Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art

Day 212 – Santiago, Chile

I was resolved to visit the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art this morning. It is roughly 200m from my hostel, so since I left 10 min before opening time, I decided to detour through the post office to buy a stamp.

It so happens that the post office opens at the same of the museum, so I internally shrugged my shoulders and joined the queue to go in. (Now that I rethink about it, today being Saturday, it may have been closed by the time I left the museum, so it was just as well.)

Inside I got a ticket and went to wait my turn. Apparently some people needed a lot of time before me. For my simple operation -glueing the stamp was the longest part, I think-, it took 40 min.

Ah well. Hazards of travelling and all that.

I finally got to the museum. It is not very big, but it has very nice pieces, mostly pottery, a bit of stonework, some textiles. The potteries are intact, very well preserved, and are a delight to see. The explanations had an English version, fortunately for me. 

Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art – Man – Maya

Of course, when the English text is a quarter of the length of the Spanish one, you get the feeling that some details get lost in translation.

I think that the visitor is expected to have some cultural background of all this, as it is difficult to arrive “cold” -that said, I have seen a few exhibitions in France, so I was supposed to have some previous knowledge!

Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art – Gourd-shaped vessel – Chimu pottery

I think that the difficulty here is that the exhibition wasn’t focused on one region or one people -or even one era-, it tried to cover everything from Mexico to Chile before the 16th century, jumping from one people to another. It is a lot to cover, and difficult to follow and assimilate at the first go!

And then it was back to the hostel.

The hostel is on the sixth floor of an old, imposing building overlooking the Plaza de Armas. From the terrace, you have a very good view (and hearing) of what is happening here. Mapuche demonstration, musician, people passing by, palm trees…

Only one of the two lifts work. It is an ancient, venerable being, with glass-and-wood doors, and there is an employee on a high stool to press the floor buttons for you. Since the queue can get quite long on the evenings to get back up, I wonder at the importance of having one person there just to press the right buttons. Iconoclast of me, I know.

I tried to find a supermarket the other day; I went to the closest, according to Google Maps (you get surprises with Google Maps, such as the disappearance of a laundromat the app swore was there at such-and-such specific address). Rather than a supermarket, this was a… convenience store? Imagine a regular butcher shop, with two walls of glass displays and one wall of goods, the last wall being the entrance. Most of the goods are either fresh -meat and cheese- in the glass display, the canned goods are on the walls behind the display, and you can access the dried goods directly on the last wall. That’s… easy to access when you don’t speak the language and have no idea what the products are.

Having tentatively selected a few things that were directly accessible, I was directed to hand them over the display to get a ticket, then I was to queue to pay before producing the “paid” ticket back at the counter to get my stuff. That’s not easily the most accessible transaction in a new city.

Fortunately for me, I kept looking and found a more traditional supermarket a further on, where I could take my time looking over the products and translate what I wanted.

The breakfast here is included in the night and is a very generous buffet with bread, cereal, hard-boiled-eggs and fruits. (And butter, jams, and powdered juice.) So I can count on that to get proteins and fruits and worry less about buying balanced meal stuff.

(Picture header: Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art – Snake-shaped bottles – Nazca)