With its bright fluorescent lights and seemingly endless shelves running over with goods both foreign and domestic, the market was overwhelming. Even its name—“Jumbo”—emphasized the vastness of its inventory. Such a vague name also allowed the store leeway to expand into just about every retail area, keeping it free from pigeonholes—which, by the way, were on sale in aisle three. 

My face was beginning to resemble the jagged Andean peaks I had seen from my descending plane a few days before; I needed shaving cream. As usual, I had forgotten to pack the necessary toiletries; as usual, in order to remedy this lack, I found myself bolstering, however minutely, a foreign economy. A stroll down one of Jumbo’s well-stocked aisles, wide enough for a couple of drag-racing Renaults, and I quickly realized that the Chilean economy didn’t need my help at all.

One of the persistent stereotypes of that vague ethno-linguistic area known as Latin America is rampant poverty punctuated by enclaves of extreme wealth. While Santiago definitely has its poor parts, the rest of the Chilean capital is the complete opposite. Walking through the city’s downtown core, I was surprised by the frequent evidence of prosperity: large shopping centers; packed cafés; laptop computers on every other lap. Even more telling was the number of cranes I counted: a dozen were visible from atop the central Cerro Santa Lucia alone. The city appeared to be in the midst of a boom.

And a boom usually means people have a few bucks to spend (or pesos, as the case may be). I’ve always found that a good signal that you’ve spent too much is when you can no longer carry your purchases. In this particular neighborhood of Santiago, known as Vitacura, that’s no obstacle: shoppers push shopping carts from one store to the next. Their only problem is the occasional errant wheel, veering to the right.

Many folks in Vitacura veer to the right in other ways as well. The name of the internationally reviled dictator Augusto Pinochet doesn’t raise so many eyebrows on these serene, tree-lined streets. Pinochet, and the amusingly named Chicago Boys, are rightfully credited by many for laying the groundwork for the Chilean “economic miracle.” The pesky subject of the several thousand who were killed or made to disappear during all the wand-waving doesn’t get quite so much attention.

The name of the internationally reviled dictator Augusto Pinochet doesn’t raise so many eyebrows on these serene, tree-lined streets.

On the other side of town, my local friend, Mack, took me to La Choscana, the house of legendary poet Pablo Neruda. The running joke among Chileans is that for a Communist, Neruda owned an awful lot of real estate. La Choscana—literally translated as “bad hair day”—was the smaller of his properties, and remains a homey yet strange dwelling filled with his obsessive collections of everyday objects. Fascinated by the sea, Neruda modeled all of his houses on ships, complete with porthole windows. On the top floor of La Choscana, floor-to-ceiling windows create a lighthouse effect.

Blocking what was once a perfectly good view of the mountains is the corporate headquarters of Telefonica Chile, a building designed to resemble a cell phone. Gonzalo, our well informed tour guide, rolled his eyes as he described this steel and glass eyesore, along with the smaller building next door (modeled after a phone charger). It apparently didn’t occur to the firm’s architects that the phone upon which the building was modeled would soon be obsolete.

Days after Pinochet came to power, Neruda died and with him his dreams of a socialist Chile. The telephone building drives that point home.

After a good twenty minutes of trying to orient myself to the aisles of Jumbo, and another ten minutes trying to decipher the Spanish signs, I finally located both my friends and the store’s assortment of shaving creams. To me, shaving cream is shaving cream; but Mack and her boyfriend insisted I forgo the always reliable Gillette and select instead the more expensive Nivea, with hydrating something-or-other. They said my skin needed it. Never mind that a six-ounce can of Nivea’s Moisturizing Shaving Gel was selling for 3,400 pesos, at roughly 540 pesos to the dollar. 

I gave in and bought the Nivea, and we piled back into Mack’s silver Renault. As we whizzed by several more shopping centers, an Alfa Romeo dealership, and an Apple Store, with Mack chattering the entire time on her cell phone in rapid-fire Spanish, I grew slightly annoyed: How was it possible, in a stable economy bolstered by foreign investment and strong capitalist credentials, that I had to pay three times what I would have paid in the United States for a cheaply made toiletry? If $6 shaving cream is progress, who needs miracles?