On The Beach

Thursday morning I rolled out of bed around 7:30, showered and the maid showed me where to get things for breakfast. I ate, had a cookie, and then caught the bus downtown (Steve had left much earlier to take his kids to school so I couldn’t get a ride with him). Before work, I had to mail off my phone to Kristen so I spent about a half hour figuring out how to do that – it was more complicated than you would have expected, mostly because you cannot get packages to send things in at the same place that you send them. Not expecting this I didn’t bring my own package. So, I had look around a bit before I was able to find a suitable container to mail the phone.

Once that was done, I made my way to work and set to work on a set of flyers for Franco about Carbon offset projects and a reforestation program funded by donations. I spent most of the day doing this before grabbing some empanadas for lunch. After lunch, I wrapped up the final additions to the overall report and started editing it. This took until about seven when I caught the bus back home for the night. Getting from the bus stop to home proved to be a challenge however. I forgot how many streets it was before Steve’s and thus turned too early. This wasn’t a problem because I realized it pretty quickly. The problem was when I tried to take a cross street to get to his and found myself in a maze of circular streets that finally spit me out several blocks past where I wanted to be.

Eventually I made it back to Steve’s and had dinner with him (some terrific type of salmon). We chatted about his history, what he had done before he started DRCLAS and his plans for the coming winter (he’s headed to Notre Dame to teach). The guy is fascinating. He’s been to over 60 countries on six continents. The only places in Central and South America he hasn’t been are the Guianas, Suriname and Honduras. At one point, he spent 4 years living in Swaziland. Who lives in Swaziland for four years?

After dinner, I watched a bit of House with his daughter and then spent some more time updating my blog before heading to bed.

My last day in Santiago dawned much the same as the first, cloudy and semi-cold. I got up and got some breakfast with Steve’s oldest daughter who was home sick and then packed up the remainder of my things and waited for Steve to get back from swimming to get a ride to the office with him. We stopped at Starbucks on the way and then I spent the morning editing the final draft of my report. At 11 I had a meeting with Felipe Valdes, the third partner and the guy who had first talked to me in January about coming down for the internship, and after getting directions that sent me to the complete opposite side of the city from his office I wandered back and had an hour long meeting with him going over what I had done all summer.

After our meeting I stopped for lunch at the Phone Box Pub, something I had wanted to do since Sam and I ate there the first time and had a delicious spinach and chicken burrito. I washed it down with their house beer, the real reason I had wanted to go, which was excellent. A lot like the Antares Scotch in BA. A touch sweet, like burnt caramel, medium weight, not too hoppy and generally very good.

After lunch, I headed down to the Santa Lucia market to do some last minute shopping and then made it back to work around 3:30 to finish editing the report. I had my final meeting with Steve at about 5 and we just went over the plan for the next month or so (I’m staying involved in the project) and talked a bit about the board meeting in September. We also talked about the fact that I may have worked myself into a job for the fall continuing to do what I’ve been doing. We’re going to talk about it over the next few weeks and at the board meeting but I may keep working for the project and getting paid and then they’ll bring me back down in January again to go down to the properties and talk to everyone after what I find out in the fall. This would be pretty sweet and it also at least partially solves my problem of finding a job while I work on my thesis.

After the meeting, I gave Steve a vase with flowers for letting me stay at his house for the last few days and then we said goodbye and I crashed into a few doors while moving all of my stuff down to the cab waiting for me. Then it was a brief stop at an ATM and off to the airport for my final time this visit. I realized this is the first time I’ve flown out of an international airport for the second time; maybe not a big deal but interesting nonetheless (to me anyway).

I’m not all that thrilled to be leaving (or, actually, to have left) and sitting in Atlanta I’m not at all excited to be back in the States as I have been on past occasions coming back from international travel. This trip was not nearly long enough – I would have been perfectly happy to stay for at least another month – and I’m kicking myself for thinking back in April that I would need to rush back in order to work on my thesis. That I can keep working on the project makes up for this a bit but there is nothing like being there. Patagonia is far nicer than Atlanta. But, as Nancy said when we said goodbye, I’ll be back again shortly, likely much sooner than I expect.

A final interesting note. I walked down the stairs to baggage claim this morning after going through customs and ran into Elise coming back from South Africa. She had spent 10 weeks working in Cape Town (?) and just arrived back as well. If you’re interested she is the author of “Women in Pants” in the list of blogs to the left (also, my trip is ending but if you want to keep reading about Chile Kristen will be teaching here and writing about it at Soy La Gringa until December. If you want to keep reading my stuff I will begin posting on Ishmael's Musing again by the end of the week and will post there weekly).

So, thus, we come to the end. I’m sure that this blog will host future adventures of mine (hopefully sooner rather than later) but my trip to Chile will officially end in about six hours when I disembark from my plane in Pittsburgh. It was a great trip and an even better work experience – the best summer internship I’ve had – and I look forward to working with Patagonia Sur again. To all you old people who read this, the title of this post is a special tribute to you.

Frosty the Snowman

Monday I awoke to a half an inch of snow on the ground. This was going to put a cinch in my plan to go hiking in the afternoon. Especially because by the time I got to work at nine the half an inch had become almost two. And by noon there were about 7 inches on the ground. At that point I decided I wasn’t going hiking in the hopes that I would be able to get some skiing on fresh powder on Tuesday morning instead. But the weather decided not to cooperate. By two it was sleeting and the snow wasn’t standing up so well to the rain/ice mix. I took myself to La Confluencia for lunch again and then got a ride home from work with Juan Andres.

After arriving home the fireplace and I had another tussle before I managed to get it going well enough that I was comfortable leaving to go to the store. This was an adventure. I didn’t want to walk the two or three km to the store so I planned to ride Valeria’s bike. But the side walks are not cleared in Coyhaique. So they were still covered in about 5 inches of an icy snowy mix. If you think driving in this is bad try doing it on two wheels. It was a trip. But great for my balance and I didn’t wipe out so I’ll call it a success. I made it to the store, bought some food for the next few days, and returned without mishap to make myself a dinner very similar to the previous night’s, but this time I threw in some avocado to spice things up a bit.

After dinner I spent the night doing some preliminary research and filling out my proposal for the Fulbright. I’m not sure how much I actually want this – I really want to come back here, to the point where I wish I wasn’t going back to school so I could just stay. This is a bit of a catch-22 though because if I wasn’t going back to school I never would have come here this summer and hence never would have found out about how great it is – but I figure that I should keep my options open. And getting paid to go study in New Zealand for a year wouldn’t be so bad.

Tuesday I rolled out of bed early because I was planning on going hiking in the Reserva Nacional de Coyhaique. I took Valeria’s bike and left at about eight, heading out along the road to Argentina – the direction Lonely Planet said the park should be. I got about three km out of town and decided that something was not right. So I stopped and asked for directions and was told that the park was actually on the opposite side of town. I was skeptical, partially because that didn’t seem like it made much sense to me, partially because Lonely Planet said the opposite and partially because Chileans have a bad habit of making up answers when they don’t know the actual answer. However, I knew that something was not right about where I was so I started back into town looking for the gravel road described in my book. I found what appeared to be a likely candidate and started riding up through the snow. This did not last long. Riding uphill in snow is very difficult because even my weighty body is not enough to give the wheel sufficient traction to propel the bike in snow. So instead I pushed the bike, comforting myself with the thought that I could ride down the hill and it would be fun.

However, when I reached the top of the hill there was no park. At this point two guys on horses passed so I stopped them and asked for directions and got the same answer as before, the park was on the other side of the town (although these guys did say the other, other side of town) and so I gave in and decided that, yet again, Lonely Planet had failed me. Patagonia must be the Bermuda Triangle of Lonely Planet. But the ride down the hill was just as much fun as I expected and it set me on my way across town to the park. By this time it was also only 9:50 so I really hadn’t wasted that much time in my search.

After descending a rather imposing hill (which I was dreading coming back up) to the Rio Simpson I managed to find the aforementioned gravel road after a short jaunt along the Carretera Austral. This was a real gravel road and I barely made it a few meters before I started pushing. I pushed for the next 1.5 km up the hill until I got to the entrance to the park. At that point, I was able to ride again as the road, still snowy, leveled out. So I road in and check at the guard station but no one was home so I just started wandering up one of the roads next to the station. This took me up several hills and before leveling out again at a field, which appeared to have a trail heading up into the woods next to it. So I ditched the bike in the bushes on the side of the road, to be picked up on the way back down, and started up the trail.

This turned out to only be a trail that cut off a switch back in the road and I was back on the road again shortly afterwards. However, now I didn’t have the bike to push and so I just kept walking up the road to see what I could see. This brought me to a fork in the road with one fork clearly well trafficked by cars, even after the snow, and the other completely untouched. Naturally, I chose the one covered in snow. This continued to wind up through the woods, affording me some great views of Coyhaique behind me and the mountains (very similar in appearance to Katahdin) in front of me.

On the way up, I ended up in what appeared to be a managed forest and followed a small access road through that. This brought me to some pretty intense tracks, the only thing I can think that they were was Lynx but I’m not sure if they have Lynx here (I have also been informed that my previous post was incorrect. There are bears in South America. But they’re vegetarian bears. So they’re a bit different than Grizzlies). These led up the road until it forked off again where I took the access road. This brought me to a small marsh and then a small lake as well. I walked around the lake and continued through the woods for a bit before turning around to head back since I figured I should get back to the office at some point.

On the way, I came across a construction helmet and my inner artist was inspired. So, I made myself a friend to keep me company while I looked at the lake.

After we took pictures I headed back down the way I came intending to head back to work. This intention lasted until I got to the fork where the tracks headed up. Then I decided work could wait (they’d made me come home from Palena early after all) and headed up that trail. I’m glad I did because after wading through the snow for a while I came to a second lake that was absolutely beautiful. I was able to walk out into the water a bit on a dead tree and just stand listening to the silence. This lake was back against the larger mountain and so sat in a little bowl, protected on three sides by the mountain and it was nearly completely silent. This is why I love hiking in the winter. Everything is calm, silent and you can go to a park that is a 30-minute walk from a town with 50,000 people and be the only person there.

After standing out in the lake for a bit I figured that I really should get back to work so I headed down but I did take the long way back, looping around on another access road before I came back to the bike. By this time the snow had finally overwhelmed my Gore-Tex boots and my feet were pretty soaked. I could have used some bread bags.

Back at the bike, I had some cookies I had brought with me and then started back down. At this point, I learned why new mountain bikes have disc brakes on them. When the conventional breaks get wet (in this case snowy) they cease to function – lack of friction on the wheels and all that physics stuff. This meant that I was suddenly going down a gravel road, covered in snow and ice with no breaks. Adrenaline rush may or may not be the right words.

However, I made it back to the entrance of the park without an incident. I took a few pictures of the trees on the way in because they looked quite picturesque covered in snow and then I started down the 1.5 km hill to the Carretera Austral. This proved to be a much greater challenge than getting back to the entrance of the park as this new road involved switchbacks. I found the best way to negotiate these was with one foot on the ground. I went for the old school breaks. I also found that riding in snowdrifts did a lot to slow me down. But mostly I just relied on my momentum to die on the flat sections between curves so that I didn’t pick up too much speed. This worked well until I got to the last bit, which I remembered as being a continuous downgrade right to the Carretera Austral. I decided that walking down that was the best choice.

Once back on the highway I started the journey back to the cabin for a shower and lunch before work. This entailed riding up the intimidating hill that I had gone down in the morning but it was not as bad as I feared and the ride home took me 45 minutes. It also started raining, which made me feel better about deciding to go to work. Not that it really would have mattered as I had a full rain suit, but knowing that I could have blown off all of work to hike for the rest of the afternoon did sit well with me until the rain meant that the rest of the afternoon would have been a wet hike.

At home, I showered and grabbed a quick lunch and then caught the collectivo to work. There I set to work on my models until about 8 when Juan, his wife, Armando and I all went to get a final dinner in Coyhaique as I was leaving the next afternoon. We went to yet another relatively good restaurant (Franco) and I tried the crab dish Franco had recommended the first night I was in town. It was good but nothing special. However, dessert almost killed me. Two crêpes filled with dulce de leche is much too much sugar for anyone.

After dinner, Juan dropped me off at home and I started a fire and then sat in front of it with plans to write in my blog. However, these plans were short lived as I started falling asleep almost as soon as I sat down. So I decided not to fight it and just went to bed.

My final morning in Coyhaique I woke up bright and early and did the dishes, packed and tidied up the house and then caught the colectivo to work. At work it was just Armando, Daniela and I as everyone else in the office had gone to various places around Patagonia for work. I spent the morning struggling with my models before for they finally gave me some numbers that made absolutely no sense so I decided to go get lunch. I had a sandwich at the churrasco place across the street and then headed back to do a bit more with them before deciding it was fruitless because of the lack of quality inputs and went for a walk to see if I could find a bottle of wine for Nancy and Valeria. Unfortunately, I found no markets or super markets within a five-block radius of the office and had to go back empty handed to get my transfer to Balmaceda.

I slept for most of the ride but I did wake up at the end to see the snow spread out on the pampas as we drove into Balmaceda. It looked like they got about 10 inches there and, although it was raining during the transfer; I don’t think it rained on there on Monday. Balmaceda was just as small and dreary as I recalled and I did very little other than go through the normal procedures and get on the plane. As we were taxiing the sun peaked out of the clouds and lit the snow drifts for our takeoff. So I had a nice sunny view as I left Patagonia.

I spent the flight updating my blog and sleeping and after a brief stop in Puerto Montt again we landed in Santiago at eight. I got a cab to Steve’s house. Steve welcomed me to his ridiculously nice house for the third time and showed me the guesthouse – not guest room, guesthouse – in the back before getting me a light dinner. Then he, Kris and I watched 30 Days. This is a show about the guy who did “Super Size Me” and the month he spent living and working with the guys who work a West Virginia coal mine. It was very interesting and if you have the chance I recommend watching it. It is an insight into a lifestyle that many people talk about in general terms but know absolutely nothing about the specifics. The best part? At several points, they had English subtitles when the guys from West Virginia spoke because of their accents. After that I had a few cookies that his daughter had made that afternoon and then headed to bed.

Road Trip

The trip ahead of us was nothing to scoff at. We had five people in a crew cab pick up and a nearly 400 km, 8 hour road trip in front of us. And this was not an 8 hour trip like an 8 hour trip down I-80. We were taking the Carretera Austral from Coyhaique to Palena. The Carretera Austral is the primary, and in most places, the only highway in Patagonia. It connects Tortel to Puerto Montt – a distance of about 1200 km I believe. It took some 20 years to build and three people died building it. It goes through some of the most beautiful terrain in the world and the conventional wisdom before it was built was that it would be impossible to build.

That’s what my guidebook says about it. They use the term highway loosely though. Very loosely. I would say that 75% of our trip was on unpaved road. About 35% was on a road not wide enough for two cars to pass without one stopping and parts of the road are less well maintained than some logging access roads that I have hiked on. To call parts of it a glorified dirt path is an insult to dirt paths everywhere. On several occasions we had to stop to allow cows to cross the road and on one occasion the cow refused to move. So we detoured around it. A cow dictated traffic on the region’s major highway. Think about that for a minute.

However, the first 50 km or so out of Coyhaique is paved so I quickly fell asleep and napped until we hit the gravel. At that point it was too bouncy for me to sleep. But I’m glad that I woke up. As I said, the terrain that the Carretera Austral goes through is some of the most beautiful in the world. It mostly follows rivers and lakes up valleys in between soaring snow covered peaks. From Coyhaique you descend about 1500 feet until your read the edge of the ocean and then you wind along fjords for the next 70 km or so. Most of the area the road transects is national park land so it’s pretty untouched and much of it is temperate rainforest. I cannot overstate how gorgeous this country is.

Populated it is not however. Between Coyhaique and Palena we went through six towns with a combined population of maybe 6,000 people. And that is probably an overestimation. The largest of these, La Junta, were we stopped for dinner took us all of 3 minutes to drive through and I think it had two gas stations and no stoplights. If you want to be alone in the woods, come to Patagonia.

We arrived in Palena at around nine after a long break for dinner. Everyone dropped their stuff in the hostel, Juan got another hostel because he was afraid that Felipe’s snoring would keep him awake, and then Felipe, Nancy and I went for a brief walk around town to stretch our legs. Brief because nearly the whole town can be walked in 15 minutes. But in the dark it seemed a pleasant, if boring, little place.

The next morning we woke up to partial clouds and a beautiful cold, crisp sunrise. The mountains around the town were all snowcapped and lit up by the sun. I walked around the block in the cold to wake up and enjoy the views and then went and had breakfast. NesCafe, tea, toast, avocado, lemon bread and some type of peach shortcake were served with ham and cheese and it was good. We ate and then Juan and I were heading out to go to Futaléfu – another town much like Palena about an hour and a half north and outside of which the company has another piece of property.

We left around 10 and the drive up was beautiful – like everything else here, I feel like I should just stop saying how gorgeous everything was because it is getting redundant. The country transitions from a dry, Colorado-esque vegetation in Palena to a much more temperate rainforest-y feel on the way to Futa. I think that Futa is not as high as Palena, which explains the transition.

In Futa Juan had some meetings so I just walked out of town along the road to Argentina until I found a gap in a fence and made my way up a small, rocky hill outside of town. This afforded me some great views of the town and a rainbow that was arcing over the Futaléfu river (it ended up staying there almost all day). On the way down I came to the conclusion that the only place in the Western hemisphere that is as stunning as Patagonia is probably Alaska (perhaps northern BC too) but Patagonia is superior. This is because in Patagonia you do not have to worry about being eaten by a Grizzly. For some reason, that Nancy and I have been unable to figure out, there are no bears anywhere in South America. I believe that it is the only continent (besides Antarctica) with that distinction. Which makes bushwhacking, and camping in general, a less nerve wracking experience.

Once down from the hill Juan and I met for lunch at one of the four restraints in town. We ended up at this one because the first two we went to were closed. Our meals were enormous; we had to take an hour to eat just to finish them, but not particularly great. My steak was far too overcooked. But we did get a traditional Mapuche dish that was delicious. It was similar to an empanada stuffed with potatoes and meat.

After our leisurely lunch we walked out around the lake in the town to a second small hill overlooking the town. I climbed this while Juan headed back into town to get something notarized. Once I came back and he finished with that we stopped by Fernando’s office and said hi and then we headed back to Palena. On the way we stopped at a farm at the confluence of the Futaléfu and Espolon rivers that had been owned by Juan’s uncle and then the Tompkins in the hopes that we could walk out to the confluence but the French guy who currently owns it is apparently not appreciative of strangers and so his farm manager said we probably couldn’t. We tried to get there by walking around the farm but the brush was too thick. So we drove out to the end of Lago Espolon opposite where the company has their property to take a look at the lake. The water was quite choppy but the beautiful glacial blue color, highlighted by the whitecaps, made for an enchanting view.

After stopping at the lake we started back for real but paused again about twenty minutes later to take pictures of an especially eye-catching peak that was flitting in and out of the clouds. It also happened to be in primary view of the elementary school in the area. What a place to go to class.

The rest of the drive was relatively uneventful, we discussed the finer points of the market for cattle in Palena, and we arrived back around seven. I hung out in the tourist office with Felipe and free wi-fi on Valeria’s computer until about eight because the rest of them had meetings and then we all met with Biz (BC '05 and the WorldTeach volunteer in Palena) and her Chilean teaching partner to go and get dinner. This meant basically going to someone’s house that had been turned into a semi-restaurant that was allowed to sell beer. However, they had no bread. So after devouring a tray of avocado, olives, cheese and sausage we went out to our truck and got the bread that was going to be used in our asado on Saturday and they used that to make us hamburgers for dinner. After that, and purchasing two more bottles of wine for the asado, we all headed home around 11.

Valle California

Nancy, Biz, Catalina and I left Palena with two of the guys who owned farms right next to Valle California at 9:30 on Saturday morning on our way to finally see the property. We stopped to pick up two additional passengers who were rather hairy, rode in the back and barked a lot. Like the rest of the roads in Patagonia the whole way was unpaved and a bit bouncy but we got to the edge of the property without a problem. Once we got into the property things got a bit more interesting as the road was one big mud puddle but we made it to the staff house without a problem.

After unloading everything and unpacking the food into the freezer for the time being we all sat around with the woman who lived there permanently (somehow I never managed to learn her name) and shared a maté. It is worth noting at this point that I’ve been going on and on about the beauty of Patagonia but I love the people and the way of life nearly as much. Sitting around and sharing a maté is one of the most relaxing and social ways you can spend an hour and there are few other places in the world that you can slow down enough to do it. The whole pace of life is different and, I think, much healthier. Plus, it is simply not possible not to be hospitable and kind in Patagonia. It is sort of like Mongolia in that way – the way of life is so harsh that you just help out everyone because you need their help just as much. This is perhaps best illustrated by the unwritten code on the Carretera Austral that, if you see someone stopped on the road you stop too. Just to make sure that they don’t need help or a ride. Because if you don’t stop it could literally be hours before they see anyone else.

After our maté the four of us walked down to the quincho and the yurts on the river. I’d seen lots of pictures of this area in my editing of all the master plans but getting to go and walk around was nice. The yurts are only vaguely like real yurts – they have bay windows – but I could definitely be cool with staying there for an extended period. They all overlook a bend in the river and there is a woodstove heated hot tub on a deck next to the river. It isn’t a five star hotel in the wilderness but it certainly isn’t roughing it either.

We were expecting Valeria and Juan back around 1 so we walked back to the staff house to help start to get things ready for the asado. While we were slicing tomatoes, we also got a preview of the bread for lunch and all ate far too many rolls while we prepared the vegetables. Juan and Valeria took longer than expected to get back however and so rather than sit around and wait I went for a walk down the valley. I just walked down the road until I came to a small creek and then bushwhacked a little ways up the cleft it had cut in the hill. That got too overgrown quickly though and I wasn’t really getting anywhere so I headed back down and just cut across the valley and then headed back towards the house. I came back up through the horse paddocks behind the barn as they were cooking up our lamb in the shed next to the barn. I stopped by and had a glass of wine with Felipe and Valeria, who had recently arrived, and then I was put in charge of cooking because the current chef had to go get the horses for our post-asado ride. Now, while I’ve degraded the Chilean food generally, and I still stand by that for the most part, there is nothing like a Chilean or Argentine asado. The meat is great, the wine is excellent and plentiful, the vegetables are fresh and there is generally twice as much food as necessary. I took this while I was cooking the lamb and it gives you and idea of the quantity of meat we had. This was for 11 people and isn’t even half of the total meat we had (for scale, the rebar that the meat is on is about five feet long).

Obviously, lunch was a long affair. Between the avocado and tomato salad, the roasted vegetables, the potatoes, the rolls, the chorizo, the wine, and the lamb we had ourselves quite a feast. I found myself with an entire shoulder of lamb on my plate at one point. Not a shoulder roast or a shoulder cut, the whole thing. Shoulder blade, shoulder socket, the top half of the bone still in the socket, and so on. All of it covered in deliciously soft, tender meat that practically peeled off the bone. That took me a while to get through. No one else was in too much of a hurry either though and we didn’t wrap up until about 4:45. From there, it was straight on to our ride. And, while I didn’t think this was a great idea at the time, it turned out to be a great choice.

Our ride took us down the path I had walked earlier but we went even further. Being that the horses were the company’s we had pretty free rein to do what we wanted. This meant that, after overcoming the initial incredulity of the gauchos, I was able to ride bareback (their initial reaction when I asked them if I could is roughly translated as, “Are you shitting me?”) and we ran the horses quite a bit. Mine had a major problem with wanting to be first in line so he really only had one speed which was fine with me except when I wanted to walk. If he was going to run I was cool with him going all out but walking, because he wanted to be running, he had the most uncomfortable gait of any horse I’ve ever ridden. Given that it was the middle of the winter and he was a bit boney, this was a problem. So he and I had a bit of a love-hate relationship for the duration of the ride. But our ride took us down to a cleared, rocky bluff that overlooked the whole valley and we were able to circle up to the top of it. The view was great. The weather was even better. We got a good solid reminder of why Patagonia has a reputation for extreme weather. When we were at the bottom of the bluff it started raining, when we got to the top it was raining up. Not horizontally. Vertically. And it was going away from the ground. It’s the most intense combination of wind and rain I’ve ever seen. Even more so than 40 mph winds on Mt. Monadnock in November. I had a full rain suit on and I was drenched when I got back to the cabin. I also loved it. This is my kind of weather. Cold, windy, rainy and gray. I think that’s why I like Patagonia so much.

We ran most of the way back since we were late for feeding time. Given the rain and the mud this might not have been a great idea but my mount refused to go at anything less than a full out run. I tried to get him to walk for a bit and he jolted so much that I just gave up and let him run. This resulted in him blowing by everyone else, jumping a three-foot gulch and then almost sliding into a gate because of the mud in front of it. But we got back without a major incident and Valeria, Carlos and I took all the horses back to the stable and fed them for the evening.

After that we all crowded into the cabin to warm up and dry out and several of us started playing the Chilean version of spoons. It is exactly the same but rather than grab a spoon you just slap the table in the middle and everyone else has to follow suit. The last person to do so is the loser. Rather than call it spoons the call it chancho va. Why I don’t know, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in Spanish (although I guess spoons makes little sense in English).

After our game of chancho va several of the people who had come for the asado decide to head home. Biz and Catalina decided to go with them rather than sleep out in the cold and rain (at this point it had been sleeting outside for the last few hours). So they all headed out we started to get dinner ready but Nancy came in a few minutes later to let us know that they weren’t going anywhere. Their jeep had gotten stuck in the mud right in front of the cabin. Watching it slide around in the mud was interesting, cars don’t normally move from side to side when the wheels are spinning front to back. It took us about twenty minutes and two dozen pieces of firewood before we finally managed to get them unstuck and get covered in mud in the process.

After they slipped and slid their way off those of us remaining sat down for a brief dinner of spaghetti with hot dogs cut up in it. After the asado though no one was especially hungry and dinner was brief. After dinner we all watched Mongol (a movie filmed in Mongolian with Spanish subtitles – it was good practice) on Felipe’s computer. I was less than impressed. The scenery was beautiful and for the most part it did look like Mongolia. But I didn’t think the filming was particularly good and most of the shots were poorly planned or executed. I also thought the story dragged at several points and I’m pretty positive that a huge plot line in the movie was completely made up. Even without that the movie was playing fast and loose with history. I think it is a fascinating story but it could have been told much better.

After the movie everyone just crashed. The girls in the cabin and Felipe and I off in the bunk house. It was quite cozy and I slept well. The whole experience of being there was enjoyable and also thought provoking. Namely, which would I rather have, electricity or internal plumbing? Because the pipes had frozen the house had no plumbing but because of its location it also had no electricity unless the generator was on. That meant no electricity before about 6 pm. I think I’d rather go without plumbing but I’m not positive. Electricity lets you do a lot more, especially when it gets dark at five. Although hot showers are nice.

The next morning I had plans to get up at 6 to watch the sun come up but when my alarm went off I could still hear the wind and rain that I had fallen asleep listening to so I didn’t bother getting out of bed. Instead I waited until about eight and then rolled out of bed and went for a brief walk before breakfast. Felipe and I were riding back with Carlos to La Junta were we were going to meet Juan Andres to head back to Coyhaique. This was a day earlier than I had thought we were leaving, and Nancy and Valeria were staying because they had to go to Futa later in the week, so I was less than pleased. I had been hoping to get more time to hike around on the property and explore but if I didn’t go with Carlos and Juan there was really no way for me to make it back in time for my flight. This is the downside of Patagonia – no people means infrequent buses, especially in the winter. So I was stuck riding back and missing out on some riding and hiking. This put me in a foul mood for most of the day.

The one upside to this (which also just made me more upset about leaving) was once we hit La Junta the skies cleared up and we had beautiful weather all the way back to Coyhaique. This meant that we really were able to appreciate how beautiful the country was. It is imperative that I come back and spend about three weeks on the Carretera Austral and in all the parks that it passes through.

After stopping to pick up a hitch hiker on the way (he had been waiting for an hour before we showed up and not seen anyone else, I imagine he would have been SOL if we hadn’t stopped) we took a scenic back way into Coyhaique and arrived at about four. We dropped Felipe off at his hotel for the night and had a late lunch while we watched a 1998 Libertadores match between River and Colo Colo.

Juan dropped me off at about five after lunch and I really didn’t have much to do since I had planned on being in Palena that evening. Still upset that I wasn’t I decided to go for a bike ride to distract myself and to get outside. This really didn’t distract me, it just meant I got some exercise while I was upset but it did inform me that a bike is quite possibly the worst means of transportation possible in Patagonia. Patagonia is anything but flat, it is cold and wet, and you share the road with some very large trucks. But most importantly it is windy. So windy that at several points I was going down a 4-5% grade and had to pedal in order to maintain forward momentum.

I got back to Valeria’s (where I was staying again) around 6:30, my return having taken about twice as long as I anticipated because of the wind, and fought with the fire for about an hour trying to get something going. After I got the wet, whole logs burning sufficiently I jumped in the shower and then cooked up a light dinner/onces of eggs, ham, cheese and yogurt. I’ll need to go shopping on Monday. After dinner I spent the evening reading some interesting articles are urban farming and the wilderness and then updated my blog before heading to bed.

Patagonia!

My last meal with my host family actually turned out to be breakfast. But like all breakfasts I ate alone since no one else was awake yet. After breakfast I went upstairs to say goodbye to Fabi, who still wasn’t feeling well, and then Rita waited for the cab to the airport with me. He arrived precisely on time and I was off. After a brief stop at the office to drop off some bags we went to the airport and somehow avoided all traffic on the way (I don’t think I’ve written about it before but the traffic in Santiago is god awful. Terrible. Worse than anywhere else I’ve ever been. Like it can take 30 minutes to go 10 blocks at rush hour). This put me at the airport at 10, way before I actually needed to be for my 12:30 flight but given my family’s constant state of worry I should have expected this.

I chilled at the airport for the next two and a half hours, security and that stuff took about 20 minutes as it does everywhere in the world except the US, and then boarded and I was off to Patagonia! I slept nearly the whole flight and after a brief stopover in Puerto Montt we arrived in Balmaceda at four. Stepping out of the airport I was reminded immediately why Patagonia is the most beautiful place on the planet. Balmaceda is located in part of Chile that actually looks a lot like Argentine Patagonia with low rolling hills covered by grass – it looks a lot like Mongolian steppe for that matter – and it was grey, overcast and windy. A perfectly typical Patagonian day. I got a transfer and arrived at the office in Coyhaique around 4:45.

Coyhaique is a small city but large by Patagonian standards with about 50,000 people. This is compared to Balmecada, which might have had three dozen houses, but I’m not sure. It’s set at the confluence of the Simpson and Coyhaique rivers on a bluff overlooking the Simpson River and it is surrounded by mountains and overlooked by an enormous granite headwall. Typical of most small cities it has no buildings over five stories (I’m not even sure it has a 5 story building) and on cold (of which there are many), still (of which there are not so many) days you are overwhelmed by the scent of wood smoke from all of the heating stoves.

By the time I got to Coyhaique it was raining and so I went from the transfer right to the office and dropped off my stuff. Juan Andres, Valeria, Danielle and Franco were all in when I got there and Armando arrived shortly thereafter. I dropped my stuff and did a few things for work before Valeria and I went back to her house, where I was staying, and I moved all my stuff in.After that we met Franco for a welcoming dinner for me at, in his words, one of the few good restaurants in the city (apparently, according to Franco, Coyhaique’s biggest problem is its lack of good places to eat). Being in Patagonia I couldn’t pass up the chance to have red meat and helped myself to an enormous hunk of a steak. We also got an abalone appetizer, which I had never had before, and was delicious. After dinner Valeria and I headed home and I caught up my blog for a bit before crashing after a long day.

The next morning I got yet another reminder of why Patagonia is better before I even got out of bed. I chose to sleep in the front room of Valeria’s house on the second floor, right underneath the great window. This meant that I woke up the next morning at eight and sat up in bed and this is what I saw:

Far superior to the pitch black view that greeted me every morning in Santiago.

After breakfast we caught a colectivo to the office and I spent the day prepping for my presentation on Wednesday. In the afternoon Franco and I had a meeting about exactly which type of offset program the company will want to implement for their visitors. Valeria and I also went to a café near work for lunch and it was quite good. Franco must have high expectations because I got the set menu (for the first time after being here for 7 weeks) and it was delicious. However, I realized that I was quite spoiled at the DRCLAS office in Santiago. Everyone in the office in Coyhaique works in their full winter coats because we have no centralized heating in the office and the electric heaters we have are not very effective. By the end of work on Tuesday I couldn’t feel my toes. On Wednesday I wore heavier socks.

After work Valeria and I headed home for a brief, light dinner – more like onces – and then Daniela, Valeria and I went out for Karaoke at Piel Rojo. That meant I had a prime opportunity to practice my listening skills as Daniela and Valeria both speak at inhuman speeds. I think I probably got about 60% of their conversation. Enough to know who and what they were talking about but not really enough to get the details. However, Karaoke was great because I could read the words to the song on the screen and then hear everyone sing them, which did wonders for my pronunciation. I also learned that the Chileans don’t mess around with their cigarette labeling here. Forget your surgeon general’s warning. On one side of the carton there is a picture of an old man on a ventilator and below that it says something along the lines of “1000 Chileans die each year from lung cancer, if you don’t want to be next stop smoking.” Then on the other side it has, in large red type, “Smoking Kills,” and on the side their equivalent of the surgeon general’s warning. On the other hand, everyone in this country smokes so I don’t think it’s doing a whole lot of good.

Wednesday morning I arrived at work ready to give my presentation at 10, which was the time we had set last week as Franco noted, and then waited until about 10:30 for everyone else to get ready. I suppose that’s typical but if Franco hadn’t said anything about me being a good American and being right on time I wouldn’t have noticed. So does that make me a bad American? Or just adjusted to Chile? This raises the larger issue of the fact that I’m going to have some major problems if I ever get a job in the U.S. I’ve spent the last three summers working in foreign countries where the work culture is much more laid back and humane and I quite like it. I’m not sure how I’d deal with an American office culture now.

My presentation went well I thought, a bit longer than I had expected, but I got through everything and I think I answered all their questions. I’m not sure what the company is going to decide to do but I think that determination may require some additional work to do some baseline studies before they can make a final decision.

After my presentation Valeria and I went back to the house for lunch and had a great two hour lunch break – another perk of living in Patagonia – after which we had a maté before heading back to the office. I then spent the afternoon getting frustrated because my excel models kept producing results that didn’t make sense and I couldn’t figure out how to make them co-operate. We finally headed home around 7 for another light dinner and then we were going to go a Cueca lesson but that was apparently moved to the next night and so I sat by the fire and read and then wrote a bit more.

Thursday morning we decided not to go to the office in the morning since we were heading to Palena in the afternoon and Valeria had to get ready. So I spent the morning working from the kitchen, and spent most of that time fighting with my models. At about 11 we headed down to the office to pick up a few things and then pick up Nancy, Felipe, Juan Andres and a lamb. The first three were coming with us to Palena; the fourth was for our asado on Saturday. This all took about two hours and we finally hit the road at 1:15 or so.

Rock Candy

Saturday morning I rolled out of bed a bit later than the last time I had gone skiing. I left the house at about 6:45 and we arrived at the mountain slightly before 9. Once at the cabin we took our time getting ready. Tomás got breakfast – superb Chilean honey on toast for me. Chilean honey, some of it at least, is slightly different that what I’ve had before in that it is thicker and can be spread like butter on bread. It makes it much less sticky and messy to deal with.

After breakfast those of us skiing, Tomás was taking care of Anna, headed up to El Colorado to get our gear and made it out onto the slopes by 11. I got my pass from a kid selling what I assume was his friend’s extra student pass and so I saved a bit on my pass in what may have been a poorly thought out transaction on my part.

Our group did not last long once on the slopes though. Fernanda (Tomás’ wife) and I quickly split up from Tomás’ coworkers who, being from Charlotte and Chicago, had learned to ski in WNC and the mid-west and had not skied in several years. In short they were a bit lost. Then Fernanda had to go and meet one of her friends from school so I was left to my own devices. This was perfectly fine with me, as I don’t think anyone would have wanted to ski where I wanted to go. I made my way up and over the peak to the side facing Valle Nevado and investigated the slopes that Sam and I had seen but been unable to ski. This investigation revealed a very fun out-of-bounds/in-bounds rock garden that was serviced by one of the lifts.

Unfortunately I didn’t have my camera so I don’t have pictures this time but it was even better than what I found with Sam. Not quite as steep but narrower and so more technically challenging and it had more easily accessible options so I didn’t have to repeat my tracks. It also still had fresh snow from two weeks ago. Chileans must not like skiing off the trails because this was in a location that should have been tracked out a few hours after a storm. The snow was a bit crusted over because of the sun but most of the couloirs I was skiing had knee-deep stashes of still fresh powder. I played over there, just doing laps through the rocks, until it was time for lunch. This meant grabbing a snickers bar with everyone else at the restaurant and then taking a brief nap in my chair while they ate before heading out to another in-bounds/out-of-bounds area.

This was a big open area that looked promising right above one of the lifts that involved a fairly long but relatively easy traverse. From there you could drop straight down to the lift through a huge open bowl that still had fresh snow. Again, a bit crusty but it still had knee-deep powder that very few people had skied. Given its location I would have expected it to have been skied out long ago. But I wasn’t arguing. I did laps there for a bit and then headed back to the rocks but found it closed because of the low light on that side of the mountain. So it was back to the front. By this time the snow had melted a bit on front so it was soft enough on the surface that your edges could get a solid bite and you could fly. Like Valle Nevado, El Colorado is above the tree line. This means that most in-bounds stuff is pretty much all the same. Straight and wide with varying degrees of steepness. This can get boring when compared with some of the tree runs in the states. But when the snow is just a bit soft and there aren’t many people on the mountain and you can arc huge GS turns across the whole face these trails are perfect. And so that’s what I did for the next 45 minutes. I crashed and burned a few times but mostly it was just big, sweeping, edged in turns from top to bottom.

I finished off the day in the terrain park but most of the hits were closed so I only took a few runs on one of the rails before the lifts closed and I headed down to turn in my gear. There, after a brief mishap in searching for my shoes, I met up with everyone else and we headed back to the cabin for the evening.

Back at the cabin Tomás put together onces for our après ski enjoyment. Like any good Chilean meal this included guacamole in addition to some nuts, olives and candies. He also had Haribo gummy bears. I have been searching fruitlessly for these since I arrived. Normally they’re easy to find outside of the U.S. but for some reason the Chileans don’t seem to have a taste for them. However, apparently they can be found (along with anything else you would ever need) at Jumbo.

After onces Tomás’ co-workers decided that they needed to do chores at home on Sunday and so were going to go home because the road down didn’t open until 3 pm on Sunday (in order to prevent accidents due to the nature of the road, described here in the other skiing post). So they rolled out around 7 or 7:30, leaving Tomás, Fernada, Anna, Maria (his brother’s daughter), his mother and I to enjoy his cabin. I haven’t yet described it – I shall do that now. It was built by his grandfather, an architect, in the early 1970s during (Tomás’s words), “the communist regime when there wasn’t much available” so he built it from scraps from his other projects.

For being built from scraps it is pretty nice. Built in the style of a traditional German alpine house it has two bedrooms, a tiny kitchen and a large living room with a front deck that overlooks the mountains and La Parva. Quite a comfortable place to spend a weekend skiing.

After everyone else left the five of us got dinner ready (spinach, feta and salmon torte) and ate while Maria watched “Over the Hedge” in Spanish. Tomás and I talked a bit more about enseñaChile while we ate. Apparently, they have surpassed their second year recruitment goals (both their goals for the total number of applicants and for the number of quality applicants) by a factor of three and they still have two months left to accept applications. However, one big problem they are running into is the lack of maturity among teachers. They’re targeting the program to the same age group as TFA but Tomás says they’ve had problems because Chileans in that age group (22-26) aren’t as professional as Americans (they don’t start on time, they aren’t prepared, etc) and so they’re working on how to deal with that now. After dinner, I read for a bit and then passed out hard at about 10:30. I was exhausted after skiing and general lack of sleep during the week.

Sunday I rolled out of bed around 9 and had breakfast with Tomás. Sunday ended up just being a relaxing day, chilling in the cabin and walking around Farrellones a bit. As good as the skiing Saturday was I didn’t really feel like paying for another day (skiing here is only slightly less expensive than in the States). No one else was particularly interested in skiing either so I walked over to the top of the small, municipal slopes in Farrellones and picked out some lines on the headwall about the town that if I had a snowmobile and some decent equipment I’d like to ski (after talking to Tomás when I got back I found out that this area is actually accessible from the lifts without a snowmobile and he’s skied it before so when/if I come back I’m bringing some good gear and I’m going to ski the line below).

When I got back I found Tomás and Maria building a snowman so we finished that and gave him a nice hat and tie and then I went sledding for the first time in a few years. That was fun. The rest of the afternoon I read, enjoyed the scenery, and watched parts of Disney’s Robin Hood for the first time in about ten years with Maria. What a classic movie.

We all had lunch (leftovers from the night before) around 2:30 and Tomás and I talked about the leading contributors to Chilean GDP (Mining (30%), Fruit, Forestry, Fisheries/Wine) and I realized that I didn’t think it strange that Tomás knew that but if someone asked me the same question about the U.S. I’d have no idea what the answer was. After lunch we packed up and headed down the mountain at about 3:45 after the road opened. I road down with Maria and Tomás’ mom and we played, “make Patrick’s Spanish vocabulary bigger” by trying to name all the Spanish words we could think of that start with a given letter. I didn’t learn new words so much as reinforced the ones I already knew but it was helpful.

I got home around 5:30 and promptly left again to head downtown to try and get gifts for everyone before I left for Coyhaique in the morning. I ended up back at Merendina for a last coffee while I wrote post cards and then stopped by the market to get gifts. By the time I got home again it was about 8:00 and Rita and I had a final dinner together – it was sort of anti-climatic given that Fabi was not feeling well so she couldn’t eat with us – and afterwards I spent the evening packing all my stuff and getting ready for Patagonia.

The Week in Review

Monday appeared as if it would be a normal day at the office after I learned that Steve was not actually coming into work after returning from the U.S. until Tuesday. However, things got more interesting when I found that I had an email from Franco, the CEO of Patagonia Sur LLC and Tomás’ best friend from home. He had also just returned from vacation and was in Santiago for a few days before returning to Coyhaique and he wanted to meet at some point during the day to talk about my project. I was more than happy to break up my work on the appendices by obliging him and we met Starbucks for coffee at one (eating lunch at 2 means coffee at 1 is like an 11 am coffee break, right?).

Franco would make a great Santa Claus. He’s a slightly shorter than I am and significantly rounder. Not fat by any means, just a bit round, with a hint of facial hair and he is perpetually jolly. He was happy, smiling and bouncy even before we got our coffee. All around a great guy. We talked about what I’ve been doing, his history (he was the lead guide at the premier lodge in Torres del Paine for a while and then got an MBA from Boulder), and he semi-offered a work/volunteer position for Christo and I in January planning a 100 km circuit on the Melimoyu property. I’m not sure how serious he was but it may be something worth looking into.

After my meeting it was back to work where I finalized the details from my impending trip to Coyhaique. After that it was back to the never-ending appendices. Now I was plugging away at the CCB standards one.

Tuesday I continued my practice of staying at work long past everyone else but this time I had a good reason for it. As Fabian was leaving on Friday (along with most of the rest of the DRCLAS crew) he decided that all the guys in the group needed to have a final get together for sandwiches and beer. This entailed meeting at a bar near his house that had been recommended by his host brother. However, like good Chileans the meeting time was not to be until 8:30 (which later got moved to 9 and he and I waited until 9:30 before anyone else showed up). This meant that if I had gone home I’d have been there for dinner but I didn’t want to eat first and didn’t feel like going home just to sit there while everyone else ate so I ended up just staying at work until about 8 and then headed over.

The bar was everything it was billed as. The beer was typical but the sandwiches were superb. For those of you who know, these rivaled Fat Head’s. Unable to chose one Fabian and I both narrowed it down to the same two and then split them. The combined total number of ingredients on our two sandwiches surpassed 14 and that included three different types of meat as well as avocado and corn. They were excellent. We were joined by Dobby, Lubo and three of the guys from the SSP group.

After dinner we all headed over to Fabian’s apartment and met his host brother who had made such a splendid recommendation. Afterwards, I headed home quite satisfied.

Wednesday I worked on the CCB standards and then the VCS standards and met with Steve for the first time since he got back from the states (neither of us had had time on Tuesday). We briefly ran through my progress and talked about my coming trip to Coyhaique. While at work I also realized how well documented by email, AIM and, while traveling, my budget, my life is. I can go to any date that I have been here and between the three of them I can recreate almost exactly what I did. It makes keeping track like this almost superfluous. But this provides a useful dialogue of what I’m thinking and little observations (like that one) that you don’t get in the emails.

Thursday I finally started on the last of the appendices (finally) when I set to work on the CarbonFix standards. After work Kristen and I met at the U de Santiago metro to grab a quick dinner and then we were heading to the exhibition soccer game between U de Santiago and Argentinos Juniors with the rest of the WT people (Fabian and Dobby had expressed interest in coming as well but they never made it. I imagine Fabian was getting ready to leave in the morning). I was excited to be going to another soccer game here (being South America). They’re always quite the experience.

After walking a bit from the metro we got to the national stadium and found our seats. Now, this was only an exhibition game so the stadium wasn’t nearly full, but the national stadium here may be the worst stadium for soccer I have ever been in. It is similar to the Big House in that the seats slope gradually away from the field, so unless you’re in the first few rows you’re really far away, and this is made worse by the fact that they have a track around the outside of the field. All together it means you have a huge stadium, that doesn’t hold sound well, and all the fans are far away from the field. Not a good combination. However, the fans that came did not disappoint. They broke out the fireworks, drums and flares even though it was an exhibition game and gave us quite the show.

The B-sides played first and U won 6-4. The high score made it a fun game to watch. Then the actual game started and was quite a bit more boring. They finally tied at 1-1 but it wasn’t a particularly exciting game – I guess that’s what you get with an exhibition. We all ended up leaving about 5 minutes before full time in order to get home at a reasonable hour since the stadium is far from both their hostel and my house.

Friday rolled around and I finally finished my appendices. This meant that I got to start on the creation of two offset pilot projects for the company. This was far more exciting than writing appendices though. I also worked out the final details for this weekend with Tomás. I was going to go up to his cabin in Farrellones with him, his mom and family, and some of his co-workers for the weekend and ski and just hang out.

After work on Friday I headed home for dinner and then out with plans to meet up with the WT people since they were all leaving this weekend and having a bit of a party. All the DRCLAS kids had already left or were in the process of leaving and those that were staying for a few extra days didn’t have any plans. So, I found myself at a bar in Bellavista for the first time during my trip. Seeing as this is the primary neighborhood for nights on the town this was a bit surprising but I wasn’t all that impressed with the bar we were at. I stayed for a while but I wasn’t really in the mood to be out (as you know I spent most of my Friday night’s sleeping – old habits die hard) and headed home to get some sleep before my day of skiing on Saturday.

Avocado hors d'oeuvres

Chileans run their buses on a tighter departure schedule than the Argentines but they need to work on their arrivals. My plan for the weekend was to go to la campana and go camping. I was assured by both Rita and the bus driver that it would be no longer than an hour and a half from Santiago to Limache.

Two and a half hours after Kristen and I left Santiago, we finally rolled into Limache. And then I had to catch another bus to Olmué and then a micro to the outside of the park where we hiked in the rest of the way to the ranger station. Where we had to pay to get in to the park, not a huge deal, but what does need to stop is this whole notion of a two tiered price system where foreigners pay two to three times as much as Chileans. I suppose it makes sense because they support the park through taxes, and it is also a beautiful example of price discrimination, but it is obnoxious.

All in all, the trip I had expected to take about an hour and 45 minutes ended up taking almost four. This meant that by the time we got to the campsite and got everything set up we barely had time to go for a brief hike and watch the sun set – I was feeling lazy and didn’t head out of Santiago particularly early which ended up coming back to bite me. On the other hand, it was a pleasant sunset and the trail to the top of Cerro campana was closed anyway so our hiking options were pretty severely limited by the snow even before we arrived late. The mountain is beautiful though. Like most of the mountains here it is very young and so the summit is exposed granite bluffs and the approach on three sides is soaring white cliffs. Covered in snow it was beautiful.

In addition to a pleasant sunset, our hike allowed me to explore some abandoned mine shafts. I’m not really sure what they were looking for though and I couldn’t find anyone to ask. The first one that investigated only went about 50 feet into the hillside but the second one went quite a bit deeper. I stopped exploring after going about 150 yards. There the mine started to curve to the left and I decided it would be wise not to mess around with an abandoned mine shaft without having someone with me who had a better idea of what was going on.

After the sun settled entirely below the horizon, we made our way back to the camp and decided to start dinner, as it was essentially night under the dense tree cover that the camps were hidden by. Our camp was a pleasant little affair right next to the creek to provide the perfect lullaby to fall asleep too. Once back at the camp I fired up the 747 engine that is my stove and began preparing our Mexican rice. I decided to go gourmet for the evening and we had a main entrée of Mexican rice with sliced salami and tomatoes mixed in. This was prefaced by hors d'oeuvres of open face tomatoes and avocado sandwiches. Take note you super lightweight fiends out there – your pack may be 20 pounds lighter than mine but when I roll into camp and breakout the French wine and cheese to tide me over until my wild rice and chicken main course followed by a river cooled crème brulee for dessert you’ll be sorry and hauling the extra 20 pounds all day will have been completely worth it. The lack of salt and pepper in my cook kit was a major fail though.

After dinner, we walked back up the road for a bit until the trees opened out and we could see the stars. Unfortunately, our planned stargazing was a bit disappointing due to the fact that the moon was almost full. So, the whole northern half of the sky was out of play. I was still treated to 4 shooting stars though and the Southern Cross was, as always, in sight. What I thought was a bit strange though, was the fact that I didn’t see any satellites. Normally they’re pretty easy to spot and the full moon shouldn’t have blotted them out as they transect the whole sky.

After star gazing for about an hour it was off to bed – one of the highlights of camping may be that you can go to bed at 9 pm and not feel bad about it because there isn’t really anything else to do. And 9 pm in the woods feels like about 1 pm in the city. I very much like how quickly your body will return to a natural rhythm when you get into the woods. I’m sure that I’ve written about this before but the flip side to going to bed at 9 is that you can get up with the sun at 6 or 7 and you don’t feel exhausted or unnatural. You really can’t sleep past sunrise because even if you sleep until sunrise you’re pushing 9 or 10 hours of sleep – more than enough for anyone. And there are few things as nice as watching the sun come up. Whether it is from the top of a mountain with a cup of maté or sliding down the Charles in a scull, there is something special about watching the sun come up and burn off the pre-dawn mist and wake up the world.

Speaking of watching the sun come up (aren’t my segues great?) we watched the sun come up the next day while we broke camp. Since we couldn’t climb the mountain their wasn’t too much reason to stay at the park and I wanted to get back to have lunch with my family again. Since I wasn’t sure what kind of time we were looking at for the buses I decided that leaving earlier was better than later. So we rolled out of the tent around 7 and out of the camp ground by 8. The sun came up behind us as we walked down to the road where I was hoping a micro would be able to take us back to Olmué from where we could catch a bus back to Santiago.

As it happened we ended up arriving at the entrance to the park at the same time as a micro, driven by a cheerful and talkative Chileno. So while he waited to start his return route we chatted about traveling down south and shared our breakfast of apples and cookies with him. He ended up stopping his route randomly – not at a defined stop – for us so that we could jump off his micro and jump on a Pullman bus that was pulling out of Olmué bound for Santiago which probably saved us at least 30 minutes of waiting for a bus at the station – quite possibly a lot more since it was a Sunday morning. So after pilling onto the Pullman bus we were on our way back to Santiago – not via Limache this time thankfully – and we got some great views of the Andes as we came over the coastal cordillera.

Our bus put us back in Santiago at 10:30 and I ended up at home at 11:30. This was perfect timing for me to drop my stuff off and then go for a run up the river. I decided to change my route today and go exploring until my play list ended. So I just followed the river towards the mountains. This unfortunately meant that the whole run was uphill but it also meant that I was running with a gorgeous view in front of me. I was motivated by the sight of three ski resorts and several 6,000 ft, snow-capped peaks spread out around me. The run ended up taking me all the way up to the end of Av. Vitacura and then back down again but I have no idea how far it was. The whole thing took me 45 minutes, which ended up being a bit shorter than I wanted, but it put me back in time to get a shower and have lunch with the family at 1.

Today we had roast chicken with some type of roasted/fried potato and rice. Pretty similar to one of the more common dishes we had at Silvia’s.

After lunch I decided that I needed to make an effort to check out the café scene here one last time before I passed judgment on what had thus far turned out to be a miserable failure. So that sent me down the metro to Bellas Artes but I ended up getting sidetracked on my way and found myself walking around the city cemetery instead. It was almost exactly like Recoleta in BA but, like most of the rest of this city, more spread out and substantially greener (the greener part may not be generally applicable). This means I’m not going to go into a great deal of description about it – for that you can find the post from my BA days about Recoleta – except to say that I am still impressed by the artistry and expense that they put into the tombs here. The highlight of the visit though, was seeing Salvador Allende’s tomb. I’m still not sure how I feel about his presidency (talking to Tomás has made me even more certain he was only good when compared to Pinochet) but if you view him as a martyr you couldn’t have asked for a better memorial. The tomb is a plain structure of white marble with two soaring spires on above it and his name carved into the stone face. Very spare, very elegant and very powerful. The other highlight of the cemetery is the memorial to the disappeared. It is very similar in substance and significance to the Vietnam Memorial. A plain wall (in this case white) with the names of all the disappeared or executed that are known of (they’re still learning about them – sound familiar?) etched into the stone. I won’t say that it is overwhelming but it does give you a sense of the scale what Pinochet did. One aesthetic aspect of this memorial that the Vietnam memorial lacks is the fact that, because the names are black on white stone rather than gray on black stone, it is very clear the immense number of names in front of you. They turn what should be a bright white wall black.

After my brief, unplanned stop by the cemetery I was back on course and found myself in Bellas Artes on the street that is supposedly the epicenter of the café scene in Santiago. This turned out to be accurate as their were about a dozen cafes within a block of each other and I found myself in one of them catching up on emails and drinking the best raspberry, chocolate latte I’ve ever had. On the strength of that latte alone I will declare the Santiago café scene passable. It was spectacular. And I also realized that I should have made more of an effort at the beginning of my trip to locate this place. Sitting in a café and writing or people watching is one of the great pleasures of living in South American cities.

Once I had worked my way through a sufficient number of emails and finished my coffee it was off to meet Kristen for dinner. We had decided to investigate the premier Indian restaurant in town. I very much like Indian food and had high expectations for this place. It did not disappoint. While it wasn’t as good as Puma it was still excellent and I wouldn’t expect it to match the quality of a restaurant that is 3,000 miles closer to India. My coconut curry was superb and Kristen’s tandoori chicken, although slightly undercooked in parts, was very good as well.

After dinner we got some Bravissimo – I have to take advantage of high quality gelato while I can – and then I headed home for the evening.

Appendices - everyone needs one

Monday and Tuesday nothing of note happened. I finished up the carbon calculator sent it off to my various bosses. Hopefully I’ll get a response from them soon-ish about that. But for now it means that my 2^nd project is finished and so I started on the 3^rd – editing and assembling frequently asked questions about the properties.

This sounds boring at first blush. However, it was actually really interesting because the company doesn’t actually really have any answers for the questions. This means that I was deputized to answer them. And since a lot of the questions are about things like what types of control plans are going to have to be submitted by the home builders (i.e. erosion control, tree trimming, landscape, etc) I get to have a significant amount of control over the direction the company goes is. Granted most of my answers will be reviewed by about five other people and revised before they’re finally published. But by being the person who comes up with the question and gives the answer that is being revised I get to at least guide the direction of the conversation if not the final answer. Which is pretty cool considering I’ve been working for these guys for about a month? They put a lot of stock in my abilities. Someone should warn them about that.

So I spent most of Monday and all of Tuesday reviewing the Drover’s Road covenants to get ideas about what types of questions people would be or should be asking about the requirements for houses on the property and how the developed aspects of the properties will relate to the easements. This project is going to have a lot in common with Drover’s Road if they don’t change my answers too much. After I got through the covenants I started writing up the questions and my answers to them. I finished this by the end of work on Tuesday and headed home for dinner.

After dinner I stopped by the WT hostel for a bit and read about Angkor Wat. I’m quite jealous that Christo gets to go and I really wish that I had gone when I was in Vietnam. It’s definitely on my top list of cultural sites that I would like to see in the near future.

Wednesday I started out the day by sending the frequently asked questions information to Steve – project #3 done for now – and set to work on compiling the appendices for my primary project, the paper on carbon markets. This is something I had intended to do last week but my flurry of meetings and the corresponding rescheduling and wasted time on the metro meant that I didn’t get around to until a week after I had intended to. The first one that I set to work on was a compilation of the procedures for developing a project under the CDMs and the various aspects steps needed before the project can actually start to receive permits. Pretty dry stuff but made more exciting by the fact that I got to play with Photoshop to create some cool graphics for my appendix. That was the highlight of the day. Gives you and idea of just how dry some of this stuff is. I also realized that one never really retires from directing EnviroEd as I stayed at work for an extra hour so that I could do a bunch of stuff with Citizen Schools and helping Adam and Lilli coordinate for next year. I am confident that the program is in more than capable hands though. And now that I’m not really directing I actually have time to go through and make sure that all the curriculums and the website actually look good. Hopefully I’ll be able to do some promotion for it when I get back and maybe spread it down to NC or TN. I’d love for this to become a national program at some point. I really think it is the way that the environmental movement needs to go and that the major environmental organizations desperately need to reorient their priorities. But that’s a topic for Ishmael’s Musings, not here (by the way, I have a severe backlog of entries for Ishmael’s Musings so keep your eyes on that as I will start posting there again as soon as I have some free time).

I also started planning my trip down to Coyhaique on Wednesday. After talking with Valeria it looks like I’ll be heading down on the afternoon of August 3^rd and I’ll be in Coyhaique for about four days before we head up to Palena and Valle California so I can see one of the properties and then I’ll come back on the 13^th in time to have a few meetings with Steve, finish up the paper and head home on the 14^th. I’m pretty psyched to be going back to Patagonia and after looking at pictures of these properties for the last four weeks I am dying to get to at least one of them even if it will be the depths of winter.

The last significant things that happened Wednesday were my purchase of several new songs on iTunes – I highly recommend both the new Decemberists song, “O Valencia!” and the new Shins song, Phantom Limb – and my discovery that a bunch of cops in Australia recently set a man on fire as they were trying to arrest him. If you’re curious google Australia, cops, taser and gasoline.

Thursday I was greeted at work by more appendices – now I was on to the Waxman Markey language, which meant sifting through 734 pages of congress speak to find the 20 or so pages that were relevant for Patagonia Sur. I also had a phone meeting with one of the architects of the Garcia River Forest project in California. We only talked for about 20 minutes but I learned a fair amount about ACES and CAR. I also got an email from Jamie about sustainable ranching and who to contact about stocking loads in Chile so I sent off a few emails for that too. But, most of my day was spent delving into thrilling puzzles of ACES. The highlight of the day was probably when Marcela came in and said that I should get a Ph.D because I worked so hard all the time. I’m not sure if I should take this as a compliment or as an indication the rest of the office thinks I’m an anti-social recluse.

After work on Thursday I went down to the bus station to investigate what the bus situation was for the weekend. I was planning to go camping in La Campana, a park near Santiago that held a mountain that Darwin had climbed during his famous journey, and I needed to figure out how I was going to get there. It actually turned out to be quite a bit easier than I had expected as a bus went right from Santiago to where I needed to go – contrary to what Lonely Planet said; one of the first times in three years they’ve ever been wrong. I also discovered – not at the bus station – that my host family has no idea who Darwin is. I thought that was interesting. They’re quite well educated but have never heard of him. I can’t decide if that’s because I think Darwin is someone that only Anglos would learn about or if it’s just because the Chilean school system is awful (which it is).

After checking tickets at the bus station I went and got my watch fixed and then met Kristen at her hostel as she was joining us for dinner. That turned out to be a great exercise for my Spanish since I got to act as a translator. This meant I actually had to figure out what was being said 100% of the time rather than the 80-90% I usually did. It also made me realize just how much I was missing out on by not having a little pocket dictionary. I think my Spanish would have improved quite a bit more than it has if I had brought a mini dictionary with me. Why I didn’t I have no idea. After dinner we listened to my family make fun of the Argentine models on the reality TV show that they watch most nights after dinner and then she went home and I crashed – my mental capabilities thoroughly exhausted after translating – especially because, when I speak I typically limit myself to what I know my limited Spanish vocabulary can handle. Kristen had no such inhibitions, which stretched my ability to creatively come up with ways of saying things that I actually had no idea how to say.

Friday it was back to work on the appendices and I finally finished up the Waxman-Markey one by the time I left work. Because I had a meeting with some of the embassy people at one of the universities (which was completely and, in my opinion, inappropriately, dominated by the ex-navy, ex-NASA, oceanography Ph.D who came with us and I didn’t particularly care for; as well as only being helpful to the extent that I found out the data I’m looking for simply doesn’t exist) I managed to leave work at a reasonable hour on Friday. More or less at 5:30. However, except for Friday each night this week I have stayed at work progressively latter working on this project. I’m not sure if staying this late is a good thing or not but I really love this job. I’ve closed the office multiple times this week and on more than one occasion I’ve found myself at home working at my projects at midnight.

This is by far the best summer internship I’ve ever had and I really enjoy working for Patagonia Sur. Steve is a superb boss and the project is absolutely fascinating. Even within the carbon markets project there are so many intricacies that it would take months to completely understand everything. Then you add in the other two projects and I have so much to do and so much to research that I don’t know what to do with myself. It’s wonderful. But it does mean that I work sort of obsessively about it as evidenced by the fact that I’m averaging between 50 and 55 hours a week for a semi-unpaid internship and I think even Steve things I’m a little obsessive. He keeps trying to get me to take time out to do stuff with the other DRCLAS kids or to go on day trips.

Anyway, after I finally left work on Friday I came home, had dinner with the family, got all my gear ready for my trip tomorrow and the promptly passed out at about 10:30. I know, I’m quite ashamed of myself. However, in my defense I had cleared my schedule because Sam was supposed to have a going away party with all the DRCLAS kids on Friday around 10:30. However, this never happened because, in Tim’s words, Sam’s family, “just straight up rejected [his] desire to kick it gringo style.” So I had had plans which then were canceled for reasons behind my control. Passing out seems like a reasonable response to me.

Snape, Snape, Severus Snape...Dumbledore!

So, Sunday was to be a workday for me. In my original plan, when I was going to Chilöe, I was going to be back in Santiago on Sunday morning because I wouldn’t have been able to get back on Monday in time for work. So, because Friday wasn’t actually a holiday, I decided to go to work on Sunday afternoon. I didn’t really see any reason to change this after I didn’t go to Chilöe so on Sunday I got up and went for a jog up the river. Afterwards I showered and found myself at work by 10.

At work, I had the run of the office but to my chagrin, I found that the coffee pot had been broken at some point in the last week and I was without my expected cup of coffee. However, I made do with NesCafé and worked until about 1:30. I finished all of the carbon footprint calculator except for the food segment. I wanted to leave by 1:30 in order to make it home in time for lunch with the family. I had only managed to eat lunch with them once since I’d been here and, since it is the main meal here, I wanted to try and eat with them a few more times before I left. After all, living with my host family is as much of a cultural experience as going to Chilöe would have been.

As an aside, deciding what to do this weekend ended up opening a whole can of worms about the justification for what I do when I travel. More to the point, what is the point of having experiences while traveling and are there some that are more valid than others? Should I feel obligated to get as far away from Santiago every time I have the opportunity to do so or should I be taking my time to stay here in Santiago too? Do I always have to be moving when I am traveling?

As indicated by my decision to stay in Santiago for the weekend I ultimately decided that I didn’t need to be moving all the time. That I was going to get something just as valuable from staying at home with my host family as going to Chilöe and it was something that I was much less likely to be able to have in the future. I’ll be back in Chile and I’ll go to Chilöe but I’m not sure if I’ll be back with a host family again. I’m in a foreign country whether I’m in Santiago or in Patagonia and it may be more worthwhile to relax in Santiago and save other destinations for later trips when I don’t have to cram two 17-hour bus rides into three and a half days.

So, I got home at two and had a terrific lunch with Fabi and Rita. We had crème of broccoli soup with salad (read: iceberg lettuce and lemon juice) and bow tie pasta and home made sauce. And they’re Italian so you know the sauce was good.

After lunch, I decided to go to some of the museums in the city since they almost all have free admission on Sundays. Why this is the case, I have no idea. I would think if they were going to offer free admission it would be on a day like Monday when they didn’t typically receive a lot of visitors rather than on a weekend when I imagine most people come to the museums. I wasn’t arguing though and I left at about 3:45 to go to the Fine Arts Museum in Bellas Artes.

This was a bit of a disappointment. The building that houses the museum is an impressive Romanesque stone edifice sitting on the edge of the river in the middle of the parque forestral. But the outside of the building is the most impressive part of the museum. The actual exhibits only occupy about 40% of the space in the building. What they use the other 60% for I have no idea. The lack of quantity wasn’t made up for by the quality of the exhibits either. The majority of the exhibits were modern Chilean works and were not as good as those in the Salvador Allende museum.

After making my way through the whole museum in about 45 minutes, I headed down to the WorldTeach hostel to say hi. Kristen was in a meeting with some of the WT people so I hung out with the guy from Pittsburgh for a bit. After her meeting, we decided to go check out the Museo Artes Visuales. This definitely made up for the disappointment of the Fine Arts museum. While it wasn’t much larger, the gallery was much better designed with three open hardwood floors with glass railings. And the exhibit was stunning. The whole thing was the work of one artist and it was all pen etchings (I think). Most of them from the 1960s-1980s – so right in the heart of the Pinochet regime and you could tell. George Orwell and/or the Wachowski brothers would have had a field day.

After we were kicked out of the museum because it was closing, we went for a stroll through the parque forestral and then attempted to get dinner at the phone box pub but were instead waylaid by an Italian pizza shop. After dinner we headed out to las Condes and Showcase Cinemas (North?) because – having just watched the 5^th movie in Spanish while I was in Pucon – I wanted to see Harry Potter. I imagine that most of you have seen it by now so I won’t discuss it in depth except to say that I think the NYT review about the presence of butter beer is completely absurd. Bonus points to anyone who can tell me where the title of this post came from too. After the movie, it was off to bed since I had work in the morning and she had class for WT.

Pomiare

So I’ve decided I suppose I should lighten up on Harvard kids. I am one after all. They’re not all that bad as travel partners, in reality they’re not any different than most of the UMinn and Cornell kids I was with in BA. The big difference is that there is no one like Ryan or Anna here. This means that I don’t have anyone who wants to do the same stuff that I do at the same time. Sam does the same stuff but he had to go to work on Saturday, so I was off on my own again.

I rolled out of the house at about 9:30 and headed to the bus station. I was finally going to get out to Pomaire, the town I have been intending to visit since the first weekend I got here. As I may have mentioned before, this is a small, dusty town about 68 km southwest of Santiago that is home to a large collection of potters. In fact, that’s really all the town does is pottery.

At the bus stop, I tracked down a micro and waited for a bit until 11 when we rolled out of the station. That put me in Pomaire at 12:15 or so. We crawled down the main street, lined with restraints and pottery shops (I’d say three dozen would be a conservative estimate), until we got to the small central square where the bus let us out. Thankfully, it had drizzled on the way over and the dust from the clay was damped down so the town air was quite clear. The village is set in a small bowl of green hills, what they grow there I couldn’t tell, and really is a small village. The primary grid is probably 12 x 12 blocks. All the action happens on one main street that runs the length of the town and two smaller streets that cut off in the center. It really is just one big tourist trap, but a tourist trap for Chileans so I didn’t feel too bad about the whole thing. I don’t recall seeing a single person I would have guessed was American while I was there. And there was some beautiful pottery. My personal favorites were the ones glazed on the inside and left plain on the outside.

I walked down the main street for a while, got some gifts, and then explored some of the quieter (read: empty) side streets and stepped into a few of the, for lack of a better word, studios. These aren’t studios in the traditional potter sense though. More like workshops. I watched a few guys do that thing with the clay that takes all the air out of it (some help here please) and another guy get a delivery off fifteen dry wall buckets worth of dark red clay. Unfortunately, I didn’t see much actual pot creation. One guy in the middle of the street doing it for the benefit of the tourists and I heard a few people in one of the workshops and saw another guy building a fire in a kiln but that was it in terms of actual work. I guess the focus is more on selling during the weekends. One of the cooler things I did see though was a hillside kiln. It looked sort of like a staircase going up the side of one of the hills outside of the center of town. I’m sure it has a real name but I don’t know what it is.

So, after walking around I decided I was hungry. Not having brought a lunch, and having seen most of the town but not ready to go back to Santiago yet I decided to have a real, sit down lunch for once. Inspired by a conversation the previous evening about the traditional pastel de choclo, which I thought I had eaten in Argentina but realized after seeing pictures that I had eaten something different, I decided to sit down in one of the open air restraints and indulge in a traditional, relaxing Chilean lunch. So after one of the best empanadas I have had here (still doesn’t compare to a real, fried Argentine one) I was presented with pastel de choclo.

What a dish. It came in a clay pots I’m sure was made in Pomaire and was about six inches in diameter and four or five inches deep. It was similar to a Shepard’s pie. But rather than a flour top, it was a sweet corn top and instead of vegetables in the middle, there was just hardboiled eggs and meat. It was delicious.

I took my time enjoying that and had a truly leisurely lunch. After I finished my waiter brought my some complementary dessert wine and I sat and watched people walk by the restaurant while I sipped that. All in all lunch took about an hour and a half. Afterwards I walked around town a bit, brought some presents, took some pictures to show Christo, and then caught a bus to Melipilla at 4. I didn’t do much (anything) in Melipilla but drive through and switch to a bus going to Santiago but there isn’t much to see. It’s a bigger city than Pomiare but nothing special. Just an agricultural center and a pleasant town square.

I arrived back in Santiago at about 6 and headed home for dinner. On the way, I stopped and finally bought a cell phone so that I can communicate with the DRCLAS kids here. After dinner, it was out for some ice cream at Bravissimo again. Not quite as good as Freddo but still better than anything we have in the states I think.

Above the tree line

Friday morning I pulled myself out of bed at 5:45 (no problems today, I had a good reason to get up) and made my way over to Apoquindo to rent skis and get a bus ticket to the mountain.Sam and I were supposed to meet at 6:45 outside the store since they opened at 7. However, I over-estimated how long it would take me to get there and after riding the buses through a fog so thick I was afraid they wouldn’t stop for me because they wouldn’t be able to see me, I arrived at 6:20. With nothing better to do I sat down outside the front of the store, pulled my hat over my eyes, and looking for all the world like a hobo, took a nap.

Sam eventually rolled up at 6:50 after the guys in the store had opened it and let me come in and nap on the couch. We got in line and got all of our necessary equipment. I also found out we were going to be joined by Evan, a friend of Sam from work who goes to UNC and is there on the “UNC Awesome Scholarship” (I forget the name of it but this is the scholarship that pays for 4 years of school and 4 years of summer traveling, on top of a bunch of other things during the school year). He was our only company since the rest of the DRCLAS kids had gone south for the long weekend on a whirlwind tour of Temuco, Puerto Montt and Valdivia. I declined to join them as the whole thing cost $140 and the highlight was Valdivia, where I had already spent five days in January.

After we had our gear the three of us climbed in to a 15-person van and embarked on the two-hour drive to Valle Nevado. This involved a trip up a road which did nothing to disabuse me of the idea that the people responsible for siteing roads in this country just get high, take a map, and draw squiggly lines all over it and then give it to the contractors and say, “stay in the lines.”

The road was barely wide enough for two cars to pass on the straight-aways and on the hairpin, 180-degree turns it was not wide enough for two cars to pass. There were probably close to 50 of these hairpin turns. The only reason this system works is because in the mornings everyone is going to the resort so traffic only goes up the mountain and in the afternoon everyone is going back to Santiago so the traffic only goes down the mountain.

Eventually, with a few more gray hairs, we made it up to Valle Nevado. It is a stunning setting for a ski resort. The last 30 minutes of the drive, once you’re over the first ridge and above the tree line, has some of the most mind-blowing mountain views I’ve ever seen. I don’t normally have a problem with heights and I was getting vertigo sitting in the car.

At the resort we got changed in the parking lot and then got our tickets. We lucked out and happened to go on a 3 for 2 day when we happened to have 3 people so we got a deal on our tickets. Then it was on to the slopes. This was interesting. Because we were above the tree line the slopes are just sort of arbitrarily determined groomed areas. But you can ski nearly anywhere. On a powder day, which it was not unfortunately – it turned out to be a beautiful bluebird day – this would be incredible.

For us it was a bit less than incredible though. Sam and I ended up abandoning Evan to his own devices shortly after we arrived as he hadn’t skied in well over five years and we headed out to the back of the resort. This involved several rides up surface lifts – there is a definite lack of chairlifts, probably due to the lack of trees – but it brought us to the top of some decent cliff skiing. Because most of the higher trails were pretty icy due to the wind blowing all the snow cover off we ventured into the rocks to try our luck. While the snow certainly wasn’t the best I’ve skied on we did find a few stashes of knee-deep powder hidden around some of the crags. If their had been more fresh snow this could have easily been the best day of skiing I’ve ever had.Even with crummy snow the terrain was terrific. Narrow couloirs that opened out into some beautiful wide-open bowls. And steep doesn’t even begin to describe it. These are slopes that when you cut your ski across laterally and stand straight up you can’t fully extend your uphill arm because you hit the slope first. In other words a slope with about five feet of vertical drop for every two or three feet of horizontal run. Look at a doorway and draw a diagonal from the top left corner to the bottom right – that’s about how steep we’re talking. It was glorious. The picture below is of one of the cliff segments.

Sam and I spent the morning taking runs on that section of the mountain, occasionally straying back to the groomed stuff to open up some super-G style turns – he’s a fair challenge in a race, one of the few people I’ve ever said that about – and we also took one ill advised traverse and hike to try and get some fresh tracks off one of the non-lift serviced ridgelines. Ill-advised because, while we got some fresh snow for our hike, the snow really wasn’t worth the hike it took to get there. But it was good exercise and always good to occasionally earn your turns.

We took a brief break at 1:30 for lunch and met up with Evan again. After lunch the three of us managed to stick together as Evan had remembered how to ski and we headed back to the upper part of the resort again. We spent some time there and then checked out the terrain park (disappointing) and took some pretty fast lines down the front groomers.

We rolled out at 5 after Sam and I showed up at the van at 4:59, well within the 4:30 to 5 window that our driver gave us, in which to meet. We rolled back into Santiago at about 7:30 and I headed home for dinner and then hung out with the WorldTeach kids for the evening. They are, unsurprisingly, far more interesting than the DRCLAS kids here. I’m not sure what it is about Harvard kids in foreign countries but they are just not that fun. They’re brilliant and they all do interesting stuff but they’re boring travel partners (Sam and Fabian being the obvious exceptions to this observation). I would like to think I break that mold but I’m not really sure. However, I did learn that among the WorldTeach kids there is a kid from Baldwin who just graduated from Notre Dame and was good friends with one of the speakers at my high school graduation. What are the odds that you’d find three kids from Pittsburgh in Santiago? I have no idea, but I suspect they’re pretty small.

Hitching a Ride

I rolled out of bed Wednesday bright and early, bright-eyed and bushy tailed and then, like I do everyday, I promptly rolled over and went back to sleep for 15 minutes. You see, I have a problem with my room. In every other way my host family is just wonderful and my room is splendid. It’s big, it’s spacious, it has its own bathroom, no one comes in un-asked (except the maid who cleans and organizes everything and makes my bed everyday), the bed is comfy – in short, it’s perfect. Except it’s on the first floor.

This might not seem like a big deal but because my host family lives in one of the wealthiest areas of the city and is scared of everything, perhaps rightfully so – there were three break-ins in neighboring houses the second night I was here. On the other hand, my host grandmother hasn’t left the house since I’ve been here, at least partially because she is afraid of getting swine flu. But, returning to the fact that they’re concerned about break-ins, they lock down the house at night. This means that they have a garage door type contraption of segmented metal that rolls down over the French doors in the back of my room. This means no one is breaking in unless they have a heavy duty saw-saw but it also means that my room is completely without light natural light once the wall goes down (by they way, this gives a whole new meaning to “raising the shield”). Now this is a problem for me. Because I struggle to get out of bed in the morning under the best of circumstances. And the best of circumstances involve me being woken up by natural light. Not having any natural light therefore creates huge motivational problems for me. Hence, I rarely, if ever get out of bed on time.

Returning to Wednesday I did eventually get up and make my way to the office and, like most mornings, was the first one there – so my getting up late problem isn’t really that much of a problem. I set to work on the carbon calculator project and by lunch I’d come up with a loose outline of what it was going to look like and had started the excel model for transportation. Feeling productive, I left at 12:30 to meet Tomás for lunch. Tomás has made an appearance in this blog before and anyone who has been reading since the beginning should recognize his name. He’s something like 30 now but when I was in Vietnam he was one of my co-workers.

Since then, he has graduated from KSG and moved back down here to Chile. After a brief unemployment stint and then some part-time consulting for Patagonia Sur (the world really is a small place, he’s also best friends with Franco Valdés, Patagonia Sur’s general manager, and was quite surprised to find out I was working for them this summer) he is now the executive director of enseña Chile. Enseña Chile is, more or less, Teach for America – Chile. From what Tomás told me, in the last few years Wendy Kopp has moved on from running TFA to starting TFA-like organizations in other countries. There is one here, one in the UK and I believe one more. So, Tomás got pulled into that. I’m not entirely clear how that happened but it makes sense. I’m not especially surprised though. The guy is quite impressive and something tells me he’s going places. Big places. Like Minister of Education places. You saw it here first.

So, we had lunch and caught up since the last time I’d seen him was October 2007. Over the course of lunch he also happened to invite me to his mountain home outside of Farrelones for a weekend. This threw my travel plans all awry. As I had said before, I had been planning to go to Chilöe this weekend and then go skiing the next two and hang out in Santiago on the days I wasn’t skiing. But I wanted to go with Tomás. This removed a day of skiing and spending time in Santiago. What was I ever to do?

Eventually Tomás had to return to work. However, being as Steve is in the US I had no such requirements (plus, I haven’t taken a lunch break the whole time I’ve been here. I normally eat at my desk while I work and the rest of the office takes an hour or so for lunch so I felt entitled to an extended for one day). So, after Tomás departed I took a stroll down to the hotel where the WorldTeach volunteers, who had arrived this morning, were staying and said hi to Kristen, who was a bit jet-lagged. We took a walk around Cerro Santa Lucia to try and get her oriented to the city and then I headed back to work.

Back at work I finished the transportation section of the excel model for the carbon calculator and sent it off to Steve for him to look at over the weekend. I then had to figure out what I was going to do with myself for the weekend.

Tomás’ invitation made the idea of going skiing with Sam much more appealing but that only occupied one of the three days I had to figure out what to do with. Consulting my trusty Lonely Planet gave me my other two options: Pomiare (where I’d wanted to go since I got here) and Quintay – a small fishing village south of Valpo and supposedly home of the most undisturbed section of beach in this part of the country. I had been planning on working Sunday to make up for skipping work on Friday anyway so that was already taken care of. Having reached my decision I was able to return my ticket for a refund and then head home for dinner and an early night so that I could get up and head to Quintay early the next day.

Early didn’t really happen. But since I didn’t have to go far that wasn’t much of a problem and I caught a bus to Valpo from where I planned to get a bus to Quintay. Unfortunately this was not to be. I found out that because it was a holiday the buses to Quintay weren’t running with any frequency and so, after waiting with an older women who was also heading to Quintay for about 45 minutes, we found another family heading in the same direction and the five of us piled into a taxi colectivo that delivered me to the main square in Quintay. On the way, I was reminded that they will build roads anywhere here in South America. The road crossed a saddle heading down into the city that, quite literally, was no wider than the width of the road. The mountain dropped more or less straight down from each side of the road for several hundred feet for the 200 yards that the road crossed the saddle.

Once in Quintay I found a pleasant, small town of mostly dirt roads that hung onto the cliffs around a natural cove. The cove had been enlarged by a large concrete construction that connected several of the rock outcroppings extending into the water to form what had been the epicenter of the Chilean whaling industry in the 1940s. It had been turned into a museum and I walked down and climbed around for a bit. This generated some good vantages for pictures more than anything else but it was a cool sight.

While I was out on the piers though the fog began to roll in and in the course of about 15 minutes turned what had been a beautiful, clear, sunny day into a beautiful, gray, foggy day with visibility reduced to about thirty feet. I spent some more time retaking all the pictures I had taken in the sun with the fog and then headed back up out of the cove to walk around the town.

There wasn’t much to see and I ended up walking through the main square and then out the other side and down a dusty dirt road that was a bit incongruous next to the gated mansions perched on the cliffs overlooking a second natural curve. These were a far cry from the fishing shacks I had been looking at earlier in the morning. Ultra-modern, airy concrete affairs with huge windows and swimming pools in the patios. And the location couldn’t be better. Most were set back in groves of pine or eucalyptus trees just above rocky cliffs that dropped straight down into the ocean.

I came to a fence in the road with an open cattle guard next to it so I just continued on and ended up down on the beach. This was my kind of beach. Rocky and windswept with heath covered headlands rising up almost immediately from the water. I walked for about 45 minutes down the beach until I found another trail heading back up to the fields that the road had dead-ended into. Back in the field it looked like someone had started to develop the property for more prime mansion sites but the unpaved road leads me to suspect that they got the road in and then ran out of money.

It made my walk easier though and I walked until the semi-road ended in another fence, which I jumped, and then walked through a pasture until I came to the main road into the town and climbed out of the pasture and walked back down the road towards Quintay with the intention of catching the bus back to Valpo. On the way I made some cursory attempts to hitchhike in order to avoid the bus but my dashing good looks were failing me and no one stopped to pick me up.

Back in the town I found that, because of the holiday, the bus wasn’t leaving until 6:15. Now, it was only 5 and I had already seen the whole town and didn’t have any desire to get an early dinner to kill the time until the bus left so I decided to try my hand at hitchhiking again. But this time I got a piece of cardboard from the supermarket and made myself a little “Valpo or bust sign.” Unfortunately I’m not that cool though and my sign actually said “Valpo/Stgo.” No room for “or bust.”

Armed with my sign now, I headed back out to the road leading out of town with the idea that I’d spend the next hour trying to hitch a ride and if that failed the bus would stop on its way out of town and pick me up. But I was in luck and what my debonair handsomeness couldn’t accomplish my hobo sign did and no more than five minutes after I reached the main road an old VW/Mitsubishi van with an old couple and their daughter pulled over and I climbed in. With an apple and some cardboard to sit on we were on our way back to Santiago.

They skipped Valpo and just took me straight to the end of one of the metro lines in Santiago where I hopped out and headed home on the metro – about two hours sooner than the bus would have gotten me there and with a story that was quite a bit more interesting.

Once I got home, it was dinner and a stop by the WorldTeach hostel to say hi before bed for me since I was getting up at 5:45 to go skiing with Sam the next day. Also, something I've been meaning to complain about for a while now and haven't gotten around to it: Those of you up North need to get your act together. Chile is an expensive country to begin with the fact that you're not doing your part to keep the dollar up against the Peso aren't helping matters at all. Since I've been here it's gone from 550 to 530 to the dollar. This after it hit 790 to the dollar in 2007. So get it together.

Karma Police

The more I travel the more convinced I become that Karma is real and most definitely is something that should be considered when making a decision. I’m not talking so much about the traditional, Buddhist, feng shui Karma - that we should all be pacifistic vegans. Although, eating less meat would be good for us and the environment – a fair number of studies suggest that eating meat regularly is worse for the environment than driving your car – and vegetarian food is generally surprisingly good. But I do like red meat. And if we weren’t supposed to eat meat we wouldn’t have incisors. Take that PETA!

Anyway, back to Karma, it definitely exists in a “what goes around, comes around” or “pay-it-forward” sense. It may not come back to you right away but it will get there. You do something good or go out of your way for someone and good things are going to happen to you. If you screw someone over you’re going to get it back eventually.

You could argue that this is just life and there are always good and bad things that happen to people but I don’t think so. I think that bad things will happen to everyone, but I definitely think that you doing good things for people will have a beneficial affect on the probability of good things happening to you. It’s also comforting to know that if someone screws you eventually they’re going to get it too. Hence, there is no reason to get too upset about anything. It’s a very mellow way to live.

I also think – and this may be a perversion of Karma but it has certainly been true for me – that if something bad happens to you something good is going to come out of it. You get ripped off on a taxi fair but when you leave your camera and a hundred dollar bill in the back of a cab a few days later and go back to the cabstand two hours later; your camera case has been returned with the hundred dollars in it.

It could be luck but I don’t really believe in luck. You make your own luck and this is just one way you do that.

So now, on to the last week. Monday was a bit of a bust. I was supposed to have a 9:30 meeting but the kid I was supposed to meet never showed up. So waited until 10:15 and then headed to the office. There I had a phone meeting at 11 with one of the board members of the company to talk about my project and that lasted until 12:30. At which point I left to go to what I thought was a lunch meeting at 1. But it turned out I had mixed up my dates and the lunch meeting was on Wednesday. So I went back to the office to have lunch. But then I rescheduled the 9:30 meeting for 3 and so had to head back out to that. So I ended up spending several wasted hours on the metro going back and forth to meetings I didn’t actually have. On the plus side, I did get a Havanna Alfajore.

After work, Sam and I went to check prices for the ski trips this weekend, which meant I got to spend even more time on the buses. But we did a few places that would get us up to the mountains at a reasonable rate.

Tuesday was a bit better as I was actually able to get some work done but I ended up working on my third project – creating a carbon calculator for Patagonia Sur’s visitors – rather than the master plan questions. At 3 I had a meeting with Mary Brett Roger-Springs, that’s one hell of a name, from the U.S. Embassy. She’s the Environment, Science, Technology and Health Officer at the Embassy and Steve introduced me so that I could get an idea of what the U.S.’ take on the Chilean carbon market was. Turns out the market doesn’t really exist. Chile is much further behind in terms of developing all the necessary baselines and methodologies than I had expected. But she was an interesting person to talk to and our meeting was very productive – in addition to getting me a free cappuccino from Starbucks. Hopefully I’ll be joining her when she goes to meet with some of the people here in Santiago who are doing a little bit with the carbon markets in the coming weeks.

After work, I headed down to the bus station to scope out tickets for a trip Chilöe the coming long weekend. I hadn’t decided yet if I was going with Sam and my other option was a trip down south to the large island off the coast. Apparently it is beautiful – several of the towns have been given UNESCO world heritage designation – but very rainy. So I went to the bus station and found out that pretty much everything was sold out. The one ticket I did find was with a company that didn’t take anything but cash. So I ended up heading home for dinner and then going back after dinner (during rush hour this is a 45 min – 1 hour trip, one way) only to find that the ticket had been sold. But I did find another and after some thought I ended up buying it for about 6 mil more than the first. So I was heading to Chilöe for the weekend.

After my adventure at the bus station, I headed to a bar to watch the MLB All-Star game with Fabian, Sam and Anthony. But because my bus tribulations took so long, Sam and Fabian had left by the time I got there. And I was only there long enough to have a beer before I remembered that I needed to go put money on my Bip! before the stations closed. But I was too late. And so had the chance to explore the city a bit on the buses. I jumped on one and ended up in Plaza Italia where I caught the 405 home.

A lack of direction

School’s out forever! Not really. In fact, the fact that my boss is no longer here has nothing to do with school. But it’s the same general idea. Plus, The Simpsons this week have all been about the fact that school is out so it’s on my mind. I watch The Simpsons now at dinner with my family because the dialogue is so simple enough that I can practice listening without really thinking about it. But, back to the original point. Now not only am I left to my own devices because I know more about Carbon Markets than Steve but he’s in the U.S. for two weeks so I no longer have a boss in this country. He left on Friday and will be there for two weeks on vacation.

Wednesday I finished the report at work, then came home, and went for a run again. No deep moral quandaries presented themselves this time though. Although I am quite pleased with the amount of feedback I’ve gotten from the last two postings. Not only do the multiple emails I’ve gotten about it give me something else to think about with respect to each issue, they indicate that people are actually reading this that is pleasant knowledge.

After my run, I had planned to meet Sam and Fabian for drinks but that never panned out. I think something was wrong with Webmail as I never got the email that I sent to the list to confirm with them. Thursday was a meeting day and Steve and I talked for a few hours about the projects I’m working on before he left for the states. The feedback on the report was helpful and I spent most of the day Friday working through the suggestions he made and preparing to send it off to the other members of the board to get their feedback.

Because most of the rest of the group is traveling this weekend, and I was planning to go to Cajón del Maipu early Saturday, Friday night was just an evening spent reading, packing and getting food for the morning. Not living with Ryan and not being in BA has really killed my sociability. I’ve been here for three weeks and gone out once. That is a sub-par effort.

Friday morning I managed to sleep though one alarm even after getting eight hours of sleep and ended up shoving some breakfast down my throat and then jogging to the bus stop to meet Sam. Lubo, who was supposed to join us, answered Sam’s phone call in a state of confusion. He had apparently woken up in someone else’s house where he had spent the night, unintentionally, after a rather long evening. So he wasn’t going to be joining us.

Sam and I then caught the bus – Sam, by the way gets huge props for coming on this trip after getting about an hour and a half of sleep after a night out with his host cousins – down to the south of the city and got another bus out to Cajón del Maipu. This bus turned what should have been a 45-minute drive into an hour and half by driving no more than 45 the entire way. But I did get to meet my CCR quota for the trip and now have a distinct event associated with CCR from each of my international travels.

We rolled into El Principal at about 10:20 and found we had to catch another bus to the natural reserve we were heading to. That bus took us all of about 5 km before dropping us at the semi-entrance to the reserve and telling us to walk the remaining 4 km (on the way home we also figured out that we could have just taken this bus to begin with and saved ourselves about $1 and 30 minutes – way to go Lonely Planet). Seeing no other options, we set off.

This brought us to the actual entrance to the park at about 11:15 where we walked into the ranger station and paid. He then told us about the two short trails in the reserve (1km and 4 km respectively). We were not interested in this. The reserve is 100 sq km and encompasses several mountains, two of which we had noted with particular interest on the way in, and we intended to spend the whole day hiking. Thus, I had the following conversation with the ranger:

“Yes, good. Can we climb that mountain?” – pointing to the semi-snow covered peak overlooking the ranger station.

“The mountain?” – sounding a touch surprised – “You know a route?”

“Yes, yes” – Poll: Did I have any idea how to climb the mountain?

– Looking skeptical, “Ok, but make sure you leave enough time to get down.”

“Yes, clearly.”

– Still looking skeptical, “Yes, the gate closes at 6. Turn around by 3”

“Of course, it’s all good.”

“Ok, good luck”

Sam just sort of watched this exchange and then we were off. I think the ranger thought we would a) try and climb the mountain and realize that there was no trail and then turn around b) try and climb the mountain and get hopelessly lost. Neither of these things happened. As it was, bushwhacking to the top of one of the two mountains we had seen wasn’t even my idea. It was all Sam. As we were walking in we were both looking at one of the peaks (not the one we climbed, we deemed the first one to be too far of a trip upon closer investigation) and sort of out of the blue Sam goes, “Hey, how do you feel about climbing that?” I respond with, “Well, there is no trail.” Him, “Yeah, I know but we can just make our own.” Did I mention this kid gets huge props?

So we started on the short, 1 km interpretive trail that meandered through one of the valleys at the base of the peak we were looking to climb. This took us up into a dry streambed, and judging this to be the highest point of the trail, we headed off up the side of the streambed. This took us through some pretty thick underbrush but then we broke out onto the spine of the ridge that was more or less clear. I should mention at this point that the vegetation was Andean scrub brush so most of it wasn’t any taller than us and it was pretty spread out. We did a lot of walking on dry creek beds and on exposed ridgelines so the going, at least in the beginning, wasn’t that bad. By the time we’d been walking for about an hour though we had reached the end of the easy going. Up until that point, the walk had been up hill but at a reasonable rate of elevation gain. We’d gone up maybe a thousand or fifteen hundred feet in about a mile and a half. However, the next part of the hike climbed at a minimum of 45 degrees. That left about a mile of 45 degree climbing. It was a trip. But it was beautiful. Because the vegetation wasn’t too thick (although saw grass is vicious on the hand when you’re scrambling over boulders) we had terrific views of the valley behind us for pretty much the entire hike.

After rolling out of the ranger station at 11:30 we reached the final, snow covered ascent at 2:00 and found ourselves on the summit by 2:15. We met four Chileans whose footprints we had been encountering all morning as they were just leaving and had a brief chat with them before lunch. After lunch, it was naptime. I didn’t want to miss out on the great sunset potential that the hike down offered so I didn’t want to leave the summit too early. Sam, being exhausted at this point, was more than happy to oblige and passed out in the sun. All in all we spent about an hour on the summit taking in the views, eating, napping and watching hawks stoop over us. I don’t know what they were chasing but watching it was pretty impressive.

The way down was only slightly faster than the way up – we still had to bushwhack and the footing going down was actually more treacherous – and we cheered ourselves with conversations about how exactly we would perform a self-rescue if one of us were to break their ankle (given the night-time temperature and the time involved in getting down and bring help back up we decided that leaving the injured party with all the food and clothes to go get help wasn’t an option. They were just going to have to man up and climb down with a broken ankle). Anyway, we found ourselves back on the trail at about 5:25 a bit higher up than where we’d left. We quickly made our way to the man made viewpoint and enjoyed a terrific sunset.

This, of course, meant that we hiked out of the park at dusk, slightly after six, to find that not only was the gate still open but our ranger friend had peaced out. It also meant that we had a 4 km walk down the road back to the bus station ahead of us. Since our attempts to hitchhike failed we had a great opportunity to look at the stars, something you don’t often get to do in Santiago.

Eventually we did catch the bus and made it back to Santiago were we split up to eat and shower at our respective homes and then met again to see if we couldn’t find the rest of the group and I could improve my social statistics. This didn’t really work out. The rest of the group was at a house party somewhere that had just run out of food. Sam didn’t actually eat in his house and he wanted food. So we decided to try and find some restaurant he wanted to try. Now, contrary to what his enthusiasm for bushwhacking might indicate, Sam has a terrible sense of direction. God-awful. We spent an hour wondering around on four different buses before we found the place. On the line of the bus that we had originally been on. Then it was closed. Peachy.

We ended up in a transplanted English pub complete with a transplanted Red phone booth that you had to walk through to get into the pub (its name was the phone booth pub). There I discovered – Sam had already been – that they had a terrific selection of beer, though no Kunstmann Meil, and Sam was able to get his dinner. We spent a few hours eating and drinking there and then Sam decided to head home while I planned to meet up with the rest of the kids. Unfortunately, they had already made their way to a club and had chosen one of the ones that was pretty far outside of the city. Since they got a ride there with the kid whose house party they were at this wasn’t a problem for them. But since the busses didn’t go there, it was for me. I ended up just heading home as well and catching up on sleep. I’m turning out a poor fantasy season.

Today I rolled out of bed at 10 with plans to see some of Santiago that I hadn’t seen yet. I had a brief breakfast and then headed downtown with plans to check out a market, walk over Cerro Santa Lucia and then check out Bella Vista. I managed to successfully do all of those. Although it was a bit on the cloudy and smoggy side Santa Lucia still gave some great views of the city and the graffiti in Bella Vista did not disappoint. Valpo’s was more ubiquitous and creative but Bella Vista certainly holds its own. They also have superb empanadas, which I had for lunch.

After lunch, I headed down to Universidad San Joaquim to play frisbee with the Chilean ultimate club. But, I suppose because it is technically winter, only one other guy showed up. So we played catch for about an hour and then I left to check out the Museum built to house the collection of modern art made in honor of Salvador Allende. For those not familiar with Chilean history Allende was the president who was overthrown in 1973 (on 9/11) by Pinochet.

The museum was quite small but very interesting. My particular favorite was titled Guernica: A return and featured selections from Guernica super imposed over a new background. It is an interesting place too because of what it symbolizes. I think that it is difficult for people in the U.S. to understand because we’ve never had the kind of political trauma that Chile went through in the 70s but this is a museum constructed to honor a deposed president. That in and of itself is not strange. What is strange is how the country relates to Pinochet, and Allende is drawn in because of his connection to Pinochet.

Allende is idolized, and perhaps rightfully so, as a hero who would not back down from Pinochet and the other leaders of the coup. Pinochet is reviled in many quarters for what he did to the country after the coup. This aversion is so strong that I have friends at Harvard who were expressly forbidden from writing economics papers about Chile because they may have painted Pinochet in a favorable light. For this is the complication with the picture of Allende as a hero and Pinochet as a terror. From a humanitarian perspective Pinochet was a terror (although not by the standards of Latin America) – estimates place the number of “disappeared” at more than 5,000 during his nearly 25 years of control. The cultural damage the Chile suffered still has not been repaired. But right now Chile has the strongest economic fundamentals of any country in South America. It has the lowest inequality and the highest percentage of the population above the poverty line. This success can be directly tied to fiscal and monetary policy decisions made in the 1970s, in the midst of Pinochet’s reign. Whatever else he did, Chile is as successful as they are today because of Pinochet’s policies.

Allende would have been better for the culture. He would (probably) not have disappeared 5,000 people. But he was a left leaning socialist. He never would have followed the economic policies of Pinochet. Thus, Chileans are left with an incredibly difficult task. How do you rectify the image of Pinochet the murderer with the image of Pinochet as the source of Chilean economic success? There is a very complicated relationship with history here – a history that is, more often than not, simply not talked about.

After my visit to the museum, I headed home with the intention of stopping at the Havanna café for coffee and alfajores. Unfortunately, the café was closed – Santiago needs to take a page for BA’s book and realize that cafes should never be closed at six pm on a Sunday – so I ended up at home a bit earlier than planned and had dinner with Rita.

Tomorrow I have several meetings and then get to settle in and start working on my second project: answering questions about the properties that haven’t yet been asked.

I'm a rambling man

Today I learned that men have no rights in our office. I work in an office with four women, and occasionally another male KSG grad, and today Pilo wanted to turn the heat up, it was already 75 degrees in the office, and I said something along the lines of, “are you serious? It’s already boiling in here.” Her response? You’re a guy and the rest of us are cold. You have no rights in this office. So we roasted.

That was the most exciting part of my day today. I’m nearly done with my report and plan to finish it this evening so I can talk to Steve when he gets back from Lima tomorrow (Steve has his own office in the front of the building, hence why I’m the only guy).

But the real reason for this post is to address some of the comments posted about my morality questions. It got people a bit fired up. I’ve thought about it a bit more and the biggest problem I am running into at the moment is the Hitler argument. How does this idea explain Hitler. Is there a mitigating factor for what he did? How could their possibly be a mitigating factor? The same (perhaps even more applicable because Hitler might have been insane, this man was not) can be said for Stalin. Or any of half a dozen other “strong men” in the last 70 years. Wasn’t what they did clearly morally wrong?

The answer depends on how broadly you define mental illness I think. You could easily define away evil by claiming that because our actions are nothing more than the end result of a complicated set of chemicals in our brains, and our personalities are the result of variations in the balances of these chemicals, that variations in someone’s personality which are abnormal (mentally ill) are the result of variations in these chemicals over which they have no control. In this case normal would be defined as those set of actions or personality traits which, broadly distributed, best promote the continuation of the human species. Thus, anyone who takes actions which threaten the survival of the species (evil actions?) is simply mentally ill. So, are they really evil?

This view shoots the idea of good to hell as well and poses existential problems for free will. If all we do is the result of a complex combination of chemicals that we’re born with, how is it that we have any free will? If we do have free will, does that necessitate that evil exist in the world as well?

Also, where does the idea of absolute right and wrong fit into this? I just spent two paragraphs supposing that there is no absolute right and wrong in a non-evolutionary sense (that is, under the supposition above it is wrong to try and end the existence of the species and right to promote its existence), but, and this goes back to the question of morals again, is there some other source of right and wrong? And the church is not an acceptable answer.

As always I leave you with more questions than I answer.

Finally, I looked up some numbers in regards to my question about traveling. Here’s what I found:

- 5% of the world is equivalent to 325 million people (slight more than the population of the US)

- The UNHCR estimates that there are 35 million refugees in the world, allowing for underestimation let’s suppose there are 50 million

- That leaves 275 million (assuming every refugee has spent more than a year outside of their own country which is probably an overestimation)

- Do we think that more than 275 million people have lived outside their native country for more than a year? I think the next numbers I need to look up are those of migration. For example, there are 11 million illegal immigrants living in the US now (more or less – why I know that off the top of my head I don’t know) so that drops it down to 264 million. What about immigrants in the rest of the world? This number is getting smaller all the time. Perhaps I should have said top 10%.

- Also, people whose cumulative travel experience of a week, or two weeks, abroad at a time, adds up to more than a year over 45 years don’t count. Sorry. That experience is totally different. Granted mine haven’t been consecutive either. But in the 24 months since June 07 I’ve spent nearly 12 outside of the US. Living somewhere for 2 months is different than traveling around a country for two weeks.

- Also, Fabi’s brother has swine flu now too. And Chile is debating whether or not to legalize Plan B (I’m watching the news).

Valpo Valpo

Thursday dawned bright and clear. That seems to be the new thing here. The weather went from being rainy and cloudy for the first week I was here to being clear and sunny every day for the last five. I rolled on down to work and didn’t accomplish anything of note after that.

Really, the only reason worth mentioning Thursday is that I went to Steve’s house for dinner.He invited me over, why I’m not particularly sure since I was going to his house the next night for the DRCLAS 4^th of July celebration, on Wednesday and I’m not one to turn down a free meal. So, I joined his family for dinner and met his wife and his three kids. They were less than enthused to be stuck at the table meeting the new guest – as could be expected from kids ranging in age from 7 to 14 – but they had to remain, they informed me, because of their parents obsession with making them speak at the dinner table. This obsession took the form of a game in which each kid had to answer or ask three questions before they were allowed to leave the table. Thus I learned that they all attend a private school here, his son was about to become a blue/red belt in Tae Kwon Do and Catholics are amphibians while Protestants are monkeys but they’re all animals because they’re all Christian.

After dinner he, his wife and I talked for a bit about The Colbert Report and the story of Lily before they dropped me of on their way to a birthday party. Their house is beautiful, even more so than the one that I’m staying at, and is just one more reason that I would love to live down here at some point in my life. They’ve been here for seven years and I suspect will be here for the foreseeable future. I don’t know if I could live as an ex-pat that long (I like hockey too much) but I definitely plan to live as an ex-pat for several years. Although that may torpedo any political ambitions I might have.

Friday I was the only one in the office again in the morning because the other students went to a public service event again and my co-workers went with them to supervise. So, I had the run of the office again and started outlining my final report with the goal of starting a draft on Monday. We’ll see if that happens. My outline didn’t quite get finished but was close enough.One advantage of having the run of the office though was that I was able to listen to the Roddick-Murray match on Wimbledon radio over the internet. If you have never listened to tennis on the radio, you have no idea what you are missing. I think it’s the most intense sports radio experience I’ve ever had. Think about the intensity of a Mexican soccer announcer when a goal is scored and then realize that there is a point scored approximately every 90 seconds in men’s tennis. In other words, it is as electrifying as golf commentary is not. Happily, Roddick won to set up what was apparently a legendary final that I am very upset that I missed.

After work on Friday, it was off to Steve’s house for a pre-4^th of July dinner with the rest of the DRCLAS kiddies. I managed to get myself stuck in traffic on the way though because I had to recharge my Bip! (which is a huge headache when you don’t live near a metro station because you can’t do it on the buses) and ended up arriving 45 minutes late. Fortunately, this is Chile and I was far from the only one.

The dinner was great and I was able to meet the new SSL kids (I’m not really sure what the acronym stands for but they’re a bunch of other Harvard kids who are interested in medicine) who had arrive on Tuesday. Fabian and I were vindicated when Steve declared that BA was the best city on the planet, bar none. He is absolutely right. Although Santiago is pleasant in its own way. The few things that BA lacks – primarily access to anything other than miles of pampas – Santiago certainly has. World-class beaches and surfing are an hour to the west while world-class powder is an hour to the east. Although Santiago may not be the city that BA is it really couldn’t have a better location.

After dinner, we stopped by the house of one of the other girls in the program for a few drinks and then planned to go out. This idea failed miserably. I’m not sure if it was because of the size of the group or because of the make-up of the group but we managed to get as far as Vitacura and the outside of a club before the group fragmented. About half ended up in a McDonald’s (it being the 4^th and all they wanted good, old American food) and the rest of us attempted to go back up to Las Urracas. I should have realized that we would run into the same problem I did the last time I went to Urracas. Namely, that nobody wanted to pay the cover and so everyone I was with except Sam went home. Sam and I made a few more attempts to get into a club before running into a few SSL kids and calling it a night. I’m a big Sam fan. He’s game for just about anything.

Saturday I dragged myself out of bed by 10 and had a quick breakfast and shower before heading to the bus station to meet Sam, Lisa, Fabian and several others to head to Lisa’s family’s apartment in Vina del Mar. I got to the bus station at 12 and we overcame our group inertia by 1:00 and rolled out of the bus station at 1:30. This put us in Vina, which was unfortunately cloudy and foggy, at 2:45 or so. We piled off the bus and promptly almost got into a fight as everyone was sleep deprived and no one really knew what to do. Arian, as he always does, tried to get us a bargain city tour but no one wanted a tour. Ultimately Sam simply walked away which had the salutary affect of dragging all of us with him and we managed to get on a micro that took us to Ricaña and the apartment. We dropped our stuff off at the apartment and then went to get lunch. This turned into a rather drawn out affair but it did result in me getting two excellent empanadas and some superb ceviche. I ended up eating with Nelia, Sam and Arian while everyone else dined in the restaurant next store.

After dinner the four of us rejoined the remainder of the group, at which point Fabian provided the first quote of the evening. By the time we left their restaurant it was about 5 and we had accomplished a whole lot of nothing. My vote was for a walk on the beach two blocks away but I was overruled and we ended up with ice cream. I didn’t mind being overruled too much, although it was no match for Freddo.

After ice cream, I voted for the beach again but this time the rain overruled me so we ended up back in a micro and headed into Vina proper. Here we strolled around for a bit, visited a market, saw the sketchy parts of town and the ended up in a bar playing Gloria Estefan videos on repeat. This was changed a short time later to Michael Jackson videos on repeat. We stayed through Beat It and Thriller and then headed across the river to the ritzier part of town. Thus commenced a short period of bar hopping before we, finally, managed to overcome what I am beginning to think is a Harvard reflex for indecisiveness and get our group into a club. The club was an underground affair but with a talented DJ and a packed dance floor so I can’t complain.However, I am apparently either hideously ugly, smelly or a bad dancer – or potentially all of the above – because, of the seven guys we went with, I was the only one who was not selected as a dance partner. Their loss.

The next day Fabian and I rolled out of bed on time and bright and early at 11. This might not seem early to many of you but given that we had gone to bed at 5:30 I give us a lot of credit for making it out of bed before 12. We briefly tried waking everyone else up and realized that this was a Sisyphean task and gave up to shower, clean our room and pack up our stuff. Being, as we took to calling ourselves, pros we then rolled out at 11:45 to head to Valpo.

On the way, we grabbed breakfast at a supermarket and ate our breakfast of bread and dulce de leche on the beach as the fog covered the hills around us. After breakfast we jumped on a micro and took it all the way to the edge of Valpo where we stopped by the bus station to change our tickets, got some fruit at the city market and then began our tour of the city.

We started at the far end where we took an acensor (read: Duquesne incline) up to the top of one of the seven hills around the city and enjoyed some gorgeous views of the harbor and the other six hills of the city. We took a stroll through the museum of naval history and then made our way back down to the harbor through one of the many narrow staircases of the city. Valpo is a gorgeous, dirty, fascinating, graffitied, mazelike, dangerous, edgy, artsy, beautiful city completely deserving of the designation of World Heritage site. If you ever go to Chile your need to see Valpo.

Valpo

Unencumbered by the rest of the group we strolled through some of the side streets in the fish district and found a small, divey restaurant to grab lunch in. Fresh fried hake with a great hot pepper sauce and some rice made a terrific late lunch and we made our way into the center of the city and then up some of the rest of the hills. As the sun set we watched it go down from the top of Pablo Neruda’s neighborhood and were treated to some beautiful pink reflections off the harbor.

We made one more stop before heading home and, against perhaps our better judgment, watched the lights of the city come alive from the top of the next hill over. I took what will hopefully turn out to be a few terrific pictures of the moon coming up over a row of houses and then, not wanting to stroll through the streets at night, took a micro to the bus station and caught our ride home. Traveling with one other person who is as experienced as Fabian – he was a Let’s Go writer in Italy last summer – is so much more enjoyable than traveling with a large group. It’s quieter, you get to see sides of the city you’d never see as a normal tourist (where we ate lunch – it was a five table affair run by a man and his wife and it was plain. As he said, it reminds you that you should go somewhere for the food, not any kind of ambience) and you can move so much faster. We managed to see pretty much the whole city. The other part of our group ate lunch and saw Pablo Neruda’s house. That’s it. We got to wander through the back alleys of the city and get lost in the hills. It got a bit dicey at times but that’s what makes it exciting.

Monday I ran into Bridgett on the bus to work and got some more practice with my Spanish. I’m more or less conversant at this point but complex conversations are still beyond me. I can understand them, to a point, but forget about being able to take part. I have to think about what I’m going to say too much before I can say it that I can’t keep up with the conversation. Work wasn’t much but I went for a brief run afterwards which, as always, prompted some thinking. Namely that, by the end of this trip I’ll have spent a year of my life abroad. I wonder were that puts me relative to the rest of the world. Top 10%? Top 5%? Top 1%? In terms of how much one has lived outside of their own country. Of people I know personally I can think of only maybe half a dozen who have spent more time outside of the country and two of them are my grandparents who were born in Ireland. I’d bet it’s probably the top 5%. 1% seems too small. What do other people think?

Interlude: Hot-lanta

In my first entry I failed to mention that, due to unfortunate flight scheduling, my trip down here involved an 8 hour lay over in Atlanta. Anyone who has been to Atlanta knows that they have a great airport. But not one that you can spend 8 hours in. I was left with the question of what I was going to do to occupy my self for 8 hours between my flights.

Not being one to sit around I gave some people a few calls and got a list of things to do in hot-lanta on a Saturday afternoon. The first step was to get on the subway and make my way downtown. Where I discovered just about nothing. Downtown was quite empty for a Saturday. Sort of like downtown Pittsburgh all the time. So I walked around a bit and made my second discovery: hot-lanta is not a city made for walking. This prompted me to get back on the air conditioned subway and head out to the High Muesuem of Art. This was great. I recommend it to anyone who goes to Atlanta. It’s not overwhelming in its collections but it did have a great exhibit on Monet’s Water Lilies while I was there. What it does have going for it though is the fact that, so far as I can tell, there is nothing else in downtown Atlanta. What I really wanted was a movie theater so I could kill two hours sitting in the A/C. Couldn’t find one to save my life. What kind of city doesn’t have a movie theater downtown?

After the museum closed at 5 (unfortunate as that left me with another 5 hours to kill) I started walking back into downtown (the museum is on the outskirts), ran into a cheerful homeless dude who had visited the Omni William Penn at one point in his life, and finally stopped for dinner at a small bar. The hamburger was great. The whiskey sour not so much.

After dinner, lacking anything else to do , I ended up back at the airport. Thus ended my short trip to Atlanta.

Walking in a Winter Wonderland

I love this country. I took this picture on my hike two days ago. That is, this picture was taken at the end of June.

Need I say more?

What I should say is that this post is going to be quite long and it is going to cover a lot of ground so bear with me. We’ll begin with the end of last week. Thursday and Friday were meeting days. Because almost everyone in Patagonia Sur (henceforth when I say Patagonia Sur I generally mean both the company and the foundation) will be taking the month of July off everyone was in Santiago to go over the last year’s work and meet me. As a result, I was to give a brief presentation of what my project was and what I had managed to accomplish in a week and a half. I assumed that brief presentation meant 10 minutes, 20 minutes tops, so I made a seven-slide presentation about compliance and voluntary markets and my initial thoughts on the opportunities in each were.

My seven slide presentation turned into an hour and a half presentation that was only cut short by the fact that we had to have other presentations. I didn’t even get to the seventh slide. On the plus side, everyone in the company is clearly quite interested in what I’m doing and is more than willing to listen to what I have to say. That’s a good feeling. I got a few new ideas out of the presentation, the other meetings, and a learned a fair amount about how the organization works and what else is in their project portfolio.

Thursday night was spent buying my ticket and packing for Pucon and Friday we had more meetings. I got out of the office at about 5:45 and headed home for dinner before catching my bus to Pucon. I missed the buses here. Greyhound doesn’t even come close to comparing.

However, it was on the way to the bus station, in a rare fit of reflection, I diagnosed myself with a severe case of wünderlust. I have it quite bad and its only getting worse. I’ve been here for less than two weeks and I’m already trying to figure out how I can come back when I have to leave. This is the first time that I’ve lost my desire to return to the US so quickly in a foreign country. If I was being paid more (and I didn’t have to write a thesis) I would happily stay here until I had to go back to school in January. There is far too much to see and do to get it all done in two months. My diagnosis was only confirmed when I got to the bus station and realized how much I missed living out of a backpack and having the freedom to decide where you’re going to go when you wake up in the morning. Things like rolling into a town at 1 in the morning, pitching your tent in the first place you find and then waking up when the sun comes up the next day to discover a completely new place around you. Or meeting a group of French tourists and hitchhiking as far as they’ll take you. It’s things like this that I value.

I place full blame for this at the feet of my parents. By the time my mom was my age she had already traveled across Europe and covered more countries that I have at this point. My dad was getting a kidney transplant but then he rode his bike 6,000 miles all over North America. Clearly, this is hereditary.

But I digress. The trip to Pucon was uneventful. I was asleep before the bus left the station and I woke up in Villarica about half an hour outside of Pucon. We rolled into Pucon in the rain about half an hour late, which, by South American standards is practically on time. I had no idea where my friends who arrived on Friday morning where staying but I did have a list of three cabin rentals that they were considering so I made my way out into the rain and down the street to the first of these. As it turned out, they were staying in the last of the three that I checked so I got a short walking tour of the city before I found them. Unsurprisingly everyone but Fabian was still asleep. Shortly after my arrival, Anthony made his way over to Fabian’s cabin and cooked us up some eggs which motivated most of the rest of the residents of our cabin to make their way out of bed.

Due to the rain, no one was inclined to do much of anything and after a bit of discussion and a trip to the supermarket and tour company it was decided that rafting seemed like a good idea. I decided to join rather than go hiking because I couldn’t find the bus to the national park that I had been interested in going to and I was also having trouble finding anyone interested in hiking in the rain with me.

Our guides arrived to take us off to the river at 1 (by which I mean they actually arrived at 1:30) and I was off to try out luck on some class III (potentially IV) rapids in 45 degree, rainy weather with a group of 11 other Harvard kids whose cumulative rafting experience equaled mine. Sounds sort of like the beginning of a safety video…

But we arrived at the river to find that our guides, Claudio and Sebastian, were more than capable and shortly had all of us dressed up in obnoxious yellow and blue splash suits over wetsuits and booties and ready to get in the water. We piled into the boats and launched. And promptly found ourselves hung up on a snag in the middle of the river. Surmounting that we made our way down the river in splendid fashion. Like any true rafting trip this involved significant rapids, perhaps the largest I have ever been on, quite a bit of water in the boat, and, the best part, a boarding party that ventured from our boat to take possession of the other boat and dispose of them in the river. We of course had the favor returned when we tried to return to our boat and everyone ended up with mild cases of hypothermia. Among the males of the group, these cases were only made more severe as the girls took their sweet time changing in the van while we waited outside in the freezing rain.

After they allowed us into the van, we returned to our cabins where we reheated and watched the “Last Castle” with Robert Redford before heading to dinner. Most of us ended up at a café downtown where Sam Crihfield and I split a parrillado. This entailed bread, salad, two glasses of wine and three of the largest hunks (hunks is the only appropriate word here) of meat I have ever seen. We’re talking several pounds of meat. For each of us. Unfortunately, what it had in quantity it lacked in quality. The Chileans clearly have not mastered the art of raising cattle in the same way their eastern neighbors have. But the wine was quite good.

After dinner we were whisked away from our cabins for a late night visit to the thermal springs 45 minutes outside of Pucon. We spent 3 hours or so basking in the toasty water as it continued to rain around us.

The next day nobody seemed much inclined to get out of bed before noon. I ended up waking up at 9:30 and laying in bed and listening to the rain on the roof until about 11. I had a suspicion nothing much was going to be accomplished and I was quite right. That’s the downside of traveling with 11 other people. Group inertia increases exponentially as the size of the group grows. Eventually I rolled out of bed and got breakfast and then went and checked the bus schedule for the bus to the park (I had found the station the day before). My next option was 1 but that would have been pushing so I shot for the 4. I returned to the cabins to find most everyone else awake and went with Sam to get some food for my trip. After I returned he and I went for a brief jaunt around town to check the bus schedules for the trip back to Santiago and see the beach then we met everyone else at a bar and watched the US-Brazil game.

What a bittersweet game. The fact that we played in it at all was terrific. The fact that we had a 2-0 lead at half time was astounding. And the fact that we lost 3-2 in the 86^th minute was heartbreaking. But US soccer has come a long way. This bodes well for 2010 and hopefully we’ll be able to get past the round of 16 this time.

Unfortunately for me my 4:00 bus was to leave in about the 60^th minute of the game. So, I watched as much as I could and then went to get much stuff from the cabin and walk to the bus station. Where I found the only bus company in South America that runs on time. I arrived at precisely 4:03 ready to head to the park only to find that the bus actually left at 4. 4 on the dot. This is unheard of here. I have never, ever been on a bus that left on time and I have only ever been on three that arrived on time. If one can’t trust the buses in South America to be late than what can you rely on?

This unfortunately meant that I had to return to the bar and watch the bitter end of the soccer game and plan to head to the park on the 8:30 am bus. Given that it gets dark here at about 5:30 and I wouldn’t have arrived until 5 and realistically can’t have expected to get up before 8 or 8:30 I really didn’t lose much time in the park. It just meant that I had spend the night in a hostel in Pucon, which actually ended up saving me money because of the obnoxious policy the parks here (Chile & Argentina) of charging foreigners twice the amount they charge citizens to visit and camp in the parks.

After the game Sam and I went for another jaunt through the town, this time our walk carried us out the peninsula that extends into the lake and onto the private Pucon golf course. On the way back it started to rain, yet again, so we just went straight back to the cabin when we got back to town. There everyone was just chilling, reading or watching Michael Jackson dominate the TV while they waited for their buses back to Santiago (everyone else was leaving Sunday night so they had a day of recovery before work began. Lamers). I, however, was above watching TV or reading a book. Instead, I took poor sophomores’ money. Sam, Ben, Jade and I played poker while they waited with the all the extra coins that Sam and Jade had. After going down early, I roared back to knock out Jade and Ben on the same hand and win our pot of more or less $4.75. Then I had to give it all back since, apparently, we weren’t playing for keeps.

After our game, it was pretty much time for everyone else to head out so I went on a search for where I was going to stay. I had been planning on just camping in the driveway of our cabins but the cabin owner was worried that I would get too wet and/or cold in the rain so he wanted me to stay in one of the rooms of the cabin that he was going to give me for $10. I didn’t really want to pay though so I said I’d go camp in the municipal camping ground where I thought I might be able to stay for free. He was still worried about me though and offered me the room for free but I felt guilty about taking advantage of his sympathy so I headed out to check out some other hostels and the camp ground. The first hostel I found was far to expensive so I made my way down the main drag towards the camp ground where I ran into a charming old fellow who wanted me to stay at his hostel for $10. Having just turned down our wonderful cabin owner for the same price, I couldn’t take this guy’s offer and tried to bargain him down but by bargaining skills could use some work. So it was off to the campsites. There I found that they were dark, wet and not free. So given the quality of the campsites and the fact that the hostel was only $4 more I opted to stay in the hostel. This involved another trek across town. But my charming friend was there to give a pleasant room and introduce me to the 5 other Americans, 2 Canadians, 4 Brits, 3 Finns and 1 Swede also staying at the hostel. Meeting all these people is the real advantage to staying in hostels and we had a great time before I put myself to sleep reading “The Road to Serfdom.”

The next morning a woke up to rain on the roof again. But I rolled out of bed at 7:45 anyway and headed down to the bus station plenty early this time to catch the 8:30 to the park. I was on the bus with another Brit and two girls from France who joined me on my hike. Although the sun poked out while we were waiting at the bus stop, by the time we reached the park the clouds had closed off most of the peaks so we skipped the trail with the views and headed for the one with two waterfalls and three lakes. This took us across the valley floor and into some temperate rain forest, where it started raining, and then up the other side of the valley. We climbed several hundred meters and went from a mid spring day in a forest populated by enormous old growth trees to a winter afternoon in a forest of pine and bamboo. The mix of snow and rainforest is pretty cool because, unlike New England winters, when it snows in a rainforest everything stays green so you have a striking contrast between the green and white.

At the top of the ridge, we passed through a notch and walked around the three lakes, progressing into deeper and deeper snow. About halfway around the second lake the trail gives you the option of completing the loop or cutting off the back half. The other three opted to cut off the back but I decided to keep going. This led me up another 150 meters and into the clouds were it really was a mid-winter day. I was hiking through snow up to my mid-thighs at points while it was actively snowing around me. I was only able to find the trail because, since everything stayed green, you could see where the trail cut through the undergrowth (something about South America encourages me to do stupid things when I go hiking).

It was beautiful though. Perfectly silent except for the occasional clump of snow dropping off the branches of the pines. At one point, I startled a group of birds that plunged out of the snow with a great deal of indignant clacking. The hike was as breathtaking as some others I have done here (read: Fitz Roy) but it was subtly gorgeous in its own way. I really do love hiking in the winter in the snow. You don’t have to worry about bugs, the trails aren’t over grown so you can see a fair distance even in trees, and everything is so quiet. The only downside is that you get soaked if you’re not careful and if you don’t have snowshoes it can be exhausting to trudge through a few feet of snow. But the worst part about the whole thing was that I overestimated how long it would take me to get back and so I rushed through the most beautiful part of the hike because I was worried about making it back in time for the 5 pm bus.

So I made my way back down the mountain while the sun finally broke through the clouds (the first extended time during the weekend. I’ve now been here for two weeks and the ratio of clouds and/or rain to sun is about 2:1), moving back into spring as I went and greatly appreciating the fact that the Chileans, unlike the Argentines, seem capable of building a trail that doesn’t follow the fall line of the hill. I made it back to the bus stop at 4:20, so I could have spent about another 20 minutes up in the snow, and broke out my lunch while I waited for the bus.

The trip back was uneventful except for a few great views of the valleys heading into Pucon with mist drifting in over them. When I got back I changed, bought my bus ticket, paid for my night in the hostel, and made a few sandwiches for dinner before settling down to watch Wimbledon with the Brits while I waited for my bus. I rolled out of Pucon at 9 on my way back to Santiago in my comfortable semi-cama seat.

We got back to Santiago at 6:30 and after returning home and taking a brief nap (for some reason I didn’t sleep particularly well on the bus) made it to work at about 10:30. Work wasn’t particularly eventful other than the fact that I discovered that there was a small earthquake (4.5) in the morning that I somehow completely missed. Kind of disappointed, it would have been (I suppose it is) the first I’ve been in and I didn’t actually feel anything.

After work, I was coming home and I listened to two different, interesting stories on Talk of the Nation. The first was about selling out and whether or not that term has any currency anymore. The guest was suggesting that the Black Eyed Peas had sold out because they licensed their new song to a Target commercial. Some of the callers suggested that it was impossible to sell out though because by simply cashing the multi-million dollar checks these artists make they are selling out. I don’t buy it. I don’t see the problem with these artists making millions off their songs. Music, and art generally, has always been a business and it has always been dictated by those paying the bills. I suppose someone like Dylan who originally came onto the scene with the anti-establishment crowd could be seen as selling out when he signs with some big record label or licenses his music for a Victoria Secret commercial but my problem with this view is that I don’t think these things have fundamentally affected his music. I like his most recent stuff just as much as I like his early stuff and I don’t think there is a noticeable decline in quality commiserate with him signing any big record deals or commercial deals. So long as the music remains true, I don’t see what the issue with making a lot of money off it is.

The second story was about the discrimination faced by women in the world of theater. A Princeton Ec major recently wrote her thesis on the fact that there are almost no women play-writes who regularly get published (or performed perhaps). She said this comes down to the fact that people in theater think that women’s plays will be less welcome by audiences than men’s plays. Given that the majority of theater audiences are women, this is a particularly interesting expectation. I thought it worth mentioning.

Wednesday I woke up and headed to work to find that I was the only person in the office. Everyone else had gone with the other Harvard kids to Valpo to see the congress. I didn’t join them because I didn’t think it was worth it to miss a day of work just to see the congress. I’ll go to Valpo on my own and I want to see the city, not the congress. Otherwise work was, again, uneventful. I’m getting a lot done and learning a lot but this whole process is fiendishly complicated and it is slow going.

After work I went for a run to clear my head took the same route as the last time. Down through Vitacura along the river and back up the main drag. Along with clearing my head the run prompted some intriguing thoughts about morality going back to my debate days. What exactly is the purpose of morals? And how or why are they determined and by whom? Is someone who does something we disagree with really immoral or are we just being intolerant? Take murder for example. It’s nearly impossible to say, outright that murder is immoral. The context must be considered. Is murdering in self-defense morally reprehensible? What about for the protection of your children? At this point, with so many mitigating factors, what purpose do morals serve? Cold-blooded killing? Clearly wrong. But find me an example of a murder that was done in cold blood with no mitigating factors. People do things for reasons and more often than not at least somebody will find a mitigating factor in those reasons.

Now this may be an issue of semantics. I think few people would call killing in self-defense murder. But if we’re going to restrict moral approbation to killing done only in cold-blood that leaves us in the same place. We don’t need a system of morals to tell us that is wrong. It is counter to the idea of the harmony that a social species like humans needs to survive. So again, why do we have morals? This certainly hasn’t been presented in the clearest or most defensible manner but that just leaves all you people out there more openings to attack it. So go at it.

This brings us, at last, to the end. I am sure there are things that I meant to include but have forgotten – that’s what happens when one waits five days to write a blog entry but if I remember I’ll post edits. I would like to say, though, that my hair is a big hit with my host family. Everyone is quite enchanted with it. Flo has a habit of playing with it whenever I sit on the couch and my host mother and grandmother think it’s gorgeous and are both quite jealous.

USA! USA! USA!

THE USA MEN’S SOCCER TEAM BEAT SPAIN TODAY! THAT IS INCREDIBLE. LIKE ALMOST 1980 OLYMPICS INCREDIBLE. THIS IS THE FIRST TIME SINCE ITS FOUNDING IN 1913 THAT THE US MEN WILL PLAY IN A FIFA SPONSORED FINAL. WHAT A DAY FOR AMERICAN SOCCER.

Now that that is out of the way, we can move on to the rest of my post.

So quite a few people have sent me emails asking what exactly I’m doing here. To head off any future questions I’ll just give a post outlining my job. I'm working for a company called Patagonia Sur LLC that owns about 55,000 acres in southern Patagonia. They bought it with the idea of putting 90% in conservation easements to protect it and then selling the other 5% in order to recoup their investment. The 5% they sell will be sold to people who want to build homes on the property. But the construction of the homes is going to be very closely managed by the company so that they don't damage the environment or adversely impact the view or the property of any of the other home owners (I'm actually doing a bit on the development of these restrictions but that's not my main job). In addition, to the company the same people have started a foundation, also called Patagonia Sur Foundation, which does socio-economic development work in the areas around their property to help the small villages in the area develop.

This brings us to what I'm doing. Because both organizations are run by the same people, it isn't entirely clear whom I am working for (although I think the Company is going to end up paying me). However, who ever I am working for, my job is to look at how they can use their property to develop carbon credits that can be sold in either the US or European carbon markets. The Kyoto protocol and probably the Waxman-Markey bill have provisions in them by which if you reforest land or if you leave trees standing on land you can be issued credits for the amount of carbon that these tress take out of the atmosphere. The idea is that you then sell the credits to companies that have to have a certain level of net emissions to make up for some of the emissions that they release. In this way people are paid for leaving trees standing since as of now the only real way they can make money off of trees is to cut them; clearly not a sustainable livelihood.

The plan for my job is for me to produce a policy paper that lays out the steps the company should take in order to get their reforestation projects certified and get credits. It's a pretty cool job, although the Kyoto protocol is devilishly confusing, and I'm pretty excited about what I'm doing. I also know a lot more about it than my boss so I have near complete freedom to work how I want. I'm doing a few smaller things like the one mentioned above but that's the main project.

I’ll end with a brief summary of today. I got up. I went to work. I worked. I wrote a post in Ishmael’s Musings everyone should read. I went to a meeting for work – this was actually pretty cool. A bunch of design students at la Universidad Católico were given a final project pertaining to one of our properties. Melimoyu can only be reached by plane or boat right now but they are considering adding a road. The student’s final project was to look at the pros and cons and offer suggestions as to what the company should do. We were invited to their presentations so that we could see what they came up with. I’m not sure if it will lead to anything on our end but it was interesting to see their ideas. It was also good practice for me to listen to their presentations in Spanish. Along those lines, I wonder if English speakers each sound as different to non-native speakers as Chileans do to me. Everyone has a very unique accent to me. The differentiation is far greater than what I hear when I listen to other English speakers.

So much for a brief summary. After work, I came home and found out that Flo’s dad, who we were supposed to have dinner with, had an emergency appendectomy today so he wasn’t going to join us. Therefore, Rita and I had home made gnocchi. It was superb. Now I’m working to get ready for a presentation tomorrow and thinking about heading to Pucon this weekend.

It’s been a long, cold lonely winter

But the ice is finally melting… not really; I woke up to find the first frost on the ground this morning. But the sun finally ventured out for an entire day in the city today. Santiago significantly more pleasant out of the rain. The smog didn’t disperse but it was clear blue skies and the views of the mountains were great.

The return of the sun also inspired me to go for a run after work so I peaced out early and got home around six. Katie Perry and I then went for a 9k or so run around the city in the brisk, early evening air (dare I say the run was Hot & Cold?). Excepting the three hours of soccer I played two weeks ago, this is the first aerobic exercise I’ve had since Senior Week and it felt great. The smog even cleared off a bit and I had a great sunset over the mountains to watch as I ran. My run took me around Vitacura and down along the banks of the Rio Mapucho. It was a pleasant route but the Rio Mapucho can’t hold a candle to the classy elegance of The River Chaarrlles. It’s more like the unruly little brother with a flashy temper. You’d never see the practitioners of that most pre-eminent sport, remando, on the Rio Mapucho. Rather, it is more suited to the upstart kayakers. But all in all it was a good run. Who knew that Avenida Vitacura ran uphill for most of the distance between Americo Vespucci and Rotunda Irene Frei?

Today at work I met one of the other people who work with Patagonia Sur, the director of the Environmental Education program. Because everyone has vacations for most of the month of July everyone from the Foundation & Company is starting to trickle in to meet in the next few days before vacation begins. I’ll be meeting pretty much everyone that works for Patagonia Sur in the next few days and get their input on my project. It should give me quite a bit to think about.

Also:

- My shower has three showerheads. What is one to do with three showerheads?

- Trying to explain what “still” means – in the sense that something is still happening – is rather difficult.

- Chileans get loads more vacation time than Americans. To the tune of two weeks in the summer and two more in the winter. I’m working here when have to get a real job.

- My host grandmother thinks that Obama is wonderful. As she said, “Que Linda.”

- Southern Chile is getting hammered by swine flu. In Osorno 65% of the population has it.

$500,000

That’s the price on the head of Carlos Cardoen courtesy of U.S. Customs because he dealt arms to Iraq. Thus, he’s a multimillionaire stuck in Chile. So what does he do? He goes home to Santa Cruz and builds two vineyards, a casino and the most bizarre and eclectic museum I have ever seen.

But first, here is the recap of my first full week here (in the future I will be more frequent in my updates in the future but since I only worked three full days this week I was a bit busy). I left off on Tuesday afternoon at work. That evening we had a reception at DRCLAS with the interns in the DRCLAS summer program and the vice provost of international affairs at Harvard. I was able to meet all the other interns here and discovered that I knew one of them from LAX and I was known by two of the others.

That they knew me through my brother made me realize that I am old.

The oldest “student” here in fact. This was only reinforced by the fact that when I went to get a nametag for the reception for the alumni in Santiago that we had after our reception I didn’t get a student nametag but a “Patrick Behrer, College AB ‘09” name tag. Other than being able to meet all of the other students the receptions were not particularly notable. Afterwards I went out for drinks with several of the other interns; one of who is from BA.

I don’t really recall what I did at work on Wednesday, which means it can’t have been particularly notable, other than that I met with Steve to get an outline for my project while I am here. Among other things I’ll be working on a white paper that outlines how and why Patagonia Sur should get involved in the international carbon markets set up by Kyoto/whatever comes post-2012 and Waxman-Markey. It should be a cool project. The field is quite new and I think quite important. I expect that the CDM and whatever mechanism Waxman-Markey uses could be the primary source of funding for conservation projects going forward. Especially ones that conserve forested land. I’m also going to be working on some smaller projects on the side, doing a bit with the EE programs that Patagonia Sur runs in the towns near their properties and helping Steve with the planning for the limited development aspects of the property. To this end, he and I had a meeting with Patagonia Sur’s architect to go over the presentation to investors that they are working on.

After work, Fabi and I had a meeting with Cecillia to go over the home stay program. The whole thing took about 20 minutes. Other than the fact that I understood about half of what Cecillia said to me, it wasn’t especially notable. The far more interesting aspect of the evening was driving around with Fabi and practicing my Spanish. We ended up driving around a significant portion of the city because we had to go to her brother’s apartment afterwards. Unfortunately, he wasn’t there (still at work at 10, who says Chilean’s don’t know how to work?) but his apartment was awesome. 15^th floor with great views of the surrounding mountains and two balconies. I could definitely live there. The visit was made more interesting by his obsession with London. I have never seen someone so clearly in love with a place. Nearly every decoration or book in the apartment was of or about London. The one exception was a very nice Dali that I had never seen before. Just based on his taste in decoration and the contents of his refrigerator I think I would like this guy and I hope I can meet him before I leave.

Thursday was an early day because I had to go to a conference about the future of carbon markets and Chile. I rolled out of the house at 7:15 in order to make it to the conference on time. As it turns out I left about 30 minutes before I needed to but it worked out because I got lost on the buses and ended up getting right on time. The conference was interesting although, with the exception of one presentation, not particularly relevant to what I’m doing here. The one presentation that was relevant was by an American about ACES and was actually very, very helpful because I really had no idea what was going with ACES before his speech. I spoke with him afterwards and got his presentation from him so that I can review it again. I’m also thinking I may have found a post-grad job with his environmental consulting firm or at least a place to apply if BCG falls through.

As I said the rest of the conference was interesting but not especially pertinent. I plan to speak a bit more about it in Ishmael’s Musings but I’m not sure that I’ll get around to it. I will say one of the most interesting things from the whole day was that the US has actually slightly decreased our emissions since 2002. Whether that is because we’re more efficient or simply because of the economic crisis, I’m not sure although I’m inclined to believe the latter has more to do with it than the former. The highlight of the conference was the cocktail snacks that we got afterwards.

The conference ended at 2:30 though so I made my circuitous way back to work afterwards. The bus system here is far more confusing than that of BA and the little guide books that they gave us are not nearly as helpful. They’re great if you’re looking for a street but nearly impossible to use to figure out where buses go and what bus you should take to get from point A to point B. As a result I went about 30 minutes out of my way to get back to work since I had to guess which bus I needed to take.

I ended up staying at work until 6:15 because I wasn’t planning on working Friday so I needed get a fair amount done after the conference. After work I headed home and just chatted with my family for a few hours. I’m not going out nearly as much as I did in BA but I’m also speaking a lot more Spanish which, I suspect, will be more beneficial in the long run. After they all went to bed I did a bit more work and then buried myself under about ten pounds of bedding. They don’t have central heating in Chile and so they use space heaters. But you can’t sleep with the space heaters on in the room because of the propane fumes so by about 3 or 4 in the morning it is literally freezing in your room. I do like the cold but that’s pushing it. Hence the princess and pea like quantity of bedding.

Friday was also an early day because I was joining the other interns on a service trip to an old orphanage that has become a community center for disadvantaged kids. Steve had worked there several decades ago and now the interns all go for a day during their program to see a different side of the city. Unfortunately, we didn’t see much as it rained all day and we just booked it from the station to the orphanage and then painted inside all day. The plan was to paint in the morning and then meet the kids in the afternoon but the kids ended up not being able to come because the rain flooded the streets. So we just painted all day.

This is something that Harvard students are not good at. The concept of sanding a wall before painting it? Completely lost on them. Edging in? Also beyond them. But perhaps the most interesting part of the day was when Anthony (of Greenough fame) tried to paint a wall with a brush that had been soaked in paint thinner. He already has quite a reputation among the rest of the group. Loud and obnoxious people are like that.

Friday night was a bit rainy but we planned to go to a pizza place/bar that Fabian had suggested. The plan was to meet at 9 or 9:30. When dealing with Chileans this means 9:45 at the earliest. I did not expect that it meant 10:30 with Americans. But they arrived eventually and I had the opportunity to get to know several of the other interns. There is a very distinct difference between this group and the group of kids I was with in BA. It’s not necessarily a bad difference, but it is clear that the group is different. I haven’t decided if it’s because the average age of this group is between 1 and 2 years younger than the kids I was with in BA or because these kids are all Harvard kids whereas most of the kids I was with in BA were either from Cornell or UMinn. I imagine it’s some of both.

Eventually we ended up back at one of the other intern’s host families where their host sister was having a get together with some of her friends. This was one of my first opportunities to speak with younger Chileans and it was an unmitigated disaster. They are completely impossible to understand. They don’t speak Spanish they speak Chileno and they speak it at speeds which humans were not meant to speak. I can’t even think that fast in English. Happily, I’m not the only one who can’t understand them. Not too many of the other interns (most of whom who have far more Spanish experience than I) can understand them either. So that makes me feel a little better. The night more or less ended there though. We made an attempt to go to a club afterwards but were discouraged by the 8.000 (~$16) cover.

Saturday I rolled out of bed around 10:30 and had a leisurely breakfast before heading down Av. Provedencia to try and get my phone worked out. That failed and I just walked around in the rain for a bit. Saw some pretty interesting graffiti and then headed home for lunch around 2. We ate with my host mother’s aunt and then I ended up back downtown walking around Centro and the cathedral. Churches in South America are so much more impressive than their counterparts in the U.S. Nearly everyone I have been in has been breathtaking in the scope and detail of the ornamentation and artwork. That’s one thing the Catholics did quite well.

I spent the evening just wandering about the pedestrian streets finding some cafes and watching the street performers. I’d like to go back again when a few more things are open but it was a good evening and I’m finally beginning to get this city straight in my head.

Saturday night I was quite lame and ended up staying in because I was joining 7 of the other guys to take a trip south of the city on Sunday that involved getting up at 5:45 to catch a train. So my options were to go out and stay up all night or stay in and get some sleep. For better or worse, I opted for the latter and crashed around 12.

Sunday started bright and early and I met the other 7 guys at the train station at 7:15. We nearly missed our train because Fabian had been misinformed about the opening of the gates by one of the guards (no big surprise there) and we lost two of our number to heavy drinking the night before and/or malfunctioning alarms. Surmounting these obstacles, we boarded our train at 8 and headed south for our first taste of Chilean wine. We arrived in San Ferdanando at 10 and were greeted by brisk, clear blue skies and a sharp chill. This alone made the trip worth it. It’s the first time I’ve seen real sun since I got here and getting out of the smog into clean air was wonderful.

From San Ferdanando we had an hour bus ride to Santa Cruz and we arrived right in the middle of mass. The town was dead. We had no idea how to get to the vineyards and so instead we headed to the museum mentioned above. The museum that housed collections ranging from a fossil of one prehistoric fish eating another prehistoric fish to amber incased mosquitoes to shrunken heads to katanas and Herman Goehrigs dagger and sword to 3 model T’s and an Indy car. And that doesn’t count the full train that was parked outside. Ostensibly, the museum followed the history of Chile from prehistoric times to about the 1930s. Then, because they guy was an arms trader, there was a hall devoted to the most complete collection of weapons I have never seen. This included a horse drawn tank which prompted one of the other guys to note that there was something very typically Latin American about a horse drawn tank. It seemed perfectly halfway done.

He also had a collection of Andes jewelry, a full-scale diorama of a mastodon being killed, a life-sized model of the mouth of an enormous shark and a collection of fascinating old cars. Including the model from the Wind and the Willows. All he was missing was an exhibit on the history of aviation.

After leaving the museum, we headed to the Plaza de Armas where we ate lunch and debated what to do about getting to a winery. After sending Fabian to talk to the nearest hotel about where we should go we started walking down the road hoping to catch a cab. Instead, we caught a school bus. The driver saw us, stopped, and offered to drop us off at the entrance. So we saved about ten bucks and rode to a winery with a bunch of kids.

At the winery, which was very large and very, very nice, we signed up for the tour and tasting. The tour involved a horse drawn carriage ride through the vineyard and past the polo field. It also included sampling some 2009 Sauvignon Blanc in the first stages of production right from the 27,000-gallon tanks. That was interesting. It was quite fruity and phenomenally acidic. The highlight of the day was the tasting that followed the tour however. We turned this three-pour affair into an hour-long experience complete with Pâté served on Pringles.

Unfortunately, this brought us to about 5:30 and we didn’t have time to make it to another winery. So our trip to wine country ended with only one tasting. We’ll just have to go back. On the way home the only notable event was my sense of direction winning me 500 pesos off a freshman who got turned around in a supermarket.

That brings us to Monday and back to work. Nothing of note happened other than that I still can’t fix my phone, although I now know that it is a problem with the phone and not the SIM card. Hopefully I’ll figure this out in the next few days, otherwise I think I’m just going to buy a new phone.

Tomorrow I might get around to posting some more observations. Right now I’m going to bed but check back again shortly to see what I’ve put up.

¡Beinvenidos a Chile!

So I’ve returned to this fine, fine country and made my way to Santiago for the first time. Fittingly it began to rain as soon as I walked out of the airport with my host mother. I expect that it will rain the vast majority of the time I am here. A suspicion that has only been furthered by the fact that I have been here for three days and saw the sun the first time for about 45 minutes this morning before the clouds swallowed it up again. Tomorrow it is supposed to begin raining and continue until Friday night, at which point we may get some snow. I really could have just stayed in Pittsburgh for this kind of weather.

What I couldn’t get in Pittsburgh is the view that I have from my office window. I sit at my desk and, when it isn’t clouded in - which it has been until today, I can see four peaks that are over 2,500 meters and two different glaciers. They are all covered in snow and when the sun hits it as it rises they are quite beautiful.

Since I’ve been here several days without writing a brief summary, followed by a few of my observations thus far is in order. I arrived at 9 am on Sunday, about an hour and a half late, and was picked up at the airport by my host mother and one of their maids (yes, they have more than one). We drove home and I met my host grandmother and we all had a brief breakfast. Afterwards I crashed until about 12 and then got up and unpacked all my stuff. I have my own room complete with its own bathroom. We live in the neighborhood that my guidebook characterizes as that of the über-rich in Santiago. The house I live in is probably twice the size of mine at home and my four year old host sister has her own room which is larger than the room my brother and I shared growing up. The house is walled in and has a nice garden in the front and back so it is in the shade all the time. My room has an enormous French door which opens into the garden in the back.

After unpacking we had a three course meal for lunch (empanadas, potatoes and chicken followed by coffee and tea) and then I went for a walk. I walked in a big circle around the neighborhood and the one thing that really jumps out at me is that this is not at all like BA. In a funny way the city is less European than any place I’ve been so far but my neighborhood is more like the neighborhood I lived in when I was in Germany than anywhere else I’ve been. During my walk I got caught in the rain and arrived back at home soaking wet. I dried off, read a bit and then we had dinner where I met Florencia, my host sister, for the first time. After dinner I read a bit and then just went to bed to get up bright and early for my first day of work.

Going to bed early was rather ineffectual as I slept in anyway but I got up in time to eat and start on my way to work. About halfway there my host mother shows up surprised that I had left and worried that I walked too much. I somehow missed that she had been planning on driving me to work the first day before I got a Bip! (read Charlie) card. So I got most of the way there and then she drove me the rest of the way and I arrived right on time.

Work was boring and uneventful, as to be expected on the first, other than the short jaunt I took through the city as I delivered one of the other interns in the DRCLAS program to their site and was oriented to the city and DRCLAS program (even though I’m not actually in the program).

After work I was picked up by my host mother and we took Flo to McDonalds because she has been rather sick for the last few days. Afterwards Fabi (my host mother) and Rita (my host grandmother) and I had dinner and then watched Chilean soap operas. I’m not sure if they help my Spanish or not but it is surprising how much of a soap opera you can understand without speaking the language well.

This brings us to the second day of work which dawned clear, sunny, about 27 and quite beautiful. I could see the mountains for the first time and was reminded why I chose to come here over Richmond (all of you who told me I would have been crazy to pick Richmond can give yourselves a little pat on the back). Unfortunately the day got much cloudier and the ever-present Santiago smog rolled in around 10 and, although I can still see the mountains, they are now a rather depressing shade of off-white rather than the crisp, glistening white they were this morning.

On to my observations:

- This whole language thing is making a complete fool of me. I was being oriented yesterday by another intern here and when introduced to her thought that she was a Chilean intern. It wasn’t until I’d been speaking with here for two hours that I realized she was from Chicago and went to Lesley. Her Spanish is near flawless – to me at least – and here I am struggling to say that I got to Chile two days ago.

- Along the same lines I feel like an idiot every time I realize that Flo is four and speaks better than I ever will. I realize this rather frequently as she is in the habit of running around the house telling everyone that “él habla extraño” every time I say anything.

- Santiago, as mentioned above, is much different than BA. Much different.

- The sidewalks are straight, even and consistent. Those who have followed this blog for a while will realize the significance of that.

- Santiago doesn’t have the same smell that I’ve found common in many of the other places I’ve been. But that might be because of the smog.

- The food is more or less the same as what I found in BA. A few more fruits and vegetables but other wise similar.

- No one in my house speaks English. This will be an interesting summer.

- My Spanish is drastically better than it was in BA.

- It is not as cold as I thought it would be.

- I forgot that it gets dark early in the winter. That, unlike the chill, is not something I am a fan of.

- Read Christo’s blog at christopherbehrer.blogspot.com

- I also expect to start updating Ishmael's Musings if anyone is interested.

And thus the End

Wednesday was a relatively uneventful day. I got through another chapter at work and had lunch at the food court. Unfortunately Sam found out he could no longer bring guests to Xac Bank soccer practices though so I ended up at the gym again after work. After the gym it was home again, home again to have dinner with the family. After dinner things began to get a bit more interesting. I had thought we had resolved everything regarding how much it would cost to stay with them but apparently my host mother had thought that I had only paid for the first month. We talked about it and I showed her the email from AMCS saying how much it was and I assumed that it was resolved yet again. At which point I went out to join Sam and James at Ilk Mongol for James’ last night. After the conversation I had with my host mother I decided to try and simplify things by moving in with Sam for my last week here and he was thrilled with the idea so I went home planning on moving in the morning.
The next morning I moved all my stuff down to the office with plans to move into Sam’s after work. At around 10 though my host mother called freaking out because my stuff was gone but I still had her phone. I had said that I was leaving on a trip and was coming back earlier (which I was doing) and so I thought it was ok to keep the phone. She apparently thought I was leaving for Beijing with her phone though and was very much upset by this. After she had her cousin call we worked it out and I ended up giving her phone back a bit sooner than I had anticipated and moved in with Sam. She also did not think the money thing had been resolved the night before and that, therefore, I was leaving without paying. After talking to her cousin (who was brought in because he is fluent) that was, finally, resolved. All in all the situation ended fine although I could have handled it better.
Anyway, after work Thursday I moved in with Sam and then grabbed some dinner at Café Amsterdam. Sam and Lizzie met me there after his conference call with New York and we were there until about 10:30. Afterwards it was off to bed in my new apartment and my far more comfortable bed. I should have moved in with Sam long before I did.
Friday was nothing special until the eclipse after work. I was awoken by the sun at about 7 and made my way down Peace Ave to the French bakery and an apple croissant for breakfast and then off to work where I finished the last chapter of my project, leaving the editing for next week. The eclipse started around 5:30 though I think and I watched it from the pool room of the gym and then as I walked home. Unfortunately in UB it was only about 60% so you really couldn’t see much but if you sunglasses and could looked directly at it you could see a little bit of a shadow.
When I got home I got some dinner from Nomin and cooked up ramen and yogurt for dessert and ate out on the balcony. Afterwards I spend the evening in and read a bit before going across the hall to hang out with Will and one of the other Aussies and his new hedgehog friend. We watched a Rugby Union game before I went back and crashed early.
Saturday I got up early to go and see if I could find a tour for the my last weekend in Mongolia. I had talked with a company on Friday but I had wanted to go with them to Hustai National Park and that tour ended up being canceled. He mentioned another that would be four days leaving at 8 am but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to spend two days away from work even though I technically had the time off. I didn’t really make a decision Friday and sort of woke up with the intention of maybe trying to see if I could still go. When the other tour company I was considering wasn’t open that was enough motivation to walk down to Idre’s and see if I could still go.
When I got to the office the tour had just left but Idre offered to call and see if they were close enough for me to still join them. It turns out they were and I ended up deciding on the spot to go with them. The whole situation made me think of something Christo said in January before I left for BA when I was complaining about having to rush from my final to packing to the plane on the day I left. Christo said that, although I was complaining, I operated best when I didn’t actually have any time. I think he may be right. I’ve found that in situations, like this one, where I have to make instant decisions I make better decisions, in hindsight, than I do if I have more time to think about it. Often, given more time to think about it, I won’t make a decision, but I’ll let events determine what happens.
As it was, I ended up running back to the apartment and grabbing my backpack and then Idre and I got a taxi out to where the rest of the group was waiting for me. The group was made up of our guide, our driver, a neurosurgery student from Japan and two girls from Ireland taking the Trans-Siberian home from Japan (on a completely unrelated note, I am currently flying over Rolla, MO and Piney-Mo – I can’t wait for October). We met them at a gas station just outside the city limits of UB and I loaded up my stuff and we were off.
This is where it is important for everyone reading this to understand something about traveling in Mongolia. I think that the city limits of the Greater Boston area have more paved road (measured by the sq. ft) than the entire country of Mongolia. On this particular day, our paved road lasted for about 30 minutes after I got in the van. Then we rolled on to a dirt path that, in addition to half a dozen others, runs parallel to the roadbed that, someday in the future, will be a paved road. We spend the next 3 hours cruising along on the dirt road except for about 30 seconds on a paved road as we crossed it and then stopped for lunch around 1.
After lunch we found ourselves back on a paved road for the next three hours and around 4:30 we rolled into our camp for the night. We were staying in a ger camp just north of a small section of the Northern Gobi that actually looks like the stereotypical desert complete with sand dunes and camels. In reality, most of the Gobi in Mongolia is really no different than much of the eastern half of the country. It is just a slightly drier version of the same steppe grassland found everywhere else. It is only small sections like the one we were in and the very southern edge (along the border with China) that looks like the standard desert.
In camp for the night though we stretched our legs for a bit and shared some airag with the family who lived at the camp before resting in the shade of one of the gers. At about 5:30 or 6 we headed down to explore the dunes on camel back. Riding a camel is a different experience. It isn’t too much different than riding a horse, except that you’re significantly higher up and mounting and dismounting is a more interesting experience because the camel kneels for you and then stands with you on its back. Our ride was good though. We found ourselves stuck in a sandstorm right when we got to the dunes but that passed quickly and we made our way to the largest dune and, leaving our camels at the base, climbed to the top to watch the sun set.
Back at the ger camp afterwards we ate dinner and then lay out and watched the stars come out. It would have been a great place to look at the stars (everywhere in this country is a great place to look at the stars) but shortly after the sun set the clouds started to form and so our star-gazing didn’t last too long.
The next morning we were up at 8 for breakfast and then it was back into the van for the next part of our trip. Today we had 150 km to cover, the first 60 or so of that was on paved roads. The rest of was a dirt road through an old volcanic rock field. We made a few stops on the way, one at an ovoo just after leaving the ger camp, and another in a small town just before we ran out of paved road to get some bread for lunch. We stopped for lunch just inside the national park we were visiting for the next two days at a very pretty small gorge and waterfall. After lunch we covered the bulk of the off road distance, I’m not sure how far it was but we drove for about two hours and at points were doing well over 80km/hour (on a dirt road mind you). Eventually we arrived at our second ger camp around 3 in the afternoon though and everyone just chilled out while we waited for it to cool down a bit. The afternoon sun in Mongolia can be unbearable and often times the hours of 1-4 or so are spent just laying in the shade of a ger or in the ger itself because that is the only way to get out of the heat. I ended up sleeping for a bit and it would have been longer except a bee landed on my bed and, not knowing what it was, I kicked it which resulted in being stung on the foot. At that point I wasn’t going to fall back asleep so I got up and walked over to small hill above our camp and climbed it to see what the view was like.
When I got back everyone was in their swimming suits and so I changed and we walked down to the waterfall near our camp. This was the reason for choosing this particular ger camp and it is the largest waterfall in Mongolia. At 66m it isn’t huge and in a country with a few more rivers it wouldn’t warrant special notice, but here it’s a pretty big deal. We climbed down into the gorge by a path that was more a rock ladder and makes the path at Tuckaseegee look like a walk in the park and spent the afternoon swimming and sunning beneath the waterfall. The area was beautiful and well worth the trip by itself. The water fall has created a small, box canyon with the falls at one end and the Orkhon river at the other. Between them is a small pine grove with a very little undergrowth. It makes it very easy to walk along the river and, in a country with so few trees, anywhere that has a large number of them qualifies as a special place.
After our swim we climbed back out of the gorge and headed back to the camp. While Baggi (our translator/guide) made dinner I took my camera and tripod and walked around. I ended up back down by the gorge for the sunset over the river and I think I got some very good shots of the light on the water. We’ll see how they develop.
After dinner it was back to star-gazing and we were far more successful this time. Starting with what was either Mercury or Venus we watched a few thousand stars come out and in the two hours or so that we were there we saw easily a dozen shooting stars, maybe more.
The next morning I woke up around 7 and walked down to see the sun come up on the waterfall. Unfortunately, because the sun comes up so early here the shots weren’t that great but it was still pretty and it was nice to be there by myself. Yesterday there were close to a hundred people at the falls while we were swimming. After watching the eagles fly around the falls for a bit I walked back up to the camp as everyone else was getting up and we had breakfast.
After breakfast we had our horse trip. I’m not sure what the original destination was to be but the night before we found out that the valley was having its Nadaam festival that morning so we decided to ride out there and watch it. It actually worked out quite nicely, I was able to see a Nadaam in both the city and the country side and our ride wasn’t too long either. The Nadaam in the city and far different than the one in the country though. First of all, in the country well over half of the spectators arrived via horse back and most of those who took cars were tourists. It also has far more of an old time fair feel to it than the one in the city. The country side Nadaam is as much about everyone coming together and being able to buy supplies and see people as it is about the wrestling and racing. Speaking of the wrestling, it is even more informal in the country side than in the city. As far as I could tell it was open to anyone in the crowd who felt like challenging a wrestler and there didn’t seem to be any clear winner. They just wrestled until everyone was tired of it and then it was over. We ate lunch and then watched the second horse races of the day ride in before heading back. On the way we stopped at a deer stone and then the Orkhon river where it enters the gorge that leads to the waterfall. While we were there a family was in the process of roasting a pig or a goat for a picnic on the river side and the eagles had found out about it. While we were sitting there I counted 17 circling above us hoping for scrapes and entrails.
Back at the camp we decided to go for a swim again and then the Japanese fellow and I went for a hike up into the hills above the camp. Apparently the region of the country were in is famous for providing the wood for gers and we found several areas where they had cut the slats for the ger out of the trees.
We ended up on a bluff above the campsite and I sat and waited for the sun to set behind the ridge across the valley so that I could get some pictures. He headed back to the camp and they started dinner. I wandered in after it got dark and ate with them. That night we sat out under the stars again and lost track of the shooting stars we saw.
The next morning we rolled out to head to Karkhoum and then it was home for me. After a few hours we arrived and I had lunch then hopped into another minbus, this time with what would become 17 others for the 12 hour drive home. Before we left we had the pleasure of chasing a rather drunk Mongolian away from our van and then cramming everyone into what should have only fit about 12 people.
We arrived back in UB after it was dark and I grabbed a taxi back to Sam’s. That pretty much sums up my time in Mongolia. The next day I headed to work and finished everything up, stopped by my host family’s place after work to give them a gift in thanks for letting me stay there and then ate dinner out on the balcony back at the apartment and watched the lights on the State Store. The next morning Lizzie and I peaced out to the airport at about 9 am and I was on my way to Beijing and then Shanghai.

Philosophical Ramblings

An interesting question of free will arose today while I was listening to Fresh Air. Terry Gross was interviewing Dr. Michael Gazzaniga who happens to be a neuroscientist and he brought up some of his most recent research into law and neuroscience. The question was that he brought up regards whether or not criminals have a different brain structure than the rest of us. If his research were to find that criminals do have a different brain structure that predisposes them to commit crimes do you adjust punishment accordingly?
This is opening up a huge can of worms here but it certainly opens the question of what place the concept of free will has in a world in which our actions can increasingly be explained by nothing more than a series of chemical reactions in our brain. The implied argument that Dr. Gazzaniga made is, because the criminals chemically could not help committing their crime they can’t be punished for it. The extension is that we must instead punish those who created the various chemical reactions that led up to the specific chemical reactions that caused the crime. But if this point of view is accepted, besides the logistical impossibilities of punishing everyone, than it immediately removes the concept of free will from not only the criminal but everyone. If the criminal’s actions were the result of a series of chemical reactions caused by everyone else than, by extension, everyone’s actions are caused by chemical reactions that are prompted by others. The idea that our actions are influenced by others is nothing new but this takes it to another level. Instead of our actions simply being influenced by others they are essentially predetermined by others. If the chemical reaction that occurs is a given if an interaction goes a certain way than the outcome of the interaction is no longer dependent upon you but instead upon the other person. Thus, you lose your free will.
Clearly it is more complicated than this and could probably be explained better but it’s an interesting question and a beginning. Sam and I discussed this over dinner while I was over at Lizzie and Mike's to do laundry he does not agree with the argument. He admits that actions are the results of chemical reactions but that doesn't preclude free will. He also raises the argument that, while actions are the results of chemicals, those chemicals coming together in a certain sequence, no matter what set that sequence off, are unique to each individual at that point in time. Does that mean we have free will? Since our actions are determined by our own unique set of chemical reactions? In other words, are we just a unique set of chemicals? I’d love to hear comments.
As an aside, at work today the secretary brought fresh watermelon around to everyone after lunch. It was terrific.

Monday Monday

Monday was pretty boring. Sam had a business lunch so I was without my typical lunch date but I did get through the sixth chapter of my project leaving me only two before I am done.
The highlight of the day was the discovery of this gem, courtesy of The Economist, while I was at the gym:
"Between 2002 and 2006 the incomes of 99% rose by an average of 1% a year in
real terms, while those of the top 1% rose by 11% a year; three-quarters of
the economic gains during Mr Bush’s presidency went to that top 1%."
If that doesn't convince supply-siders that Reagonomics simply doesn't work I don't know what will. We have here what appears to be a perfect recipe for the supply side argument, large amounts of capital in the hands of the richest few that can be "trickled down" into the economy. What happens? Housing prices are at there lowest levels since the Great Depression, every major bank except Goldman has had enormous write offs in the last few months, the dollar is in a tailspin and the Fed says things are going to get worse before they get better.
Not only did the trickle down argument fail miserably, but it arguably made things worse. Hedge funds typically aren't getting capital from your average Joe. The average Joe spends his money more often than not and when he does save it he typically chooses relatively safe banks or simply sticks it in his mattress. It is that richest 1% that constitutes the vast majority of Hedge fund investors. The massive increase in wealth was fueled in part by the success of the major funds but I'd be willing to bet that a lot of their success had to do with increases in wealth for that 1%. If that increase goes to the rest of the economy though there is a much greater balance of spending and a larger infusion of cash into the economy rather than just the financial system.
I'm all for those at the top making money and I do agree that the investments they make in the financial system are necessary for the health of the economy. On the other hand when the disparity between income growth is as large as it has been for the last 5 years or so I doubt anyone could argue it has been healthy for the economy.

You're a new and better man, he helps you to understand

Anyone? The title is inspired by Hal or, more accurately, his blog's title (there's your hint) and you shall meet him shortly.

Friday nothing much happened until around 7 pm, at which point I left work. I had stayed late in order to try and finish the chapter that I was writing and I was successful. Afterwards I planned to walk down to Seven Summits to check on renting bikes for the weekend. Instead I ran into Sam and Ben as they were leaving work and started chatting with them. While in the midst of this conversation I though to check what time Seven Summits closed. Turned out, it closes at 7 on Fridays. Discovering this I ran across Sukhbaatar to try and make it there before they closed. I was semi-successful in this because the woman who owns it was in the process of locking the doors as I arrived. She did answer my questions about the bikes though and what she told me was not promising. They had bikes and they had panniers, as they said they would when I asked earlier in the week, what I didn’t think to ask (because I assumed this was included in the, “Do you have panniers?” question) was whether or not they had the rack to attach the panniers to the bikes. It turns out that they did not. That threw a major wrench in our plans and I went back to talk to Sam about it.
By this time Sam and Ben had moved from outside the bank to dinner at a new restaurant by the Trade and Development Bank and so I joined them. That ended up being a great decision as the food was excellent. Not being particularly hungry I just had a steak salad and some pumpkin soup. The pumpkin soup made the meal. It was hands down the best soup I have ever had and both Sam and Ben reached the conclusion that it was rich enough to have been dessert. To return to the issue of the bikes however, not having panniers caused some major problems for our plan to head out to Terelj in the morning because we’d be unable to carry any of our stuff with use and staying at a ger camp in Terelj is rather expensive. Ultimately we decided, once Lizzie had arrived and put her two cents in, that we would go to another ger camp, Steppe Riders, south of the city that Sam had been to last summer and we’d bring bikes with us and then ride home on Sunday. That decided and dinner eaten we all went home.
I got home and began to read but shortly after starting to read we lost power. Not sure what the reason was, the two apartment blocks on either side of us still had all their lights on but nothing in ours was working. Unable to continue reading I called Sam and he and I headed out to Tengis to see Wanted, which we had discussed doing earlier in the day. This was a bad choice. Wanted is a pretty awful movie. I’m not sure if it’s just because all of the actors had a bad day (or several bad days as the case may be) or if the script was just that bad. I think the script was just that bad.
The next morning Lizzie, Sam and I met out in front of my apartment at about 11 to begin our grand adventure. After a breakfast of a pastry from the supermarket we walked down to Seven Summits to get the bikes. I stopped and grabbed some film in the only store in the city that I have found that sells 100-speed film. We weren’t able to convince Lizzie to get a third bike, which ended up being a good thing since we barely got two into the car that picked us up, but Sam and I got two rather new, nice looking mountain bikes for our trip.
Our car arrived as we were getting the bikes and we were off. The drive out followed the same road I took to Zunmod and the ride took about 30 minutes. We rolled into the ger camp around 12:30 and got comfortable in our ger. Shortly after we got there we had a small snack of tea and some type of roll and then we went on a short ride. The horses here are significantly shorter than any that I’ve ridden before and as a result have a very different gait than what I am used to. The Mongolian technique of simply standing in the stirrups when you do anything but walk is definitely the easiest way to ride them. The saddles, with high pommels and backs, also make it difficult to ride any other way.
Our ride took us over the ridge behind the ger camp and down a valley to a watering hole so that we could water the horses. Afterwards we took a short ride over to another ger where we were invited inside to have airak with the family. We stayed there and drank several bowls of airak with them for a few hours and then rode back to the ger camp. The ride was very pretty, the area south of the city is mostly just rolling grasslands and although we were only about 40 km from UB you would have thought we were in the middle of nowhere.
Back at the camp we had a lunch of spaghetti with a pork and carrot spaghetti sauce. That may not sound great but in fact it was it was delicious and I wish that I could get the recipe. The large meal induced a great deal of drowsiness in the three of us though and we retreated to our ger to get out of the heat and take a nap. I read a bit and then ended up falling asleep on the floor of the ger.
We all woke up around 5, after about an hour, and introduced ourselves to the new arrivals. We had a South African, a Brit and an Aussie all from UB coming out for various periods of time. Once everyone was up and introduced we went on another ride, this time down the small valley that led to the camp and across the road to Zunmod and up several of the hills there.
We got back to the ger camp after about 3 hours and sat down for dinner. Stir fry with noodles. With some of the Vietnamese hot sauce they had tossed on for flavor it was excellent. The Mongolian’s are experts with the simple but tasty meal.
After dinner we threw the Frisbee around a bit with the kids that lived at the ger camp and then Sam, Lizzie and I walked up the hill behind the camp to look at the stars and share a bottle of wine. We lay up there until the moon came up and drowned out the stars. It was a full moon and it might as well have been the sun. With no trees to cast shadows you could see as easily as if it had been daylight.
The next morning I rolled out of bed to try and see the sun come up at 4:45. But it was raining (though only above our ger for some reason) and the sun was already well on its way up. So I watched it for a bit but didn’t bother to get my camera out before I went back to bed for about three hours. At 7:30 I rolled out of bed again and went and sat outside for a bit but decided that the sun was too bright and since no one else was up yet I returned to bed for another two hours. When I got up at 9:30 the rest of the camp had begun to wake up and I went down and sat outside at one of the tables for a bit before breakfast was set out for everyone in the meal ger. We had tea and some type of flatbread with a black currant compote and some smaller lemon rolls. It was very good, as is typical. The flat bread was particularly addicting.
After breakfast the six of us just sat around in the meal ger and chatted for an hour or so. They’re all quite nice and very interesting people. Especially the South African. The new link on the left, to Dr. Lobster, is his blog. Here’s an excerpt:
“…. while nursing a Black Russian alone in a low chair I observed a young Mongol complete with Fohawk leave his booth, come to the bar to grab a straw for a compatriot. He dropped it on the floor. Then picked it up, replaced it back among the others, took a different one and returned to his table. Not having much else to do but watch and think about this I imagined he may have thought “I can’t give this to one of my friends now, its been on the floor and I’m sure they saw me drop it, but if I just throw it away unused then this might be the straw that breaks the planet’s back. But what you don’t know won’t kill you so I’ll just put it back and no-one will be the wise, the next dude will just use it no problem…”
I recommend you read some of it. He’s quite a character, having been to 3 burning mans, he’s headed to another on in a few days which will mark his 5th continent in the last 8 months and the second time he’s been to the US in that time.
After breakfast everyone had an easy morning of reading and tossing the Frisbee around. We migrated to our ger after a while and continued our conversation, this time with the addition of another Brit who had missed her flight yesterday by five minutes and so arrived to UB a bit late.
Shortly before after one Sam and I decided it was about time to get moving on our bike trip and packed everything. We waited for Mindy (the owner) to get back from picking someone up from UB so that Sam could say goodbye and then headed out. Lizzie was going to follow us on horseback and meet us back in UB at some point.
The first kilometer and a half of our trip was down the dirt road leading out of the ger camp and onto the main road between UB and Zunmod. This was all down hill and started out pretty steeply so we booked it down to the road. It was a great way to start the trip, the diciest part of the whole thing at the very beginning. Once down on the road though it was pretty easy going and we cruised along up the valley for about 15 km before the first (and only) real up hill. That lasted about 3 km and then we reached the ovoo and made the customary rock offering before coasting down the other side and back into UB. Just before the main road connecting UB with the airport we made a right and cut across the steppe on a dirt road running parallel between the road to UB and the foothills. Cutting across there let us skip one of the busiest roads in UB and we got to mess around with all the open space, doing some slalom runs down the sides of the hills and rock hopping through some of the gullies. It was a good time and makes me think that mountain biking may not be as bad as I thought. Still not skiing but a possible substitute when there is no snow on the ground (though I still think kayaking is the best substitute).
We reached a bit of an impasse after about 45 minutes though when the road ran right up to a cliff and then cut across the river. It was either up the side of the hill (rather steep, mind you) or onto the too busy road. Sam took a bit of convincing but we decided to head up the hill and see if we could descend the other side on the bikes. We made it almost to the top before it got too steep to ride and we put the bikes on our shoulders, climbed over a small ravine and hoofed it to the top. There we discovered our initial plan as not going to work. The other side was little more than a cliff for the first 5 meters and so riding down was out of the question. We decided to circle around the top of the cliff and try our luck over the next ridge. Carrying the bikes we continued.
There we found a slope a bit more hospitable to a bike descent. After the first ten feet or so of 60 degree rocks it leveled out to a gentle 40 degrees or so and the rocks disappeared (for those of you not so good at geometry, a the steepest road you will ever drive on is unlikely to be more than a 15 or 20 degree slope). We carried the bikes down a bit and then I got on and tried to start a descent. I didn’t get very far though before the bike began to fall to the side and I jumped off. Sam carried his bike a little past where I jumped off and then began his descent. He had a much better go of it and I moved down closer to him and started again. Shortly after I started though Sam’s luck ran out. He had picked up enough speed by this point that when he hit a rock too large to go over he ate it, hard. A textbook over the handlebars yard sale. When he first fell I though he broke his wrist. But he managed to avoid any major injuries and no more than a bit dirtied and shook up he got back on no worse for the wear and we started down again.
I have a new respect for the hardcore mountain bikers after completing that. Even with a good six inches of play in the front shocks navigating grapefruit sized rocks is not easy. In fact, the descent, especially the turns, was more of a controlled slide than an actual bike ride. It was fun though and if it weren’t so much to rent the bikes I’d definitely do it again.
Once off the mountain we found ourselves on a gravel road that wound along the southern side of the Tuul until it reached the bridge to Zaisan memorial and we crossed there and were back in UB. Returning the bikes we met Lizzie, who had beaten us back because of our detour, at a pub for a celebratory beer after a weekend well spent and then met Ben and a boatload of Australians at Café Amsterdam for the afternoon. We hung out there for about three hours and I finished my book while everyone socialized.
After most of the Aussies had left Sam, Lizzie, Ben, one remaining Aussie and I headed to a Korean place for dinner. It was a Korean BBQ and they cooked it at your table. We had the pork and steak and were doing just great until they showed up with a chicken dish at the end of the meal what was probably as large as everything we’d had up to that point and then it was game over. Not only was the chicken dish the worst dish of the night but it was far too large for everyone’s already stuffed stomachs.
After dinner we walked home, Sam and Lizzie stopped to get ice cream, and I spent the evening reading a new book and relaxing before going to bed pretty early.
Monday I got to work early by Mongolian standards, right at 9, and had a pretty productive day. Met Sam and an Australian girl at Luna Blanca, a vegetarian restaurant, for a very good lunch of salad and pumpkin soup. After work I headed to the gym and then came home and got some more reading in.
Tuesday was more of the same but lunch was with a different Aussie. This time I met Will, working here with the Ministry of Health, and Sam over lunch in the food court. After work and a short stop at the gym I helped Sam move into a new apartment by the state department store and then headed down to the Corporate Hotel to meet Hal, the South African we met over the weekend, and his friend who had just arrived from SA via Dubai and Beijing. Sam and I were joined by yet another Aussie, James, who is moving out of the apartment that Sam is moving into. The three of us met them around 10 and spent the evening discussing the finer points of Malthusian population theory vs. the limitless potential of technology and the role of fate in one’s life. We all left around 12:30 and I caught a cab home and rolled into bed by about 1.
Wednesday I found out my boss was going on vacation until the day before I leave here and so I was basically on my own to finish my project. They really need to work on their prior notification skills here. In addition to this and the whole Nadaam vacation fiasco I found out on Friday at 3 pm that one of my colleagues was going on a week long trip to the countryside for a conference and then just to travel and leaving on Sunday at 7 am. He said that I was welcome to come if I wanted to. I would have loved to have gone except for the lack of prior notice and the fact that Lizzie, Sam and I already had plans. I also think that I would have had a hard time getting my project done if I had taken the whole week off.
As work was winding down on Wednesday though I got a call from Sam inviting me to play football with Xac Bank (where he works) and so he, Lizzie, Mike and I got a cab over to the pitch. It turned out to be a really, really nice pitch. Nicer than anything I played on in BA and as nice as any turf pitch I’ve played in the states. We divided into three teams and rotated, though they rotated in a rather frustrating way. First of all the games were 20 minutes long a piece and the victors stayed, no matter how many games they won. That the victor stays is pretty common, but they normally only play two games in a row, whether they win the second or not. This combined with the fact that Sam’s team was stacked frustrated Mike and I a bit. But besides their unfair allotment of playing time, Mongolian’s need to work on their basic team strategy. They can start with defense and then passing. As Ben pointed out when I first arrived, Mongolian’s do not do team sports well and having seen them play first hand I can agree whole-heartedly. On the plus side they play offense very well and we tied the first game with about 15 seconds left when on of them headed my corner into the upper right hand corner. Of course then I missed a PK in the shootout that would have given us the advantage and we ended up loosing on the next shooter.
So we got to sit out for the next twenty minutes until Sam’s team finally lost in another shootout out. By this time the rain that began with our first game had let up and we played the ‘red’ team and had the same problems as the first game. A complete lack of defensive or passing ability and a forward corp. who couldn’t run and wouldn’t know how to trap a ball if they had glue on their feet. My dad’s team moved the ball better than these guys did. In keeping with what was rapidly becoming a theme this game went into a shootout again on my goal and a nice header from the other team. And again I missed my PK, but this time I missed what would have been the winning goal. We ended up winning on after two more and started a revenge game with Sam’s team but were kicked off the pitch before we could finish.
After dinner the four of us and one of Sam’s coworkers ended up at Broadway for some pizza, fulfilling the craving for pizza I’d been having since I saw a Wallace and Grommit in the gym on Monday in which a herd of sheep steal several dozen pizzas. After dinner Mike and I headed home and I got to bed early after my late night on Tuesday.
Thursday was another boring day at work and I headed down to Ilk Mongol afterwards to see a live folk show and try and meet Sam and Lizzie. Unfortunately the show was not that great and Sam and Lizzie had been told that there were no seats so they didn’t show. But afterwards I ended up at Sam’s apartment with them and Adrian, one of Lizzie’s old Peace Corp buddies. We sat outside on Sam’s “balcony” (the roof of the store in front of his apartment, accessed by climbing out the window) and had some wine and chilled. Adrian is living here now, and is running a software development company and potentially starting a pizza delivery company. On the way home I discovered that Karma does, in fact, work. After being ripped off by my last two taxi drivers on my way home I accidentally gave the taxi on Thursday a 10,000 instead of a 1,000 Tugrik bill. Instead of just driving off he gave me change and actually charged me less for the ride than he fairly could have.
Friday Sam and I met one of his friends, Todd, for lunch down at a Japanese café. Todd is here on a Fulbright to take photographs of farming. If there exists a better reason to go on a Fulbright I can’t think of one. I’d love to do something like that though I think it may be one of the few things that an Ec degree won’t prepare you for. After being kicked out of the office at 6:15 because everyone wanted to go home I headed home and tried to go to the gym, found out it closed early on Fridays and went home and ate dinner with my family. Afterwards I met the group, plus Andrew at the Grand Khan Irish Pub as everyone was more or less leaving and headed to a club with Mike and Andrew. That didn’t last long though and I headed home to write and read a bit before crashing early.
Saturday I woke up with ambitious plans to go to Darkhan with Lizzie to meet her host family from when she had been Peace Corps. Sam was supposed to come but he had said the night before he wasn’t really up for it. Mike and Andrew were convinced that this meant Lizzie was done too but I remained hopeful.
When 11:30 rolled around and I hadn’t heard from her I began to agree with them but she came through in the end and even managed to convince Sam that going was a good idea. We managed to get down to the Dragon Center by 1:45 to try and catch a bus out but when we got there the 2 pm bus was already full. Instead Lizzie managed to find us a meker that was supposed to leave at 2. Without much choice we piled in and played the waiting game for the driver to find enough other passengers. Surprisingly we managed to roll out only 15 minutes late, which for Mongolia is practically leaving early. The driver also decided to take good care of us and gave us the front seats, the best in the meker, and not crowd a 4th person in our seats.
Our drive to Darkhan took about 4 hours and took us through some beautiful country. Not really any different than anywhere else I’ve been, a bit more mountainous, but mostly just a lot of grass. Darkhan is the 2nd largest city in Mongolia and is on the way to Russian via the Trans-Siberian. It is basically UB but even slummier and more soviet. We waited in the parking lot of an abandoned building that had been turned into an unofficial meker depot while Lizzie tried to get us transport to her host family’s village. At this point Sam and I discussed how totally lost we’d be without her and her language skills. Mongolia is not a country that is hospitable to the budget traveler who doesn’t speak Mongolia. I doubt we could make it very far out of UB on our own. At least not without paying 5-10 times what we should have.
Eventually Lizzie got the driver who had taken us to Darkhan to take us the rest of the way and then back in the morning and all the way back to UB as well. We made a short stop at a supermarket and then were on our way. It was an hour to the village and the country was much the same, and probably a bit prettier. This far north it gets a bit more moist so there was a fair amount more vegetation. In the valley that the village sat in there were actually quite a few trees.
We arrived at her host family’s house at about 7:30 (aside: her host father has what might be the coolest name ever, the translation is "Strong Happiness") and got a lesson in Mongolian hospitality. As I said to someone earlier, hospitality is a way of life here; we arrived to find the table covered in various vegetable and meat hors d’vors (sp?) with some chocolates and cheese curds thrown in for good measure. We were all invited in and sat around enjoying this while they prepared us dinner. The amazing part of this isn’t so much that Lizzie, Sam and I were invited to eat since they knew we were coming and had told Lizzie to eat with them. What impressed me was that they invited the meker driver and his wife (who had joined us) to eat with us as well and cooked for them as well.
After dinner the three of us went for a bit of a walk down to the river and got to listen to wind blowing through the trees for the first time in more than month. It’s amazing what you can forget so easily. It didn’t cross my mind that I hadn’t heard wind in trees for a month until I did hear it. On our walk back we were passed by a horseman going down the road in the pitch black at a full gallop. I’m not sure if that’s a good idea or not but I get the impression they do it all the time.
We spent the rest of the evening chatting with her family. Or, more accurately, Lizzie chatted with her family in Mongolian and Sam and I invented conversations for them. I did find out that they had never before used the Internet though. Something we take so much for granted, they had never used it and are more than twice my age.
Sunday morning the rain delayed our waking up and we didn’t roll out of bed until about 9. I went for a bit of a walk but was chased back inside by the constant drizzle and so I read until everyone else got up. We had a big breakfast with ham, eggs, potatoes and the ever present rice and then everyone piled into the meker and we headed up to see a holy spring. Unfortunately it turned out that the spring had no water in it and so we just saw where the spring used to be. Pretty typically Mongolian. We did get to meet the crazy man in the mountain who lived there and ran the museum. He definitely fit the part with long white hair down his back and a wispy white beard that came down to the middle of his chest. He showed us around his museum, filled with woodcarvings and, of course, disturbingly stuffed animals.
After our short tour we stopped by her host family’s store and they gave us some small gifts of chocolate and candy and then we headed back to Darkhan. We got to Darkhan around noon and had our driver drop us off at Texas Pub in honor of Sam’s home in Austin while he went and tried to get more passengers for the ride to UB. We ran into some embassy folk there patching up a Marine who had been jumped in UB the week before and was now embedded with a Mongolian military unit in Darkhan for the next three months. He had a nasty gash on his head and the embassy doc was checking on the stitches. We grabbed lunch while we waited and several more of Lizzie’s Peace Corp friends showed up to keep us company until 2 when our Meker finally had enough people to head back to UB. We crowed into the third row this time and headed home. On the way we stopped in a small town and added two more passengers bringing the total in our row up to 4 and the total in the meker up to a nice, round 20. At another stop we ran into two polish brothers heading home on their motorcycles after having gone through Eastern Europe, Russian and Mongolia. They were complaining about the roads in Mongolia and said they couldn’t wait to get back to Russia were they could make more than 230 km in a day.
Back in UB we stopped by Sam’s place for a bit and I read and worked on my tan on his balcony before we headed to Luna Blanca for dinner. We had been planning to meet a woman and her husband from the states who will be working for Xac Bank as well for the next year but they called back so Luna Blanca it was. Afterwards we met Ben and a friend to see Kung Fu Panda at Tengis. I highly recommend this film. It is hilarious and very enjoyable. That definitely ended my weekend on a good note and I headed home and crashed afterwards.

The Manly Sports

This was a busy weekend. I walked into work on Thursday and found out that I only had a half-day and then had Friday thru Tuesday off for Nadaam. For those of you who don’t know, Nadaam is a celebration of Mongolia’s independence and is the biggest holiday of the year as far as I can tell. It is a two-day event on July 11th and 12th each year and the entire country more or less shuts down for two days. The festival takes place in all of the towns across the country and a lot of people say that the best celebrations are those found in the smaller towns outside the city. Unfortunately since I didn’t find out I had almost a week off until four hours before it started I wasn’t able to plan anything to get out of the city (It is worth noting at this point that Mongolia is not a country, which is good for impetuous trips in the style of my trip to Carnaval in February. Because it is so difficult to get around and travel to anything outside of the major cities requires your own vehicle or a rental, which are prohibitively expensive because they more or less require you hire a driver as well, planning a trip takes some time.). 

The festivities in the city itself focus on the central stadium across the Peace Bridge from downtown where the archery and wrestling are held. The third manly sport, horseracing, takes place about 90 Km from the city in the middle of the empty steppe. But before we get any further in describing the festivities of the weekend I should return to the beginning of the week.

Returning to the beginning of the week lets skip back to the end. All I did worth noting this week was to begin writing the first (second) chapter of the guidelines on Tuesday and finish it after a late day at work on Wednesday. Other than that, a few afternoons in the gym and we’ve arrived back were we started on Thursday morning. Once I found out that I was done at 1 and that my boss wasn’t going to give me any feedback on the chapter I’d finished last night I started working on my second project, compiling a database of all environmental education activities in Mongolia. That occupied me until I was free and then I headed to lunch. I apparently lucked out getting off early, I found out later that Sam and Ben were kept at work until 7 to make up for having Friday and Monday off. 

After getting lunch I headed over to the post office and picked up a sim card for the phone my host family gave me so I finally have some way of communicating here. I should have done this a while ago but just never got around to it. Once I had my sim card I headed down to some tour company offices on the off chance that I’d be able to throw something together for Sunday thru Tuesday. Things were not looking good though and I walked up to my Buddhist café for some coffee and meditation empty handed. 

Once I got there I decided on a milk shake instead of coffee and some emails instead of meditation. But it was nonetheless a productive afternoon and I ended up putting the finishing touches on the Carbon Footprint curriculum for EnviroEd. Afterwards it was back to the gym and then out on the town for the evening. I was planning to go to River Sounds to try and see a live Jazz performance, but in what is becoming a pattern, there was no live music at River Sounds, just a DJ. I didn’t go in because I didn’t feel like paying the cover and headed instead to Oasis and had a drink before heading home. The highlight of the night came at Oasis where I met the owner of the bar and ended up chatting with him for about an hour. From Vancouver he has been here for two years after spending 6 years in Korea. A nice guy, like most Canadians, I’d end up running into him again later in the weekend (UB is a small town and you quickly realize that everyone knows everyone else. I’ve run into friends randomly on the street about half a dozen times since I’ve been here and have met multiple people independent of each other only to find out later that they have been good friends for a while).

Saturday morning I got up early and walked down to my French Bistro for breakfast. When I got there I found it packed with tourists here to see Nadaam and the staff running around like chickens with their heads cut off. After a coffee and some croissants I headed out as quickly as I could. Even being there for about 20 minutes I was chased down by one of the tour guides who tried to get me to pick up my Nadaam tickets from her. I really despise tourists and most guides and I can understand why most of the natives have fled for the hills, so to speak, this weekend.

After breakfast I walked down to the square and discovered that it was packed as well. I had heard that the parade down to the stadium started here though and so I waited with everyone else for it to begin. There was a military band in formation in front of the parliament house apparently waiting as well since they weren’t playing anything. I walked around the square and took some pictures until about 9:30. At that point the band started up in what I can only assume was the national anthem and a contingent of ceremonial cavalry, bearing a replica of Chinggis Khan’s peace time spirit banner came riding down the east side of the parliament house. They made their way into the back of the parliament house and then turned around and came back down the street about 15 minutes later, heading for the central stadium. I took the street across the Peace Bridge and after seeing that the traffic was backed up all the way to the square decided to walk rather than try and grab a cab down to the stadium. 

I got there and almost immediately ran into Mike and Andrew walking around. They told me their section and then I went off in search of tickets. I never found an official ticket vendor so I ended up buying them from a scalper after using my phone to indicate which section I wanted.  It’s worth saying now that I saw more people in and around the stadium than I have in any other place since I’ve been in Mongolia and the stadium is hardly larger than a large high school stadium back in the states. The area around it was packed with vendors, mostly selling food, some selling souvenirs or just random stuff (shoes, shirts, watches, etc) and a few selling a go at fair ground type games. I saw several of the kind that you try and knock a pyramid of cans over, a few basketball hoops and even a couple of pool tables. 

After about 15 minutes of walking around and taking the festival in it was time to go into the stadium. Once you got inside your section it was general seating so I was able to grab a seat with Lizzie, Mike and Andrew (Sam was in a different section) and we watched the opening ceremonies. While we couldn’t understand anything being said the entrance of the cavalry that I had seen earlier was cool and we got to see a tsam mask dance, which was also very neat. Sam said that the ceremonies had been toned down from the year before but I was still impressed and enjoyed them. 

After the opening ceremonies the opening round of the wrestling began. I don’t know if a more chaotic and disorganized sporting event exists. There is none of this mano a mano or something as official as a ring that one normally expects in a wrestling match. Instead two small armies of very large, very overweight men run out into the middle of an area the size of a soccer field and just go at each other. Everyone wrestles at the same time and as far as we could tell the assignment of opponents was totally random. There are no boundaries and the only rules that I know of is that the first person that has any part of their body other than their feet or hands touch the ground looses. There are also no weight classes. This gives the aforementioned huge, overweight men an enormous advantage over the few thin, averaged sized guys we saw. They never really had a chance, Mongolian wrestling is all about brute force, speed is basically worthless when all your opponent has to do is pick you up and throw you on the ground (which we saw happen more than once). 

We tired of watching the wrestling after about 20 minutes, which happened to coincide with the apparent end of the first round, and left the stadium to walk around a bit more. By this time it was about noon so we all grabbed some food from the various vendors, I ended up with a steak kabob and Mike decided to try some corn dogs with potato pieces cooked onto the outside. Lizzie picked the winner though, she found an ‘organic’ food stand with apple turnovers, honeysuckle juice and rye and corn bread cookies. We all sampled some of this as we continued to walk around. 

While walking we ran into several of Sam’s friends, the kid knows everyone, and a girl who’s father works at the embassy so who knew Lizzie and Mike, who is going to school at Waynesburg University. I discovered this after pointing out that I see more Pittsburgh apparel here than I do in the states. I’ve seen a Pittsburgh hat or jacket almost everyday I’ve been here and while waiting in line at the Chinese embassy the other day (something I had to do with annoying frequency last week, though I finally did get my Visa) someone heard me say I was from Pittsburgh and (this is a Mongolian mind you) went off about the Steelers. They really do have a global fan base (that’s for all you Patsies fans out there). 

Back to Nadaam. We circled the stadium and got some apple cider before walking the 50 yards over to the archery stadium. There we watched the archers warming up. They still use the traditional horn recurve bows and compete in the traditional garb. It’s a step back in time to see. The arrows are all wooden and fletched with feathers and the targets are set only about 6 inches off the ground well over 50 yards away. This is apparently to simulate hunting marmots, one of the original reasons for having a talent in archery. We watched that, and I got some pictures, until we started to get sunburned around 2, unlike the main stadium the archery stadium had no cover for shade, and then decided to head back downtown to see what that held for us. Sam and I spent most of the walk back talking about construction and bike riding (I wonder why) and ended up planning a potential bike trip to be taken some weekend before I leave. 

We ended running into more of Sam’s friends (big surprise there, as I said he knows everyone and this is a small town) and ended up spending most of the afternoon hanging out in the beer garden in front of the Great Khan Irish Pub. Our conversation covered everything from elite school admissions and lifestyle (we had a Harvard student, two G’town grad students and a Princeton in Asia fellow) to Mongolian art. We eventually made our way to the top of the Corporate Hotel to check out the view of the city. It was a gorgeous blue-sky day at about 75 degrees, like most every day here, and so the view of the city was great. By that time it was about 6 and we decided dinner was in order. After some discussion Indian was settled upon and we walked back across the square over to near the WWF office. 

The restaurant we chose was on the recommendation of Lizzie, who was Peace Corp here last year, and was excellent. I realized a bit ago, probably when we went out with Sameer and Anna in BA that I really like Indian and this was excellent. We had a beef curry, a chicken curry, an eggplant curry and a mixed vegetable curry with naan and an appetizer of samosas. 

By the time we rolled out of the restaurant it was 9:30 and we walked back to our apartments. Sam needed to do some laundry at Lizzie and Mike’s so I went with him to pick it up and then was going to go over to the others’ so that I could figure out where everyone lived. It turns out that I can stand in my room and look out my window and see Sam’s apartment. He lives about 300 yards down the street from me. I then found out that Lizzie and Mike live in the same apartment building that I do, only about four sections to the east. It took my three weeks to figure that out. But in my defense we would never cross paths because the WWF office is west of my door and the Embassy is east of theirs so I’d never walked in front of their apartment before and I assume they hadn’t walked in front of mine.

At Lizzie’s Sam did his laundry and we all hung out for a bit. I met Kevin, their other roommate and a junior at Columbia. He is also working at the embassy but has spent quite a bit of time here already. He’s a junior but he’s 23 and spent a year here teaching English and then another year doing research before coming back for this summer. We didn’t stay for very long since everyone was pretty tired after our day. Mike passed out almost as soon as we got there and Lizzie ended up falling asleep on the floor. I assume Sam finished his laundry but I headed home at about 10:30 when Kevin headed out to meet some friends. I got home and had intended to read for a bit but ended up falling asleep almost as soon as I got home. All in all a great day, probably one of the best I’ve had since I’ve been here. I really enjoyed Nadaam and it was good to get to know Sam and everyone a bit better. 

The next morning was an early one. We had arranged at dinner to meet at 8:30 at Lizzie and Mike’s apartment to get an embassy van (one advantage of having friends in the US government) to head out to the horseracing site. The trip took about an hour and a half after we got outside the unbelievable traffic of UB. It seems, unsurprisingly, that everyone in the city was heading out to the races. I’d be willing to bet there were close to 20,0000 people there all told. Most of the ride was on paved roads, the last little bit was gravel and then finally just off roading across the steppe. We paid the cops for our ‘parking pass’ (whether it was actually necessary to have a parking pass is still unclear) and headed down to the races. 

Like everything else about Nadaam the races aren’t like horse races you’d see in the States or Europe. Instead of racing around a ring the riders all start where everyone is and then race out 15 km in a more or less straight line and then turn around and come back. The riders are also all no older than 13 and most of them are between 7 and 10. And they do the whole race bareback. The whole thing takes about 3 hours so after it starts everyone at the start/finish line just chills and has a huge picnic until the riders get back. At that point there is a mad dash to get to the wire marking off the ‘race track’ so that people can see the riders come in. This takes about 15 minutes from the first place horse to the last few stragglers, some now riderless, and then everyone goes back to their picnics until the next race. Over the course of the day there are three or four. We got there in time to see the end of the first and happened to be standing next to the wire when the mad dash began so we actually had a pretty good view of the whole thing. It was cool to see the riders come in over the hill proceeded by their dust cloud and then to see the first place horse out in front of everyone. Unfortunately we also saw a horse collapse in front of us, less than 300 yards from the finish line. 

After the race was over we walked around the picnics a bit and tossed the Frisbee around. We walked through the Cultural Nadaam, a huge tourist trap set up near the races complete with archery, painting, horse acrobatics, anklebone shooting and concerts. The best part of that was the blueberry smoothies. We ran into the Ambassador and Kevin as we were leaving and said hello. We had told our driver that we would leave by 12:15 though so we could chat long. I wish we had been able to stay for the afternoon and have a picnic but none of use had brought the necessary supplies and I don’t think that most of the rest of the group was up for it. 

The ride back ended up taking about 2 hours because the traffic was even worse but we arrived home around 2:30. I caught up on the reading I had meant to do the night before and just spend the afternoon relaxing. At one point I walked down to the stadium to catch the end of Nadaam but it wasn’t too much different than the first day and I didn’t feel like trying to get a scalped ticket for the closing ceremonies so I just went home and threw together some dinner. My host mother had left me some dumplings and I added cucumber sandwiches to them to make a great dinner. 

After dinner I got a call from Kevin who was heading out with two of his friends again and invited me along. Not having anything better to do I joined him at one of the beer gardens near the square. He was there with another Patrick, he was working for an I-bank here, but that Patrick ended up heading home shortly after I got there to meet a friend. His roommate joined us a bit later though and the three of us headed back to Oasis where Kevin and Glover (the roommate) happened to be good friends with Tyler, the owner who I had met on Thursday. We chatted with him for a few hours and then Glover headed home. Kevin and I grabbed a cab and started home but stopped at Metropolis, apparently UB’s premier nightclub, before we got there. We spent a few hours there and then caught a cab for the short trip the rest of the way home. 

Again, all in all a good day. The horse races were enjoyable, mostly just because I was able to get out of the city for a bit. I also got my first exposure to UB’s nightlife and discovered that, small as it may be, it does exist and I think that I’ll always have someone willing to go out, should I feel like it, in Kevin. 

Sunday I slept in to make up for my late night and then got up intending to rent a bike and ride out to the observatory a bit south and west of the city up on the border with Bogdkhan strictly protected area. Before I got around to leaving though my host mother invited me out with her and some of her co-workers to go on a picnic outside the city. I decided to live with a family specifically for opportunities like these so it was an easy decision to scrap my plans and head out with them. 

We left around 2:30 and stopped by her hotel to pick up some food and people but then spent the next 45 minutes stopping at every grocery store we passed looking for something. I’m not entirely sure what it was we were looking for because the food we ended up eating seemed pretty typical for a Mongolian meal and I can’t imagine it was very hard to get it. Whatever it was they were looking for we eventually found it and then headed west and a little north of the city to where the urban sprawl ends and the Tuul river whinds through the foothills leaving the city. We ended up on a shaded grassy patch right on the riverside with several other groups on each side of us. Apparently where we were is a pretty popular spot.

We ate almost as soon as we got there, typical picnic fare of sausage, hard-boiled eggs, bread, juice, some wine, pickles and cookies. After lunch everyone lay around a talked for a bit, I read my book. Once our food had been satisfactorily digested I pulled out my Frisbee and tried to teach them out to play. We made some progress but since most Mongolians have never seen a Frisbee before it was slow going. At one point it ended up in the river and we went running down the shore trying to pull it back in. Eventually the Frisbee gave way to a game of football which, in classic Mongolian style, was played with a ball that had a 2 inch gash in the side and thus held air until it was kicked two or three times. At that point the game was stopped and the ball was blown up again before we resumed. Our pitch was also less than desirable as the goal posts were empty glass bottles and the sweeper for the opposing team was a fire ring with the charred remains of a BBQ in it. My team pulled off two wins in a row though and, surprisingly, no one got hurt so it ended well. 

After our game my host mother and her friends got out a bottle of Chinggis Vodka and started passing it around amongst each other. I ended up playing with one of their daughters who was about 3 and must think that all American’s are mute since, not understand Mongolian, every time she spoke to me I was at a total loss for what she was saying. She had a great understanding of tag though. Our driver and my host sister joined in for a bit two before retreating to the car to get away from the swarms of mosquitoes that came out once the sun started to go down. 

Once the sun was all the way down and our fire that had been doing a little to keep the mosquitoes away burned out they (my host mother and her co workers) had finished the bottle of vodka and most of them were sufficiently toasted and we headed home. The driver dropped several of her co-workers off at the hotel and then delivered us to our apartment. 

Once again a good day, the picnic was a blast and I’ve been looking to play some football since I got here. I also got to experience some aspects of the culture that I wouldn’t have been able to if I had lived on my own or with other ex-pats. 

Moving on to the beginning of the week, I ostensibly had Monday and Tuesday off but since I had only found that out on Thursday I wasn’t able to really plan anything to take advantage of that so I planned to work instead and take two days off later in the month. The advantage of this idea is that, because the office was closed, I could work wherever I wanted and so I spent my mornings working at the French Bistro where I ate breakfast and the afternoons working in my Buddhist café. Surprisingly I’ve found that I am more productive working in coffee shops than I am in the office. There is something about the office that is just depressing and not conducive to me being productive. The warm, yellow paint and ambient music in my Buddhist café is very conducive to productivity. It’s too bad I can’t work there all the time. 

Monday I met my host mother’s brother as well and her mother has been staying with us since Saturday so I’m getting to know the whole family. Her brother speaks English fluently and actually knows a bit about ESD and what I’m researching. He recommended several papers that I look at for me research. I haven’t had time to look yet but they may or may not turn out to be helpful. 

Tuesday night we had another English lesson and I ended up staying up until about 2 teaching my host mother and her daughter English while I wrote here. Wednesday afternoon Sam and I walked down to the Taj Mahal to grab some Indian for lunch, which was superb. I’m well on my way to trying all the Indian in this city and I have yet to be disappointed. 

I had been planning on finishing this entry on Wednesday night but was side tracked when Kevin called to invite me out to see his friend sing. As you know I’ve been trying to see some live music in this city since I got here and I’m of the opinion that doing things is better than writing about past actions so I headed out with him and some of the guys I met on Saturday. We headed down to Level and spent several hours there listening to his friend sing. He covered older American or British songs and did a nice job. He has a good voice and he changed the song enough that it was his own version and interesting ones at that. I also got to meet a Columbian grad and Rhodes finalist who is here to visit Kevin. He and I got along swimmingly and had a fruitful evening talking about the Marshall, Fulbright (which he did get) and the Rhodes. 

Thursday has been a work day and not much else. I’ve finished the second chapter of my handbook and started the third; hopefully I’ll finish writing by the end of the month and be able to review during my remaining time here. After work I headed to the gym where I learned this interesting tidbit of information: “The most damaging consequence is that by 2000 31% of American adults were obese, with another 16% defined as overweight. American airlines spend $275m a year more on fuel simply to lift the heavier passengers.” – From the Economist, emphasis mine. What I want to know is how they calculate something like that? How do you separate out fuel increases, luggage increases, etc? It is an interesting and disturbing fact if true though. 

That wraps up this week so far. This weekend I think Sam and I and maybe Lizzie are headed to Terelj on bikes on Saturday and coming back on Sunday. I’m sure I’ll have plenty to write about by Sunday afternoon, which is probably the next time I’ll get around to writing. Until then I’ll leave you to contemplate the fact that as unpopular is Bush is Kirchner makes his approval ratings look positively rosy by comparison after her ill advised tax on farm exports tanked in the Senate today. 

A 4th with no Fireworks

Happy 4th of July to everyone. That being the highlight of this weekend it seems appropriate to begin by wishing everyone a great, if belated, day. I already wrote a bit about my day on the actual 4th I’d just like to add a note about dinner. We had home made Japanese noodle soup, which was simply superb. I’m not sure how the noodles were made but they were much thicker and more doughy than most that I have seen and had a very definitely flavor to them. I can’t put my finger on it but unlike pho or spaghetti they didn’t just pick up the flavor of what they were cooked in.
After dinner one of my host mother’s friends came over and brought some ice cream for everyone. They spent the evening chatting while I worked (after finding out my jazz show was canceled).
Saturday, as I mentioned, was our 4th celebrations with the US Embassy. I got up around 9 though and headed down to the Black Market first. The Black Market is not nearly as sketchy as the name would imply, in fact, it’s the primary ‘market’ in the city. Unlike HCMC which has 3 or 4 major markets UB only has the Black Market and it certainly makes up for the fact that it is the only market in the city. I’ve never seen a market of this size; it puts even the largest in HCMC to shame. Located at the southeastern edge of downtown it is set apart from the area around it by a concrete wall. Within this wall are three buildings, each a bit larger than a football pitch, that house the more permanent stands in the market. These are then surrounded by hundreds of stands and kiosks laid out in more or less ordered rows. Behind the three larger buildings there are a few more smaller ones that look as if they were once garages or offices for the market that were commandeered as the market grew.
I spent about an hour and half wandering between the stalls and stands taking everything in. You can find just about anything here, from chainsaws and industrial winches to knock off Knicks jerseys and fresh fruits and vegetables. Rugs and house ware are right next to sections selling fabric and camping gear. And the largest section by far is that selling shoes. Everything from tennis shoes to the traditional Mongolian boots.
After getting my fill of the market (and sampling several of the macaroons for sale) I walked back to the center of town to head to the celebrations at the Star Apartments.
They started at 12:30 as the line began to file into the apartments. The apartments are quite nice, although out of place. They look as though someone pulled up a section of an American suburb and placed it down in the middle of UB. The events were to take place on in the small field in the center of several of the apartments. Behind the tents that had been set up for the band, the food and the tables was a small artificial pond that was full of kids taking advantage of the water to get out of the heat.
I ended up at a table with several Americans who had been in Mongolia between 2 and 13 years teaching English outside of UB. We chatted about living in Mongolia and the riots earlier in the week until about 1 when the color guard arrived to post the colors and the celebrations began. After the Star Spangled banner and a few comments by the Ambassador they began serving the food. I lucked out and happened to be standing at the food tent when they began and thus avoided standing in the hour-long line to get my potato salad, hot dogs and hamburgers. I love the food here and I don’t know if I could ever get sick of it but at the same time there is something to be said for having hamburgers and hot dogs on the 4th of July.
Shortly after I got my food Sam and Ben arrived and we headed over to the tent where I had been sitting to eat. They weren’t up for waiting in the line to get their food and so introduced me to Mike (interning at the Embassy) who also had his food already and they sat with us while we ate. By the time we finished the line had gone down enough that they went to get their food and I ended up with several students from Pitt. Apparently they are here in Asia for 3 months and have been in Mongolia since May 20th and will be here until the 20th of July. There were about 8 of them I believe and all working on various research projects ranging from the religious and social implications of the spread of Buddhism in Mongolia to the ecological impact of the growth of the mining industry.
The afternoon ended with a tug of war competition. Mike, Ben, Sam, Lizzie and I entered as a team and went into the semi-final match against the “stormin’ Mormons” undefeated (1-0). We started strong, almost winning in the first few seconds but then the coordination of the Mormons began to give them the advantage and they started to claw their way back in. We fought back and had reached a stalemate with the flag in their half by just a mall margin when Ben, our anchor, decided that we were losing and it was time to throw in the towel. He let go and the rest of us fell like dominos. It was a good run while it lasted though.
After the tug of war people began to drift off as the event ended. We hung out for about another hour but Sam had a date (with a girl who speaks no English, while he speaks no Mongolian. I’m sure that was interesting) and I had been asked to cook for my family so everyone headed their own ways around 4:30. We had possible plans to meet for a movie at 7:40 but nothing definite.
I arrived home at about 5:00 and checked my email and read a bit before starting dinner. My family had asked me to cook ‘American spaghetti’ for them. I’m not all together sure what that is but I’m glad that (a.) They had a suggestion and didn’t just want me to cook something random and (b.) Their suggestion was relatively easy. I did a bit of shopping before I started and got a bottle of Heinz tomato sauce (which I’ve never seen in the states but was the only tomato sauce I found here after going to two super markets) and then came home and went to work. Throwing the spaghetti in some boiling water I started on the sauce and in doing so found a great use for my undrinkable Merlot from the other day. I diced up some peppers and onions and then sautéed them in the merlot before finishing by adding the Heinz sauce to heat it up.
The general consensus was that the meal was quite good. The girls seemed a little leery when I started pouring wine into the frying pan but after tasting the sauce they were quite pleased. Whether or not this had anything to do with what I did or was simply because of the spices found in the bottled sauce I can’t say but I’ll gladly take the credit.
After dinner I headed out to try and catch Iron Man at 7:40 with Sam and Mike but when I got to the theater I found that there would be no showings that night for some reason or another (I imagine it was because of the state of emergency) so instead I headed to River Sounds to see about my Jazz show. That turned out to be canceled as well. Having nothing better to do I walked up to Sukhbaatar Square for a bit and people watched. Once it began to get dark I simply headed home. They clearly hadn’t yet lifted the prohibition on the sale of alcohol and as a result there wasn’t anything much going on around town. Back at home I tried to rent “The Meaning of Life” from iTunes but the Internet connection was far too slow. Instead I spent the evening working on EnviroEd and then went to bed a bit early so that I could get up the next morning to see the Summer Palace of Bogd Khan.
I rolled out of bed at 9:30 on Sunday and had breakfast before walking down to the Summer Palace. I passed the 45-minute walk listening to PRI’s On Point and their discussion of the Beijing Olympics. The Palace itself wasn’t as impressive as I had hoped. Unfortunately I don’t have many pictures, because like every museum here it costs between 4 and 5 times the price of admission to take pictures. The few that I did take had to be taken on the sly and thus are not that great. But as a whole the palace was underwhelming. Parts of the architecture and the intricate work on the roofs were incredible. But time has not been kind to most of the palace and it was not kept up well. The highlight of my visit was the small museum inside the main palace which held some of the Bogd Khan’s possessions including a Ger made with the fur of 150 snow leopards and a cloak with the fur of 80 black foxes.
The one interesting feature of the palace is that it emphasizes the importance of Mongolia in the history of Buddhism. Outside of Tibet Mongolia may be the most important country in the world from the perspective of the Buddhists. When the Dalai Lama first fled Tibet he spent several years living in Mongolia and there is a long history of Mongolians going to Tibet to become monks. There have also been several Mongolian Dalai Lamas. I hadn’t realized any of this before I came but every Buddhist temple here seems to have a very strong connection to Tibet.
After leaving the temple I began my walk back to the center of town and on the way I stopped to watch some of the Mongolian Football League. It was nice to see soccer again but the quality of the game wasn’t much better than American college soccer or even high quality high school games.
Once the second game began I started back towards town and lunch. Instead of eating dinner out this evening I decided to have lunch out. I had been hoping to go to the brunch at Silk Road but it turns out they don’t have a Sunday brunch anymore. Instead I enjoyed a nice steak and milkshake and then walked over to Chojin Lama Temple.
This is a drastically different temple than any I have been in so far. This seemed devoted to far darker themes than any of the others I have seen. The central sanctuary was surrounded by images of disemboweled humans and individuals cut from cloth and hanging in various states of extreme pain from the roof. Outside of the main sanctuary there were several examples of the tsam tsam masks including one that is apparently 30 kg. Considering that these were worn by monks for a dancing ceremony the fact that one weighs 30 kg is pretty impressive.
After visiting the temple I had planned to go to the UB Golf Club and play nine holes but it looked as if it might start to rain and I couldn’t quite figure out how to get there. Plus, having walked all morning and most of the afternoon I wasn’t quite in the mood to try very hard to figure out how to get there. Instead I walked around the city a bit more and then headed back to the apartment and ended up taking a nap. On the way I stopped and picked up a nice Cabernet Sauvignon Rose from Chile since they had lifted the ban on alcohol sales earlier in the day. I ended up having a glass over dinner and enjoyed it. It was a fruity, sweet wine without the overwhelming presence of alcohol. Unfortunately it was a bit cheap and didn’t have a very strong or long finish. For what it was though I liked it.
When I woke up from my nap at about 6:30 I decided to head over to the Stupa Café, my Buddhist café, and have a coffee while I read for a bit. Bringing “The Master and Margarita” with me I grabbed a taxi (I was still in napping mode and didn’t feel like walking the 5 blocks to the café) and headed over. I ended up spending about two hours reading and enjoying a latte and brownie on their couch. Because it was Sunday they closed a bit earlier though and I had to head home by about 8:30.
At home I read some more and then made myself some dinner (the second of the two instant rice packs I bought when I went backpacking). I spent the rest of the evening reading, writing and watching a bit of the Final. Unfortunately I missed most of it because of the rain delay. I’m also very much upset with the results and thus will say no more about it.
Monday was unremarkable – the standard day at work and then the gym – except that we went out to lunch because one of the guys who had been working on a National Park project from the Boston office of The Nature Conservancy is heading home tomorrow. We went to a Mongolian BBQ (which is far more of an Inner Mongolia thing than an actual Mongolian culinary style) and had a terrific buffet lunch. I may have to go back on my own. They had about a dozen salads on offer as well as soups, dumplings, stir-fry and baked goods. Very, very good and Charles and I finally got to know each other the day before he leaves. I think we’ll end up meeting when I get back to Boston though.
One unrelated note, the drivers in UB are just as bad as those in HCMC and far worse than anywhere in the states. The difference between UB and HCMC, and what makes UB far more dangerous, is the fact that in UB everyone drives cars rather than motorcycles. It is far more difficult to swerve around objects in a car than on a motorcycle and accidents are correspondingly higher here. I’m very glad it’s something I don’t have to worry about.
Finally, as I write this the girls are watching “Britain has More Talent.” I’ll leave you to guess what exactly that is.

We made the headlines!

So my original assessment was a bit off. The chapter in Mongolia’s history on the protests isn’t quite closed. I went to go and see a live jazz show this evening downtown after dinner and found that while the club was still open the live show had been canceled because of the state of emergency. The rest of the bar scene across down is pretty dead as well because no one is allowed to sell alcohol yet. I think this ends tomorrow and hopefully I’ll be able to see my show after the 4th celebrations but we shall see.
More importantly though the protests were on the news this evening; or, more accurately, the coverage of the protests in the rest of the world was on the news this evening. The lead story was about how the BBC, Reuters, and such small town papers as the Miami Herald had picked up the story of the protests and some of them had even run it on the front page. This should give you an idea both how much news coverage Mongolia typically gets as well as how they view themselves in regard to the rest of the world.
The cops are still out as well but the army has pretty much disappeared. I may be proved wrong again but I think that by the end of the weekend we will have seen the last of the effects of the protests.
That’s about all the important updates for the day. I’ve finished the initial part of my first project and will hopefully be moving on to the writing phase next week. I’ve covered a few hundred pages of environmental education literature since I’ve been here and I have almost a hundred pages of notes to pare down to a 30-40 page document by the time I leave. It should be an adventure.
Some notes on various things worth noting that have been going on since I’ve been here. I’d like to talk about dinner first. Each night we eat around a small coffee table in my room in a very typical Asian fashion. By that I mean rather than using chairs we often just sit on the floor around the table. Most of our meals also involve some sort of stew or soup with rice. About every third or day we have a large salad as well. This means that contrary to my expectations we eat fresh vegetables here more often than we did in Argentina. The food on the whole is pretty good though, a lot of flat breads, rice, carrots, potatoes and mutton. In fact, various combinations of the above are what we have each night. Dinner is rounded out by tea or water.
I had some other things I wanted to talk about as well but I have forgotten what it was I wanted to talk about so you’ll have to wait for a later post.