Disclaimer: I have again failed miserably to write anything about the culture of Chile. This is my fault rather than Chile’s. Instead, I have yet again written about going camping in the Andes. I imagine this is stultifyingly boring for those who have enough sense to sleep indoors. cheers -c In the olden days, some crazy, one-eyed, warty old lady could find the portents of doom in the innards of disemboweled chickens or the lines in the palm of your hand. These days, they usually arrive in a friendly email. The ominous warnings had been arriving from Michigan for a couple [View Full Entry]

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Perhaps it was for my sake. Or hers. Or his. But whatever the reason, Tia put Antoine on a plane in NYC and sent him to Santiago. This is remarkable because of Anaïs (age 2 and change) and Noémie (8 months or so). In my experience, no one willing sends their genetically obligated care-taking partner on vacation to see me. So due to Tia fabulawesomous, I walked back from class Thursday morning to find a Frenchman in my apartment. In a wholly lame effort to reciprocate Toine’s tour guiding in Paris and New York City, we wandered around and looked at [View Full Entry]

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Morning arrived. Then afternoon. The metro. A cab. Sitting in the airport is followed by sitting on a plane. Near dusk, we walk down the ladder onto the runway of the Calama airport. Around us, the soft blurred reddish magenta tones of sunset color the smooth dunes of the Atacama Desert. Night comes quickly and a blanket of star-pierced black is pulled up and around us as we taxi south toward the little city of San Pedro de Atacama. San Pedro is a tiny town of low adobe buildings whose narrow dirt streets are filled with tourists. The reason has less [View Full Entry]

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Whereas the head crusher, the heretics’ fork, the rack etc. represent a few of the rather nasty things inspired by religion, Carnaval is an altogether more pleasant manifestation of ‘religious’ fervor. Although Carnaval may have been co-opted from heretical Roman festivals such as Saturnalia and Bacchanalia, the Catholic Church thankfully decided to incorporate a little pagan hedonism into traditional dogma. I guess you can’t burn them all. Or perhaps, the church agreed with the Brazilian author Jorge Amado who described Carnaval as “a month and a half of frolick [View Full Entry]

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The red eye out of Santiago stopped in Lima, continued to Bogota, and finally arrived in Cartagena de los Indios on the Caribbean Sea. Cartagena is an old Spanish port city with a history of violence. After the overtures of peaceful cohabitation, the natives had to go. Shortly thereafter, it became the Spanish port for transporting the wealth sucked out of South America. Given that Spain is much closer to the Caribbean than the Pacific, this was logistically a sound idea. However, galleons loaded with gold and silver tended to attract attention; specifically, the piratical kind that hid o [View Full Entry]

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Whereas Santiago summer is a predictable 90 degrees with no precipitation; the south is decidedly less so. Though shine is always more photogenic, inevitably, there is rain. Hail, in the middle of summer, however, was not anticipated. In pursuit of the more attainable of my ‘2 Goals in Chile’ (the other is the much less successful learning of Spanish), enthusiasm was generated, plans made, camping crap dragged out, piled and packed, and food and bus tickets bought. In an act of flagrant un-patriotism, neighbor Nick and I skipped the SuperBore and instead spent 8 hours bussing s [View Full Entry]

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Today’s AP headline informs that Obama is in Indiana stumping for a stimulus plan that the let’s-not-approve-a spending-bill-for-the-first-time-in-8-years-Republicans are bemoaning in WA. Seems money for rebuilding schools, early childhood education programs, meeting state budgets, unemployment benefits, food stamps, improving infrastructure etc. is ‘wasteful big government spending’. The answer predictably enough is more tax cuts because using the government to propel the economy out of a recession is inefficient and stinks of the old bugbear communism. Only the deb [View Full Entry]

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Horror. Despair. Waves of nausea. Real fear. Different from the three day bender fear that can be fixed with a gallon of water, an icy diet coke, serious sweating or the white flag of surrender return to bed. I stared again at the message. One terrible sentence fragment with an excessive amount of punctuation meant to convey, or perhaps engender, enthusiasm: “Plomo Next Week!!!!” El Plomo is the 5424 meter dome shaped glaciated mountain looming over Santiago. Over the winter, conversation often wandered dangerously near the idea of climbing it. Now, my neighbor Nick had ma [View Full Entry]

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A lot of people have and will write about the US election in 2008. The vast majority of them will do it better. Here are a few disjointed thoughts from watching this thing unfold from a few thousand miles away. Somewhat surprisingly, Obama won Iowa. Then he kept winning. The democratic establishment was blown away. Perhaps it was because the black guy from Illinois was selling a different brand of snake water. Perhaps it was because a lot of people wanted to and still want to believe in the cultural mythos that informs and is the United States: from ‘We hold [View Full Entry]

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There is a KFC around one corner and McDonalds around the other. In the park, 4 year olds are regularly seen chugging two liters of Coca-Cola. Black Iron Maiden t-shirts are ubiquitous. There is Budweiser and Doritos in the supermarket. Moreover, the dominant economic philosophy of the country was imported wholesale from the University of Chicago’s School of Economics and Milton Freedman. All of which is to say that American hegemony is more or less wholeheartedly embraced in Chile. Unfortunately, super awesome parts of Americana such as Halloween have met stiff resistance. Hallow [View Full Entry]

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