good hub to find listings. As well, the company acts as a liaison for communication in Spanish, English, and German, money exchange and bank transfers, and they can hold deposits and do escrow. After arranging for a showing, I locked in a clean, furnished, 2-bedroom apartment just three blocks from La Moneda Presidential Palace. The place had a unique circle window. I got some great sunsets from the window, it was thankfully west facing.

Flashback to July 2022

Now the craziest thing is… I took a photo of the building that I ended up renting about 6 months before. I was in Chile with the family visiting my grandpa in July and I noticed a cool building with circular windows, so I snapped a photo. I am also a fan of Brutalist architecture, for better or for worse. But really, that is a tangent that I will blog more about in the future. Suffice it to say that the building was giving me some familiar Brutalist vibes, being all grey, featureless, and concrete-looking. All of this was enough to convince me to snap a photo.

When I did the showing many months later, I approached the building from a different angle and didn't recognize it. You'll have to take my word for this, but only many months later when I was going through my photos from 2022. I was honestly floored. Did I subconsciously pick the building that I remembered from before? Not sure. The landlords for the apartment in this building were the only ones to grant me a showing, so it wasn't just me manifesting this.

Saturday, February 11th

Another parallel plot to my whole trip to Chile concerns my grandmother's house. The fact that I even exist and that I am Canadian is sadly due to my mother and her family having to flee Chile in 1973 [*]. My great-grandmother did not come to Canada with my family, at least not initially. She owned a house in Chief and stayed for many years until her health started to decline. She then moved to Canada to be looked after by my grandmother. She ended up passing before I was born, in Winnipeg.

The deed to my great-grandmother's house came to Canada with her, but in the intervening years, it was lost. This meant that there was technically a house that should've been passed down as an inheritance to my grandmother, as she was the only child. Given that the deed was gone, the proof of ownership of the land and house, this property was pretty much presumed lost. That is until my grandmother was visiting Chile before the pandemic in 2020. Miraculously, a path opened up for her to get her house back!

She went to visit the original church that she used to go to when she lived in Santiago, and there she ran into some old family friends that helped them when they had to flee the country. They mentioned that, the house is still there, a neighbour took it over when it was clear that it was "abandoned", and started renting it out. Given that my grandmother was the sole child, she should have inherited the property. We are currently working through the bureaucracy to get a new deed showing ownership. She intends to sell the house in Santiago and has got someone to do some renovations. I was able to see the house and it's pretty vibrant. I love the green colour of the exterior.

We ended the day having a nice meal in La Vega, the central market of Santiago. Speaking from the future, this was surprisingly the best Chinese food I had while in Santiago, beating even the chaufan from D003: Focused on Food.

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[*]

My grandfather was a local union leader in Santiago at the time. When the right-wing coup overthrew the previous socialist government, communists, socialists, and other left-wing groups such as unions were "purged" and forced underground. Thus, my family left for Argentina, and then Canada granted asylum. It is an interesting and sad rabbit hole to dig into. For those interested, the Wikipedia article on the coup is a good place to start. If you ever visit Santiago, then the Museum of Memory and Human Rights is a must-visit to get context about the coup and the ensuing dictatorship.