November 22: Plane Tickets at the Grocery Store?

So luckily for me, one aspect of American culture hasn’t taken off in Chile to quite the same extent as elsewhere: the credit card. It’s still possible to pay for even the most expensive things like your electricity, phone bill, or even plane tickets with cash (not even by check!) at centers known as Servipag, which are located all over the place, especially in grocery stores. All you have to do is either print out a receipt or bring your bill, wait in line for a long time with a ton of other people and then fork over your cash.

In my case, this helped me two ways in purchasing a flight to Patagonia for the end of the semester:
a)since the disappearance of my wallet, I don’t actually have a credit card and
b) LAN airlines, Chile’s main airline (sort of a monopoly actually, much of which is owned by President Piñera) charges foreign credit cards an obscene amount more. ie a flight that was well under $200 magically transformed into a $600+ flight when some of my friends tried to use their credit cards. I’m not entirely sure how/if this is entirely legal, but así es.

This is an example of an irony I’ve found really interesting: sometimes living in a slightly less developed economy is actually more convenient. You don’t need a credit card or bank account to pay for things. Because a lot of people don’t have cars or don’t want to pay for long trips, there are extremely efficient and cheap bus services almost everywhere. In the center of Santiago, you never have to walk into a store to get snacks or a newspaper- you can just grab one at one of the millions of stands that dot the streets. Even clothes, electronics and toys are sold on the streets. Ice cream vendors are constantly climbing onto the buses. You don’t have to pay for a cell phone plan and can just get a rechargeable phone, putting money on it when you have it from phone recharger people who wear gigantic flags and wander around subway stops. I don’t want to say that the informality of the economy is a good thing, merely that it is kind of useful as a student with limited funds and time.

In another interesting occurence, today my econ professor asked me and the other American classmates “O, today is a holiday for you right?” He received several blank looks. “Thursday? Thanksgiving?” Finally a French classmate who seems generally knowledgeable about history helped us out: “Kennedy?” We wanted to explain that no one commemorates Kennedy’s assasination especially, but it seemed sort of unnecessarily defensive after our ignorance about our own history. I think he probably assumed that we would commemorate Kennedy’s death since the death of Chilean President Allende during the coup d’ etat is a really big deal here, especially among certain political sectors. But I guess since Kennedy’s death wasn’t followed by 20 years of dictatorship, it doesn’t warrant too much commemoration. Awkward.