From our living room window,
looking towards the waterfront...
<- the band of aluminum at the base of the photo is the roof of the covered parking.
From our living room window, looking up towards the third level of the city. ->
From our doorway, looking at the living room window...
Monday: Pagamos las cuentas. What does it cost to live here? Today we hiked downtown to the O’Higgins Plaza building, where Ivón works on the fifth floor in the office of Propiedades Nor/Sur. She showed us the departamento we are renting, so we visit her to pay the monthly rent. CLP 300,000. Around $600 US/month. A week or so ago we paid the gastos communes … similar to condo fees … paid to the conserje in our building. Gastos were CLP 36,000 or $72 this month. We’re told they vary month to month depending on …. cosas.
I had a report to make to Ivón while in her officina. The hot water faucet (la llave) in our bathroom sink is often goteo (goteando?) dripping. Ivón called someone right away, and we think that someone will be calling us whenever he or she is ready to visit our departamento to fix the problem.
It better not be tomorrow afternoon, though, as we have a date for lunch at Cotele, the fabulous steak restaurant in Pelluco run by Jeremy (our landlord for the island house). http://www.cotele.cl We’ll be celebrating with a friend who plans to sail away on his voyage out of Chilean waters.
Back to the cost of living: At Telefonica Sur on Avenida Guillermo Gallarda we took our bill to the caja and paid CLP 22,000 - aka “22 mil” - or about $44. That covered the installation cost of our internet at the apartment ($36) plus the pro-rated cost of the monthly internet @ $28/mo from the day of hook-up (10-21) to the end of October. At least, we’re pretty sure that’s what it covered. We’re on the cheapest available plan and we’re happy with the internet service at the apartment. There are occasions when it fails, but only for a few minutes at a time … 6 pm and 10 pm being the likely moments of failure. Richard explains that that’s most likely because people in other parts of our building are connecting at those times to check email or whatever.
We had to ask directions to find the closest Caja Vecina where we could pay our electric bill for the past month. 9 mil … or $18. Electricidad powers our hot water heater at the apartment, as well as lights and the various battery-chargers for phones & computers.
Our gas bill for this first month in the apartment should be arriving any day now. We do a lot of cooking here, so I can hardly wait to learn how much gas we’ve used.
This week’s load of laundry only weighed 5 kilos, instead of the 6 it’s been the last couple weeks. At 1.2 mil per kilo we’re paying $12 to $14/ week to have our clothes, towels & bedsheets washed and dried.
We stood in line for a few minutes at the Banco Estado to pay our final charge for today: a one-time fee of $100 US to extend my 3-month tourist visa for another 3 months. Current visa cost is $160 - good for a 3-month visit thru-out the life of your passport. (We paid $100 the first time we came to Chile in 2005. I had to renew my passport last year, so had to pay again to get the initial 3-month tourist visa this time.) 25 cents to have my passport & original tourist visa copied. Senora Gladys, at the Office of Estraneros in the government building downtown made things easy. She remembered Richard from last year, asked him about his boat, and understood perfectly that living in an apartment was more comfortable than living on the boat. She filled out the application for me, scanned a signed copy into her computer, and gave us the chit to take to the bank to record our payment. We took the bank receipt back to her to be scanned and added to the application package. I go back on Wednesday to get my extended tourist visa.
By 1 pm our financial chores were done. We hiked back up Guillermo Gallardo to the Bikram Yoga studio and ascended the concrete ramp up to Avenida Padre Harter, past the Kofke market, past the wild fennel field and the Dental Clinic to our building up on O’Higgins. Time for lunch, and rest, and checking email.
I chopped the contents of our little compost tub and buried the vegetable material in the window box amongst the geraniums.
In the late afternoon, I walked out to the Jumbo to replenish the wine supply: cabernet sauvignon for Ricardo and chardonnay for me. In the future, I’ll give you the economic analysis of what we spend on food and drink.
Tuesday: What was that about the internet service here being so good? Somehow paying the bill yesterday coincided with a total collapse of our service! Rebooting the modem didn’t help; and the special phone # we’d been given if we needed help just rang, and rang, and rang. We had to walk to town anyway, to collect the clean laundry, so we stopped at the Telefonica Sur office to ask for help. They’ll have to send a technician to the apartment. Someone will call us within 48 hrs to set the time of the visit.
Walking to town includes descending to the waterfront level. One way to do that is to take the Rancagua stairway. From our building we have walked one block south-ish on O'Higgins and turned a la derecha (west-ish) onto Seminario. When Seminario begins to descend (on the right), we take the stub street to the left. Next, you see Richard standing at the top of the Rancagua stairs.
On the way back up the Rancagua Street Stairway .... below shows the view from the bottom ...
... we were almost to the top when my cell phone rang. I have trouble enough hearing a Spanish-speaker correctly in person, and the phone is an extra challenge, even when you’re not outside with the noise of traffic and birds, not to mention the pounding of my heartbeat near the top of that stairway. So you’ll forgive me if I interpreted the caller to be the Telefonica Sur technician wanting to set a time. The caller used the word clave several times: that should have reminded me to think of the bathroom sink faucet since both llave and clave mean “key.” My over-heated mind heard clave and interpreted that as needing ingress to the apartment ….
Well, anyway, I knew it would have to be after 3:30 or 4 pm, due to the aforementioned lunch date at the steak house. I managed to convey that time frame, and the caller seemed to agree. Yay!
Later, while putting the laundry away, I realized I’d probably made that appointment with the plumber, not the internet tech guy. Ai yi yi.
DURING lunch with our sailing friend at Cotele, Richard’s cell rang with the call from the internet guy. He passed the phone to me … !!! There was something about dies y ocho horas but all I could manage was that anytime after 4 pm today would be perfecto. What will it be like to feel any kind of grace or competence in this strange lingo!?!?
After a wonderful lunch, we were home around 3:22 pm, but Luis, the plumber didn’t get there till a little after 4, and it was almost 7 pm before the Telefonica techy arrived. Luis took things apart in the bathroom, then took off to get the part he thought would work … a new washer/seal. When he returned, he told us he’d gotten the new part at the hotel down the street. (They just have a different way of doing business here.) Maybe it wasn’t exactly the right part, or maybe the problem is beyond the washer/seal. We’re pretty sure Luis said he would have to return with an entirely new faucet. He did leave us better off than before: the leak is only a drip now, not a stream.
The young man from Telefonica fiddled with the modem for ten minutes, then called in to Ground Control for another ten. Pretty soon he wanted Richard to tune in and see that the link had been re-established. Success. Could he tell what had gone wrong? I asked. It had to be reconfigurado. Maybe there had been a cut in the power. Okay!
