Salesmen and security
Now I'm giving you all lots to read in your office on monday morning. Hope you enjoy (the first posts made today are more interesting than this one, I promise), and feel free to drop me a line yourself if you have the time.
As always, I am trying to figure out why things are like they are in a given country. In Chile there are two things that are very common but taken to the extreme: the salesmen and the security. There can be up to 5 people selling you something in a small store; they have their own supply chain going on in the store -and I mean in a store that could be run by two or three persons max. First you ask one salesman of the product you want, he points you to the right direction. Second salesman is the one who presents the product to you. Should you decide to buy, you are given a receit which you present to third salesman, who takes the payment. The fourth salesman checks that you have paid (they give a stamp) and the last one delivers you the product if payment is really made. I mean, if they think that works faster than with one or two people they must be joking. The only explanation I can think of is that they just want to have the payment separately (for security), but it still does not explain all..
Then, it is true that Santiago is a safe city by Latin American standards. But that is, according to my theory, because of the übersecurity of all places. They have guards and police everywhere. Sometimes I just get the "someone is watching you" -feeling, as they are virtually in every corner. In central Santiago you can have
carabineros (police) moving around in a fortified bus that resembles an all-terrain vehicle. The place where it is taken to the extreme is my dear university with all the rich kids in it: you can not take a leak there without somebody reporting on it. In the supermarkets the guards stalk you, I counted 6 guards visible in addition to the cameras and behind-the scenes operators in my local, medium -sized supermarket. But, I guess Chileans like their safety. And this way there are less unemployed people. ;)
Through the brick wall
Now everything is back to normal (if there is such a thing) here, and I finally got an answer from my thesis instructor and now I am actually starting my thesis! I know many of you did not expect to see this day at all, let alone the day when it is finished. Also, I made a study plan in order to graduate in time, and man did I get pissed off. I should have done it years ago! Making the plan I realized that I have a load of garbage in my degree, I have taken way too many courses that I didn't have to take.
The good thing is I have studied everything I found interesting, but the bad thing is that I still need loads of courses that are compulsory for the degree. If I need 160 credits for a MSc, I will end up with AT LEAST 220. Welcome everybody to my graduation in spring 2008 at the soonest.
Then the thesis.. of course I started with enthusiasm, but there is so much stuff that I need to do here, along with the normal everyday life and studies (which, of course, get tougher by the end of them), that it will be tough the last month. My friends here said that you might as well try to put your head through a brick wall, but I am motivated to do it, as it is crucial for the thesis to get the data here (it handles the Chilean telecommunication industry). So probably there will not be that many posts emerging in may..
Cena Finlandesa
Yup, it was my turn to show some national cuisine as every other foreigner in my house had already done it. At this point huge thanks to my mom that supplied me with some key ingredients from Finland like reindeer meat. This was the menu:
Starters: Smoked reindeer rolls
Main course: Meatballs and potatoes made in the oven, served with Finnish mushroom (kanttarelli) sauce
Dessert: Vanilla ice cream with cloudberries and chocolate sauce
Due to my background in the Nordiska Ekonomie Studerandes Union, I just had to give them a taste of some sitsi (sitzfest, table party = singing, eating and drinking in good company) culture and we had ourselves some good old Russian vodka for that. Everybody was amazed by the dinner and I also got to answer a lot of questions about Finland so 10 more people now know what is the real deal with the country. And to top it all off, I played music of some of the most famous groups of Finland, like HIM, Rasmus, Apocalyptica, Nightwish, Bomfunk MC's etc. Special thanks for Juuso and Minna who supplied the music.
Anyway, overall a good representation of Finland in one dinner with actually tasty food. Cry me a river, Berlusconi.
Pablo Neruda kicks ass
Let me enlighten you: the dude won a Nobel, wrote some excellent poetry, worked as an embassador for his country but most of all he seemed to have life completely figured out. Doesn't matter that he was a little weird and a communist -nobody's perfect, right?
On my tourist tour through the worthwhile places I took Patricia to Isla Negra, some two hours from Santiago. It is not an island despite the name, and it is mainly known for the fact that one of Neruda's houses is there. Now you ask yourself "how sorry is that?", but you should have seen the house! Unfortunately we were not allowed to take photos inside, but here are some from the outside:
First you see the house. It doesn't seem like much, but he really made everything like he wanted. The house is very long and narrow (he wanted it to remind him of Chile), with different parts. He designed his bedroom so that every day the first rays of sun would hit his head and the last ones his toes. He also had a "small" fixation on the sea and ships, so he included things like round windows, round ceiling and parts of actual ships in it (like a huge, 4-meter anchor in the backyard). And all of course making the most of the place where the house was situated: the second picture is what he would wake up to every day or the last thing he'd see from his bar at night. Get a load of that.
He was also the worst kind of collectionist (but never admittedly, he just said he was
cosista, liked nice things) and therefore the house looks like a museum. His favourite things were the statue-like carvings people used to hang in front of old ships (don't know the word in English but you catch my drift, like ship's hood ornament) which were all over the place, but he had virtually everything from African bug collections to seashells, not to mention loads of art from his friends of the art circles around the world, including names like Picasso for example. Everything was done to the last detail, I have seriously never seen something like that (below one example of his "things").
He really knew how to live. Not just the house, but the tales of him living it to the maximum, organizing get-togethers in his house with his friends (he valued friendships a lot and considered his friends even in the house: a separate toilet for men that was covered with erotic pictures) and just basically enjoying life in every way imaginable. Too bad I do not have talent as a writer..
Later we visited also his other house down here in Santiago. It is called
La Chascona (meaning someone who's hair is messed up), and it was equally impressing. Neruda built it as a house for his third wife, which at the moment of construction had to be kept a secret since he was still married to his second. There was even more imagination put into that one: he made passages in the yard that connect the three different sides of the house in a semichaotical manner. That gave the impression of his lovers messed-up hair, thus:
La Chascona. There he included things from ships as well as in the other one, but he also constructed a river flowing on one side of the dinining room to get the feeling of being afloat. The bad thing was that the house suffered in the military coup as Neruda was a communist, for example 3 original Picassos were burned by the army.. Idiots.
All in all, he really had it all figured out. I don't really like poetry that much but after these eye-openers I'll have to get better acquainted with Neruda's work. He was the man in his time.
Visiting Valpo
Last week I had Patricia, a friend I just met when I was passing by Mexicali, here for a visit. Of course we had to make the tour of the worthwhile places and do that while partying almost every day..
We passed through Viña, where we had a great time partying with the French in their apartment. It is becoming a trend here to not continue the party in a bar, which can mean one of two things: we are either really having too much fun just by ourselves or we are just getting lazy and old. Or maybe both are true, who knows. The penguins were a great hit in the party, and below you got Gael showing some moves.
Anyway, from Viña we continued with Patricia to Valparaiso, which was definately worth the visit. I will need to get back there someday for some serious clubbing, as some of the places there looked really cool. Valparaiso is just some 10 minutes from Viña in a bus, and the funny thing is that I remember most of the maps I have looked at showing Valparaiso as a bigger city than Viña, which it actually is not. The importance of Valparaiso has been diminishing along the use of its big port. However, it sill houses a naval base, the Chilean Congress and is the capital of the 5th region (instead of using the actual names, Chileans have their country divided into 13 regions with the imaginative "names" of 1st, 2nd, etc. except that Santiago is its own
Región Metropolitaneo). "Valpo" has just some 250,000 inhabitants and with that its just a bit smaller than Viña that keeps growing as a holiday resort/summer house city. And for those Finns that think it is disturbing that people flock into Helsinki, here's a fact: Valparaiso and Viña are among the biggest cities after Santiago, as its region houses about 2/3 of the WHOLE population of the country!
The city itself was all about the port, which just about ratifies the whole existence of the city. The locals were also really proud of their engineering wonders, small cable cars that run up the mountainside connecting the oceanside with the rest of the city in the hills. Personally I did not see their wonder, but then again, my education in engineering is not quite at the MSc level yet so maybe I missed something crucial...
Travel plan adjustments
I noticed that there is some space within my travel plan and thus I decided to make some new arrangements (something to look for when study motivation gets closer to zero). It is all starting to come together now and I will probably end up seeing a lot more of South America than I anticipated earlier.
First I will head to Bolivia in late may to see the
Salar de Uyuni (thanks for the tip, Simo) and the
Lago Titicaca that I missed thanks to the bus problems in Peru. On the same trip I'll go check out Northern Chile. And the best part: my friend Carlos from Mexico might join in for the ride!
Then it will finally be time to see Johanna again in june and we'll be making a modest tour of the main sights of Southern Chile, Tierra del Fuego and Southern Argentina before heading to Buenos Aires, Foz do Iguazu and Rio de Janeiro. By the way, by the time we are in Rio it will be semifinals and finals of soccer, so if Brazil goes all the way this year there will be an extra carnaval..
And that is not all, since I got some 22 days to spend in Costa Rica according to my earlier plan, I will try to change it so that from Rio I will head to Manaus instead to check out the Amazonas (!!! another dream come true !!! ) and then find a way to get to Costa Rica, probably first to Venezuela and I'll see it from there what seems convenient so that I can continue the old plan as intended from Panama City. After all, at this point many things could have gone wrong already and I´m not about to relive the Peruvian bus mishap. Just have to find some malaria medicine for this part of the trip but I think I can come up with it somewhere..
NOW this is starting to look like a real trip! ;)
Surfin' Easter
The exams are over for another 6 weeks, hopefully I got through them. The high emphasis on applying science to use left me dazzled and for some subjects I frankly cannot say how the exams went. This week I´ll get the final ruling of the teachers..
Otherwise, life here is continuing like usual. Long schooldays and trips to/from school, gym every schoolday, 3-day weekends, lots of DVDs and lots of good, meaty food and local wine. The audience might be pleased to know that I finally gave up the beard-growing and cut it. After all, it was getting to be quite nasty after 10 weeks.
Also, I have now officially experienced the first stomach problem of the trip (I bet you can not wait to read on..). Eating everything everywhere has not affected me yet at all and I was starting to think that my stomach could handle just about anything. But it couldn´t handle downtown Santiago´s Burger King. The MFs probably put some laxative in it, no wonder they were smiling so much when they served the burger. And there I was, happy to get good service.. Anyway, on my way home it really hit me. And anyone who has been in the situation knows that when you gotta go, you gotta go. The nearest place was at that moment the movie theatre, and of course they would not let me use the toilet without being a customer. So I bought a movie ticket and thought that relief was just around the corner -but to top it all off, there was a young couple in the toilet engaging in some other kind of activity, and I seriously felt like Mr. Bean as I sat in the booth next to them. But the movie V for Vendetta turned out quite good..
Easter holiday for semana santa was long enough after all: we got a 6-day vacation instead of the promised 4 days as one of our teachers did not want to work on monday. That's the way to do it! Knowing this it was about time to take upon another trip, this time finally to Pichilemu, the surfer's paradise I had been dreaming about for a month already. And it was just that, a surfer's paradise. The city lies a good 4-hour drive southeast of Santiago, alone in the edge of the Pacific and it just happens to have one of the best left breaks on this side of the continent. It is all about beach, hostels, restaurants, bars and alcohol stores to accomodate all the surfer flocks that go by -especially in vacation times like Easter. Arriving on friday the place was swarming with people and by monday morning it was dead again.
So, I finally got to try surfing with some instruction with the Los Lobos del Pacifico Escuela de Surf. It was every bit as hard as all the other newbies have said. I would estimate snowboarding to be about 5 times easier, or then it is just the Finnish blood talking. Anyway, in a short but a bit rough three-hour "making myself humble again" -session it became clear that I would need some serious practice to really get the most out of this sport. Every time I even got on the board the ride was just about over: "I'm doing it, I'm doing it, I'm really do.. sinking". This is unfortunately one of the sports that are hindered by the old knee injury. I just couldn't jump on the board as my knee would not bend sufficiently -and the struggling method (as my teacher conveniently described it) takes too much time to really start surfing.
Still, a great experience! It is surprisingly tough physically, getting thrown around with the board tied on your ankle, then getting up and fighting the currents and waves, paddling until you catch a good wave -and do it all over! I was so overcome by the experience that I did not feel at all the cold temperature of the ocean (ok, the wetsuit did help a lot). Quite the contrast, as after 3 hours of being in the water I had to wear the warmest clothes I have to survive the sunny beach weather on dry land..
I spent the rest of the weekend with Gael and Cindy riding, lying, walking, talking and drinking on the beaches, just to relax and get our minds off the smogs of Santiago. We also met a nice newly-wed Chilean couple that just insisted that we play cards with them in the camping grounds we were living in. I could imagine something else to do on my honeymoon but they seemed to have fun. Everyone has their thing, of course..
Beach, party, rodeo
Now that is what I call a way to prepare myself for the mid terms.. Last week we had the
semana mechona, which means the week when the new students are "properly recieved". Good thing that we, the
intercambios, were not considered as new since at least one local university threw paint at the new students, ripped their clothes to shreds and made them beg for money on the streets. I do not know if this was the case for UAI as for us the
semana mechona was more about partying..
As usual, the party was in Viña and there we went again. This time I was crashing in at Charlotte's (the beforementioned Swedish girl, next to me in the picture), but eventually most of the time we were on the beach. The greatest part was when the bar we went to opened the doors and let the people on the beach with a huge wide-screen playing music videos, coolers full of beer and everybody partying like crazy. Of course, the next day was spent chilling on the beach again -you just gotta love those Viña's casual fridays at the beach..
The highlight of the week was still the national rodeo finals that were held in Rancagua, some 1,5 hours from Santiago to the south. We headed there with Gael early in the morning to see as much as possible as the rodeo started at 8 AM and the tickets were a little pricey. The first 50 runs or so we were trying to get the hang of how they give points for the performances. Because I am sure you all are dying to find out as well, here goes: there are two vaqueros that drive the bull around the arena between their horses, with the aim of trying to hit it with the horse and lift it up the wall at certain points of the arena. Points are given based on what part of the bull hits the wall, head giving only one punto bueno and the ass the maximum of 4 puntos buenos. If they miss the running bull, they get two puntos malos and if it escapes from between the horses while running it is one punto malo.
Ok, there you have it. The real deal was to see the skill of the riders and the perfect control of their horse (they actually ran sideways). Now what made it all a bit less intriguing was the treatment of the bulls. As one might suspect, they got pretty banged up every now and then, and there were two guys whose job was to get them up and running again. This included hitting, pulling their tail, flipping them over (see pic), shouting and kicking. That was not for everybody, even I hated that part of the treatment of my future meals.
Nevertheless, a good show and a long, hot day with quite a few tasty beers and greasy food. Nothing like a weekend with all that to get me prepared for the exams..
