Preparations for Patagonia

At 2:30 today I finished my internship.

My boss came in while I was eating lunch. He told me that he finally reviewed all of my code and it worked perfectly. He was happy with the effort I put in and the results I got out. He wished me good luck with my travels and hoped I enjoyed my time here. And just like that I was done.

At 4:20 I cleaned out my office. Cleaned the whiteboard, threw out all the papers, took out the trash. At 4:25 I wiped my browser history and deleted my computer account. At 4:30 I walked out the campus gates for the forty-fifth and last time.

At 4:50 I briefly lingered around the aftermath of today's riot. Somebody had blockaded a street on one end with cinder blocks. On the other end they stuck a fire. The police wouldn't let anybody get too close. This was right behind that church I saw on the first day. Where I took my first picture. This will be the last riot I have to see for a long time, I hope.

At 9:00 I finished packing. Everything's heavier than I remembered. Probably an accumulation of all the bits and pieces of Chile I'm taking back.

At 10:00 I climbed to the top of our apartment complex. From here I could see a mile in every direction. All the homes, shops, and churches were thrown chaotically beneath me. A friend once posed the question: when does a city become a home? I don't think I agree with his opinions, and I'm not sure of my position. But I know that, in these past two months, Santiago has been a home to me. A home I'm going to leave forever.

At 11:40 I will leave my apartment for the last time and head to the airport. At 5:30 tomorrow morning I will land in Punta Arenas, the southernmost city on the mainland. From there I will spend five days in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. Then I will return to Santiago for a few short hours before taking my flight home.

Goodbye, Santiago. You were a good home.

What I didn't do

You've read all about the things I did do, so some of the ones I didn't:

-I never went into that church. In retrospect that probably would have been impossible to arrange. Yes, I hate soup grapes.
-Didn't track down all of that guy's sculptures. I forget which one. Forget everything about him, really, besides that he did sculptures. Oh, and he had a nice fountain.
-I never made lava cakes. I blame my terrible kitchen. Sorry Tito.
-I am not bilingual in Spanish. I'm honestly wondering why I thought I would be.
-I did not go into the rainforest.

That's all I can really think of. Man this was an intense summer.

What I Actually Did

I leave Santiago Wednesday night, so these are my last few days of working. Mostly it'd wrapping stuff up and polishing, but I got that done two weeks ago. Nowadays it's busywork. I figure that it's high time to explain what I actually did all summer.

Take a metal. All of the atoms and stuff in the metal are arranged in a neat periodic lattice. Now squish atoms together, twist them around, and generally screw up the orderliness of the lattice. This is called a defect. A dislocation, to be more precise. Defects play a major role in the properties of materials. It pays to know many there are the ratios of the various types. Until recently the only ways to do this were 'guess' and 'zap it with x-rays'. My professor has come up with a theoretical method of finding defects with ultrasound. Ostensibly my job was to confirm or reject this theory

In order to confirm it we have to compare it to a method with known validity. Before I came in the professors decided 'guessing' was too vague and that crystallography was the way to go. The idea is that x-rays scattered off a crystal would form bright, intense peaks. Defects would cause the peaks to be a little dimmer and a little wider. This is called broadening. Measure the amount it broadens and you're done. Simple, right?

Not really. Due to QM effects it's impossible to get a single, nice peak without a particle accelerator. You can only get double peaks, where the two overlap so much it's impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. My professor had no idea how to separate them and brought me on for the sole purpose of doing it. In MATLAB. Which I didn't know.

It took me six weeks of teaching myself MATLAB and running through various dead ends, but eventually I figured out how to pull it off. I still finished it ahead of schedule. It's a bit of a hollow victory, though, since I feel that if I knew MATLAB from the start I could have done it in two. Ah well. This is why I'm an undergrad and not a professor.

Overall I think it was worth it. I was able to contribute significantly to the project, got things done faster than expected, and impressed my professor with what I pulled off. They haven't compared my results to the theory yet, or if they have they have yet to tell me. If it succeeds, hooray! If not, at least I learned MATLAB. It's a pretty great language.

Since then I've been writing documentation and puttering around with a simulation of a triangular lattice. Two more days and I'm done. Then comes Patagonia. The capstone of the summer.

Descent into Decadence

The NSF gave us a budget of 2600 to fly in and settle down. Our sponsor universities gave us an additional 1100 discretionary spending. The idea was that this would be just enough to live in the city, check out a few scenes, and maybe travel once or twice. Due to frugal living decisions mixed with decent trip planning, I ended up with a bigger surplus than expected. We dropped maybe 260 on Atacama and still have plenty left over. I put 240 into Patagonia tickets and set aside even more for guides/hostels/souvenirs. I still have plenty left. With only two weeks to go, it's exceedingly unlikely that I'll go over budget. Strange as it may seem, this is a problem for me. We got this money to enjoy Santiago, and if I have money left over it means I didn't experience as much as a could have. It's gonna be a looooong time before I come back here, if ever. I needed to find a way to burn through the remaining money in as productive a way as possible.

It occurred to me yesterday that I have almost no sense for local food. I've been making my own lunch and dinners. Up till now we've eaten out maybe once every other week, rarely in a place that really showcases the food. I do know a bit about the street food, the fast food, and the pub food. Specifically, I know that it's trying to kill me.


Don't get what I mean? Here are some of the more common foods you can find around here.

Empanadas: Make dough. Stuff with cheese. Deep fry.
Sopapillas: Make dough. Mix with pumpkin. Deep fry.
Churros: Make dough. Top with sugar. Deep fry.
Chorriana: Fry beef. Fry eggs. Fry onions. Put on french fries.

You might have heard about Chilean sea bass. Known here as merluza, its got a great flavor and a wonderful texture. I've had it many times and love it. What's the standard way to cook it? Deep fry. Don't forget the side of french fries.

Hot dogs and hamburgers are also popular. But because these don't have nearly enough oil in them they're almost always topped with guacamole and mayonnaise. Lots and lots of mayonnaise. If you're trying to watch your weight (or are a cheapskate) you can buy them without the guacamole. Not to say mayo is limited to here. If you don't top your sopapillas with copious amounts of hot sauce and mayo you're doing it wrong. Mayo is optional on empanadas in the same way tipping is optional in the States. I opted out once and got horrified looks from bystanders.

This would balance a little if vegetables were at all popular. And while salsa is delicious and omnipresent the only whole vegetables I've had in entrees were the fixings in sandwiches. Whatever you do, do not order a salad. I have seen salads consisting of shredded lettuce, a sliced up tomato, and a small pile of boiled potatoes. And before you say that sounds okay, keep in mind those are three separate salads. If I didn't cook for myself I'd be dead within two weeks. It's a tossup on whether it'd be from heart failure or beriberi. At least scurvy isn't a problem. You can get four pounds of oranges for like a dollar.

Sometime during Atacama I snapped. Chile has high quality beef and amazing seafood, and from what I've heard they do amazing things with them. Further, I could imagine myself going home, being asked "so what amazing foods did you try?" and replying "guac burgers". So to hell with deep fried mayonnaise. My new goal before I leave is to try as many different regional specialties as possible. Will fix the problem and give me a way to spend the rest of my money.

Sunday Tito and I decided to track down the not-very-elusive Seviche. It's cold raw whitefish 'cooked' by submerging it in lemon. Reasonably cheap and (I later found) is easy to make.

I made the mistake of eating the broth along with it, which Not A Good Idea. Once I figured this out the dish became a lot better. Definitely something I'd want to make myself in the future. Afterwards we tried conger eel, which supports my increasingly-strong hypothesis that eel is freaking awesome.

That's two down, many to go. I'm probably going to come back home a perfect sphere if my heart survives that long. Maybe I should go easy on the guacamole. Or I could start eating more raw-onion salads. The world's my oyster here. 60-cents-a-pound oyster.

Me llamo Sol

I'm bad with languages.

It's not "oh I'm okay with languages but they're not my specialty" or "I have some difficulties grasping other languages". I'm just objectively bad at learning new languages. Over fourteen years of studying Hebrew I learned about ten words. I had a panic attack when I took Spanish in high school and had to switch out immediately. I did pretty well in Chinese but forgot it all when I came to Chicago. Most people can read all the Wheel of Time books in the time it takes me to memorize "hello".

Part of the reason I jumped at this chance was to forcibly get better at Spanish. I don't use it at work or at home or when travelling with my friends. But enough things are in Spanish that I start picking up small bits of it, and trying to interact with people outside my little bubble has improved my abilities enormously. And the administration secretary has been more than happy to help me learn the grammar. For the most part I can't understand people but can be understood. I can read many things in Spanish now although I can't quite write it. But I'm improving!  If I go from ignorant to barely fluent then the entire summer would be worth it for that alone. And as time goes on I grow more confident about that.

Not to say I could be going faster. And I'm frustrated at how lazy I often am about this. I keep promising myself to buy Spanish books and watch telesoaps but never get around to it. I used to scrawl language aids- verb tenses, grammatical rules- on my whiteboard. It hasn't gone updated in about a week. Actually... be right back.

...

Okay, I just filled my whiteboard with common verbs. Had to ask the secretary about a few bits I didn't understand. Mostly it was about when to use different words for 'fix'. One of the really annoying things about Spanish is that none of the verbs are interchangeable. In English "to have" is universal. I have happiness, I have the keys, may I have the keys? I've used it as "to be", "to possess", and "to take". But in Spanish I can't use tener like that. I can only say "I have hunger", not "I have happiness". I need to use estar for "to be". Similarly I have to use tomar or prestar for take. Similar problems crop up in a lot of cases. "Know" in English is universal, but en castellano there are separate words for "understand," "think," and "be acquainted with." I originally (originayee?) thought that I could memorize just one and use it interchangeably, but nobody understands me when I do that. Ah well, ignorant American at play.

On the other hand, no multiple pronunciations! Every single a is pronounced as in "caught", every e as in "ten", etc etc etc. It means that when I do find the right word, more often than not I can pronounce it correctly. Big change from English. I'm sure that when I get better I will find new and exciting words to botch, though. My family will not have to die of shock. Learning Spanish, in short, is revealing to me both things that I hate about English and things that I love. I'm sure I would think the same if I had to study any other language. Occasionally I find that I miss 了. At least until I remember how terrible sinograms are.

So one last thing. People here have even more trouble with 'Hillel' than people back in Chicago. Back home some of you may know that if people have too much trouble with the name I tell them to call me 'Solomon.' I landed knowing that I probably wouldn't use Hillel for anybody but UChile staff and professors. I'd use Solomon for everybody else. I quickly found out the pronunciation of the vowels are pretty uncommon on Spanish and people were having trouble with that, too. By noon of day one I started introducing myself as 'Sol'. I later found out from Peter that I've been calling myself 'Sun'. Hey, it works.

I think tonight I'll try translating this post into Spanish. The bilinguals reading this should feel free to mock the resultant butchering.

Walking to Work

I left my bike at home today so I could take pictures of the trip. Camera was running low on batteries (hadn't recharged it since the riot) so I couldn't do multiple takes. 

We live on the first floor of this building. It makes it a lot easier to move the bike in and out. While the gate is a little foreboding, we're actually in one of the safest parts of Santiago Centro. Barrio Brasil has a flourishing nightclub scene and is very close to the local police station. The front desk guy speaks very little English and we practice off each other.

Remember how my first pic was of a sprawling church? Turns out there are a lot of them in the city. I used to think they were a little unreal for some reason, and I've finally pinned down why. Santiago has pretty bad smog issues. I've never noticed, but both locals and interns have complained about it. One thing it does do it slightly lower the "resolution" of everything, making all of the buildings look a little vide-gamey. The churches seem more affected by this.

Ave Brasil is probably the most vibrant street running perpendicular to O'Higgins. There's a lot of restaurants and stuff that everybody eats at regularly (me less so I guess). The defining feature is the line of palm trees that separates the lanes. Seeing real-live palm trees strewn all nilly willy is really novel.

Plaza de Brasil. Like Chicago Santiago has lots of tiny little parks scattered everywhere. Haven't spent much time here, though. The other interns' place is just out of sight. I've been trying to get them to take pictures of their place with no luck. Maybe I offer cookies.

Ave O'Higgins is Santiago's main road. I think it stretches all the way into Providencia and Los Condes. The red line follows it pretty closely, and all the facing the street are horribly overpriced.

Both riots followed O'Higgins. These pictures were taken pretty close to where I got tear gassed. I'd say it's weird standing in that spot now but it's really not. You can still see some broken glass and shattered signs on O'Higgins' sidewalks.

Another residential building, this one specifically for students. We looked at one place, but they were (1) horribly expensive (500 dollars per month!) (2) didn't offer doubles or quadruples and (3) didn't offer noncommunal kitchens. So basically US dorms. Note the ever-present palm trees.

Another plaza. Not sure why I took a picture aside from the fact it looks nice. Actually, that's a pretty good reason. 

Here we are! Universidad de Chile, campus Beauchef. All of the engineers and applied scientists work here, as do four of us interns. I've grown pretty fond of it.

The 'quad'. It's pretty small and serves a lot of people, so there's always music or demonstrations or whatever going on here.

I think I could learn to enjoy watching soccer. We curbstomped Mexico two weeks ago and I was surprised at how exciting it was.

I was going to upload pictures of my office, but then my camera decided to crap out on me. Will get those up tomorrow. 

Just a Day

Wasn't planning on blogging this because nothing overly interesting happened, but I figured I was due for a post and that the sum total of everything is worth talking about.

Woke up sick today. Professor told me to come in the afternoon and only if I was feeling better. I got over it pretty quickly, so decided to bike to Mercado Central and pick up some food.

Biking has been a bit of a problem here. Every helmet I've found as been either too small for me or broken, so I've been going without one for now. I can't begin to describe how scary this is for me. Actually I can: it's pretty scary. Apparently I'm the only one in the city who thinks so, that or everybody else has the same problems with finding a helmet. It's definitely changed my biking habits. Most people who've biked with me know that I'm not exactly an aggressive biker but a proactive one. Biking isn't just about getting from point A to point B; it's about experiencing the act of biking. Bad roads, horrible weather, pedestrians... they aren't obstacles, they're challenges. Not so much here. If I get within thirty feet of another person I slam the brakes and walk the bike past them. I'm not taking any risks. Paradoxically, I think the lack of a helmet makes me safer. The few times I do try tricks I quickly regret it. Then again, the bike has two speeds: slow and jammed. I can't expect miracles from it.

A friend suggested that I only lock my bike when absolutely necessary. If I can I should walk it with me. This changes how I can shop. Instead of going on weekends, I need to hit up Mercado Central off peak times to avoid crowds. I can only get as much food as can fit in a backpack (not that I need much more). I avoid the inside shops, which has impacted my shopping experience by approximately nothing. My main worry about walking my bike was that I looked like a rude American. Then I saw three other people do it. I am no longer worried.

This is the first time I've shopped without Peter, and it's been pretty liberating. For one, I have a lot more agility. We don't have to mutually agree to purchase something, which saves a lot of time and energy. It also means I can impulse buy, which I've found helps my cooking a bunch. More importantly, I've been using Peter as a crutch. His Spanish is much better than mine. Shopping without him means I have to work much harder at it. Anything that improves my Spanish is A Good Thing.

I went to a vegetable stand that we shopped at before. The people recognized me and showed it. Before they spoke fast, getting frustrated when we didn't understand, the transaction just barely squeaking through. This time they spoke slower and were much more tolerant of my fumblings. It went well and I bought a thousand pesos worth of vegetables from them. Before now Peter and I would jump from store to store, always trying to find the best deal. After twenty minutes of looking we saved 4 cents on a pound of bananas. Now I'm thinking that's the wrong way to do things. Instead we should pick a few stores we like and stick with them. Always buy fruits from the same guys. Always buy veggies from teh same girls. Establish rapport with the shopkeepers. This might be the best way to learn Santiago "from the ground up" and seriously improve my Spanish. That's worth the four cents.

Mercado Central has a thriving fish market. Everything is caught the day of, if not sooner. I picked out a primary store and bought a kilo of salmon for just under three dollars. Stuff here is about as expensive as chicken. I imagine that by the end of the summer I'll be pretty good with seafood!

I biked into work at one o'clock. It was pretty nondescript; not gonna bore anybody with the details. After I got home I started work on dinner. This is the first time I had enough food to make two dishes, so I made salmon with onions and paprika-roasted potatoes. Neither is gonna win any awards, but this is only my first time making fish and second time making potatoes. I think they turned out well for novice attempts. Fish might have been a little undercooked, though; I'll let you guys know if I get Hep A.

Whenever I move into an apartment I try to get the food engine running. If you make three meals of food then you have dinner, lunch, and another dinner. During that second dinner you cook more food, and you have lunch dinner lunch. Then you make more food... rather quickly you're making more food than you can possibly eat and you can afford to relax and/or experiment. This time it hasn't been easy. I've tried to kickstart it on a couple different occasions but it putters out way too quickly. I think it's because I'm feeding two people right now; three meals is only dinner dinner lunch. Then we're back to square one. What I might do is get a kilo of lentils and make the biggest damn pot of lentil stew anybody's ever seen, creating enough food to keep us fed for a week. Soon we're going to have four people in the apartment, hopefully one of them will cook. That'll make things a bunch easier. If not I'm going to try to wrangle grocery stipends from everybody. I cook, you pay.

My labmates told me about a protest tomorrow, possibly the largest of the year. We're going to be heading out as a group. Will hopefully have pics up of that tomorrow night. I now know what I'm getting into and will be much more cautious.

Mercado Central

This post was supposed to go up later tonight, but Peter and I are waiting for Alex and Tito to contact us. We've been waiting three hours now and have nothing better to do, so I killed time by writing this.

Due to the move and other fun complications we really haven't been making that much food. Either we eat out or nosh on bananas (30 cents a pound!) or cereal or something. Faced with two more mouths and a lot more time on our hands getting groceries has increasingly become a priority. There are a grocery stores in the region, but they're small, crowded, and expensive. If you want good food you go to Mercado Central.

Mercado Central is not a supermarket but a super market, a bazaar spanning five city blocks. If you can't find it here, it either doesn't exist or is banned by the government. Note that the inverse is not true. I think I found a stand selling unicorn blood. It's not just food and restaurants. Two vendors were selling kitchenware, one shop carried bikes, and at least three casinos stood in plain sight.

But we didn't come here for the tea kettles. The big attraction is the food. These shops are just two in a legion of produce stores built in formation. Everywhere you go baskets of fruit and crates of vegetables line the walls. We didn't bother to count the number of places, but it was probably more than fifty. If somebody counted a hundred I wouldn't be surprised. And they're all incredibly cheap. We bought ten pounds of potatoes for two bucks. Combined with another five pounds of onions, carrots, and bananas getting home quite the challenge!

Spices are a little hard to track down. They're either sold in dry good stores like this one or in small unlabeled packets in the stands. Mostly you differentiated them by sight and smell. Easy for spices, not so much for herbs. I avoided doing it because I was worried about getting in trouble. I don't think people appreciate it when you jam a pack of powder up to your nose.

   

Tito and Alex never ended up showing. We ended up staying home and making lentil soup. I think that was the first real dish I ever learned to cook. It reminds me of warmth and home. Tomorrow we'll definitely be meeting up with the two, plus hopefully Malus and Arthur. I'm looking forward to it. It'll be nice to meet other people from the States.

Oh, and before I forget:

LLAMA LLAMA LLAMA 

Our New Home

This was supposed to go up Wednesday night, but then we didn't have internet and last night was the riot... so it's going up now. Better late than never! The short of it is that Peter and I moved into our new place two days ago. It's a cold-but-cozy four person apartment for 200 dollars apiece. Given the size of the place and our location that's an insane deal. At least three people in my lab have expressed jealously so far.

Of course the first thing I looked into was the kitchen. It's surprisingly well stocked with equipment, including a nice heavy-bottomed saute pan. I'm gonna be doing a lot of experimenting here. Note the gas stove doesn't have a pilot light. If you want to cook anything you have to open the range gas pipe, turn on a burner, and manually light it with a match. I've gotten pretty accustomed to this but we're gonna get a stove lighter just to be on the safe side.

This is the hot water heater. If we want hot water, we have to turn this on and manually light it. Kinda like the stove. It's not strong enough to feed two systems at once, so I can't wash dishes while Peter showers. This isn't actually as much of a problem as you'd think. The shower system is terrible anyway, so I'm anticipating that I'll be doing fast showers in the late afternoon to get it done with the minimal amount of time and freezing. But when three other people are doing the same it might get a little tricky to clean up after dinner. I was planning on rigging up a brick sauna system but Peter vetoed it. Plan B: Electric kettle + wash rags = 2 minute eco shower!

The master bedroom. This was originally a single bed, but the owners tossed in another to make the place more attractive. It has its own bathroom and everything. Currently Peter's living here, and we'll push a second person in when we get a full house.

My room. Much smaller than the master bedroom. I picked it because I like sleeping in a top bunk. Five years in one can do that to you. Not sure if I'm going to move when the new guys come. On one hand, bigger room! On the other, it could look like we're assigning them to the cruddier room for the cardinal sin of Arriving One Week Later. And I'd have to move my stuff. What'll probably happen is we'll all sit down and hash out a sleeping plan. Maybe we'll rotate rooms. Maybe we'll all go crazy.

The living room. We've been using it as a work room / dining room and are looking forward to seeing it with four people in it. I've already staked my claim on the couch. The TV looks so sad and alone. It will probably stay sad and alone.

Central heating in Santiago is very rare and expensive. Everybody uses these space heaters. This one is powered by propane. It makes a bone-chillingly cold room pretty warm in a very short time. The gas can be a tad expensive, though, so we're only using it early morning and late night. We're supplementing with lots of tea.

Peter's been pretty happy with the place, but it still feels wrong to me. I've gotten used to the quirks and lukewarm showers and gas ranges, but there's something missing. Something vital...

That's better.

I bought it at a hole-in-the-wall bike shop for fifty bucks. It's rusty, it's creaky, and it's got the most insane gear changing system I've ever seen. It is, simply put, the worst bike I've ever ridden.* And I love it. It's crap, but it gets me around the city. With this Santiago is no longer a discreet set of metro stops but a continuous city. I always feel more complete when I have a bike. Now I'm ready to take on the city.

That covers our living situation. Tomorrow we're gonna get a truckload of groceries and meet up with the arriving interns. Should be a fun day!

*FIXIES ARE NOT BIKES

Work: Day 0.5

I haven't been posting much until now; Saturday and Sunday were pretty boring. Rain kept us mostly indoors except to shop for food and stuff. Mostly I spent the time making halting conversation with the other Hostel folk. So far that has been my best way to practice Spanish.

I've been feeling more confident with my speaking skills. I'm still at a three-year old level, but at least now I can reasonably navigate the city. My sentences are sharp, terse, the phrases of a caveman who just got out of the glacier. But it works! I've gotten directions and bought food. Some people, especially the restauranteurs and shop owners, love it when I come in. I think they're impressed that I'm making an earnest effort to learn the language. Yo quiero ser culto etcetera.

Today was supposed to be the first day of work, but apartment hunting took over. On the minus side, I came in very, very late. One of the apartment contractors tried to help me get back, and we ended up 3 km from the nearest metro stop. Fortunately my professors were very understanding and set me up. I have three papers to read as 'homework' for Wednesday, which should occupy me for most of tomorrow morning. I also get my own office. I'm really moving up in the world! I didn't get a chance to talk with many of the people in the lab, but they seem very friendly. Señora Anderson also put me in touch with some of the other students. I'm much more optimistic about befriending people now.

More good news: we have an apartment! It's a four person place for about 220 per person. Compared to what other interns have paid, it's a steal. I'm going to have to add another commissioner to the list of housing contacts. Pictures when we've moved in!

Now the important part: pictures. I finally figured out how to change the camera from "screw up the pictures" to "let me screw up the pictures myself". Combined with me walking about 12 km while hunting for apartments, I had a lot of opportunities to take pictures.

All three of the HQs we checked out were in the Providencia district of Santiago. Like the rest of the city, it's overtly not much different from Detroit or Chicago. Fewer burning buildings, maybe. A lot of the differences, aside from the different language, were a lot more subtle. Different colored buses, superior walk signs, etc. The street signs list the highest and lowest addresses of the buildings on that street, an urban policy so brilliantly simple I'm shocked the US doesn't do the same.

In the distance is the San Cristobar Hill. It's the largest park in the city. They say that on a clear day (ie after it rains) you can see all of Santiago from the peak. It's surprisingly easy to access via metro and I'm planning on spending a Saturday exploring it. Not all of our travelling has to be done outside of the city.

This fountain is a tribute to the famous Chilean sculptor Tótila Albert. Before his death in 1967 he taught at the Universidad de Chile and created multiple famous and influential pieces around the city. I want to track them down. This shot does not contain his tribute statue, mostly because I'm a terrible photographer. Closeup of the water, as well as a building I'm calling "Souther Campus":

That's all I have for now. The next couple of days are gonna be taken up with actual work and moving to the new place. After that I'll finally be able to explore the city for pleasure and not necessity. I'm looking forward to it!

Day One

We've landed, gotten through customs, and settled down. I spent a good five hours walking today. There isn't that much to say. High points were a broken conversation with one of the hostel owners (She doesn't know English, yo no comprende castellano) and successfully buying electrical equipment. Low points? Many. Getting around is really tough when you don't know where your goal is and can't ask anybody where to go. I'm still in that zone where I don't know where to shop or anything. Cooking will be tough until I get a place and eating out is expensive. Most all, Peter and I are utterly alone.

We're the first wave. Nobody else is coming for at least a week. The hostel owners and other rentersare nice and friendly, but the owners are older than us and the hostel folk are equally removed from the culture. Peter knows little Spanish and I less. We will probably not have any Chilean friends until our work starts, and maybe not even then. We have no guides or mentors. We are experiencing the city completely removed from all of the life and energy around it.

I'm really starting to empathize with the UChicago international students. Not knowing the language cuts you off from everybody. I can already feel the temptation to hide in our own circle and never experience the city. The alienation hurts that much. The pragmatic difficulties of navigation do not help either.

It's not all complaining, though. Slowly I'm learning more Spanish. And I think I've figured out a way to meet some people, especially people who know a bit of English. There's a park three blocks north in which I'm going to try a juggling bit. Peter and I may have found a place for the next two months. I've successfully done some daily activities. The first week is gonna be rocky, but that's what we wanted. That's why we're the vanguard.

I spent a lot of time walking around the city but no time taking pictures. I'm not yet comfortable enough to play the tourist. Another part of it might just be the natural laziness that comes from unfamiliarity with cameras in general. There was one picture I just had to take, though.

I don't know anything about the place. I just thought it was striking in a way, something so different from the rest of the city that it deserved the first picture. I think it was a church. Maybe I'll explore it if I wouldn't get in trouble. I don't know. I don't know how the next ten weeks will evolve, aside from the fact it will be interesting and possibly life-changing. Best laid plans.