note: location is santiago, chile

One funny thing about driving in santiago…the hostal i’m staying at is in a small pedestrian plaza with narrow one-way streets. even after a couple days, the only way i know how to drive there involves backing up about 2-blocks on a one-way street.

today, i had a few more meetings re: finding a cool MechE company here. Still no luck, but I think that I am making progress (towards finding out if such companies exist here). i also checked out two catholic museums with some nice religious artwork. the museo la merced features a room full of baby jesus’, including one that appeared to be showing the middle finger. nearby, at the museo de arte colonial de san francisco, they had some more nice artwork….including one painting of a very homosexual looking saint francis (…no surprise there) and another where saint diego miraculously transformed bread into flowers (…which seems like a much less useful miracle than turning flowers into bread). there was also a unique painting from 1690 of a man in a bar beheading st. john the baptist. across the street, the national museum had a free concert. the first musician was a classical guitarist. it was funny to hear bach being performed in a nice little auditorium, while people chanted outside on the street (not sure what they were protesting*). this was followed by a very experimental saxophone duet — i think someone said ‘bless you’ before i sneezed.

*as i was heading home, i noticed that some streets were closed. i asked a cop what had happened, and he said that there had been a disturbance, with people throwing rocks, etc. why? well, according to him, because they were bored.