Santiago singing

I spent my first day in Santiago walking around in a daze. How strange it was to be in a cosmopolitan city once again. Gone were the indigenous tribes of Ecuador walking about in their brightly colored cloth and the ladies bent over roasting plantains on dime store grills. Gone were the green leafy trees now laid bare, grey and cold in the midst of winter. I walked in a sea of dark skinned ebony haired humanity as I had so many times before for the last 7 months, and yet it seemed more ordered somehow. There was an underground and one could almost feel as if they were on the London tube. The mercado central was full of bantering fish mongers and tubs of iced salmon, cod, tuna, and octopus, giving the feeling you had just been dropped down into the Pike street market in Seattle. The Spanish architecture of looming buildings and Baroque churches had a distinctly European feel. And yet when the buildings gave way to reveal the muddy current of the Rio Mapocho and the rocky hill top park of cerro Santa Lucia, and the clouds parted to offer striking views of the snow capped andes to the east I was unsettled by the unfamiliarity of it all. I sat down in a wooden pew in the beautifull neo'classical church of Catedral Metropolitano admist the soft glow of the stained glass windows and the lofty recesses of the heavenly vaulted ceilings and somehow felt once again grounded. It was confession time and the repentant were kneeling before the boxes yearning for the forgiveness that would make them new once again. The organ was playing softly and a woman was singing a hym that sounded familiar but couldn{t quite be placed. Here in this cathedral in this country tipping toward the south pole I felt the pull of familiarity and comfort. People came here to seek the same God and to seek solace and peace and in the quiet of the common need the bewilderment I felt gave way to wonder once again.