this morning i dropped off my uruguayan hostal-mate and his girlfriend at their new apartment here. they also offered me some mate, which tastes worse than it sounds…well, as far as i’m concerned, they could call it ashtray juice and it still wouldn’t do the drink justice. but it’s probably me, since i don’t like a lot of things…and they love it so much that, from uruguay, they brought a special goblet and silver straw to drink it with. afterwards, i walked around the center a bit, checking out a couple museums…and whatever else was open (it’s a national holiday, so 99% of the city is closed today). i’m not sure if it was the extreme-walkability of santiago or the miserable, gray, rainy weather…but, today, santiago reminded me a bit of boston. because it rains so infrequently here, it seems that many of their infrastructures are not as well equipped as you might think — take calle alameda (one of the major arteries), which is a good road (so people drive relatively fast), but has huge puddles, resulting in water splashing 10+ feet high; or the art museum, which has small pools of sawdust in the lobby to absorb the water leaking from the beautiful (but old) glass ceiling.

tonight at lunch/dinner, i started with a soup and almost realized that joke from the end of Coming to America…but afraid that it might not translate, i just asked for a spoon.

today i finally made it to santiago….over 2000km since entering chile (it’s a really really long country). i’m chilling near plaza brasil…it’s impressive how many places have a street, hotel or plaza named after brasil. in iquique, i stayed on ave. brasil, in antofagasta i was in hotel brasil and now i’m in the neighborhood brasil.

i spent this afternoon at the university of santiago. i like chile, so i was curious about what kind of exciting mechanical engineering jobs i might be able to find here. the people at the university were really nice, but it doesn’t sound like there’s too much opportunity here. one researcher did have an interesting suggestion, though. apparently a few years ago, chile formed a committee whose sole purpose is to dish out billions of dollars to innovative companies. i’m gonna try to meet with them on monday….if there’s a cool MechE job here, they should know about it. it’s also ridiculous how the name ‘MIT\ instills immediate respect. In the us, people might say ‘wow’, but here it’s like i’m a clown in the traveling circus…and they’re afraid to let me slip away. well, that was a pretty bad analogy….but that’s why i’m no poet. unfortunately, it seems like the salaries are quite low here. when i was getting my master’s, i was given a stipend of about $1600/mo + free education + health insurance. here, asking for a salary of 2k/mo is pushing it. granted, the cost of living is lower….but it means i can’t save as much either. in the us, it was pretty easy to save enough money to go on this ridiculous car trip. in chile, it would take years to save up. well, we’ll see what corfo-innova says on monday.

later tonight, i stopped by one restaurant and had a hamburger. then, walking back to the hostal, i stopped and grabbed a pizza. the woman at the pizza cafe was very friendly and had two great recommendations for me. the first, was another hostal (the backpacker hostal i’m at now has no character, or people). the hostal looks very cool and i’m excited to switch tomorrow. it’s on a small side plaza, which is primarily pedestrian. the building is cool (stone/brick and old), it’s cheap ($10 for a dorm) and the people working their are insanely friendly (i think that’s partly because the hostal is so new, so they’re not jaded yet….kinda like the people at virgin america first were). the second was a gypsy concert…

after a long nap at the hostal, i walked over to the concert under a light mist of pepperspray (apparently there was an earlier disturbance in barrio brasil). turns out that the concert was going to start an hour later, at midnight. coincidentally, as i was standing outside, i ran into the same woman from the cafe (who had now picked up another two tourists). so, the four of us walked over to a house party. it’s pretty ridiculous to befriend three tourists so quickly (and to have a mutual bond of trust), even more so bring them to a house party…but the party was by far the most insane of all. it turns out that there are quite a few abandoned mansions around santiago. a group of kids will simply take over one of these houses and live in them for several years, even paying for gas, water & electricity. every few years, the government will take over one of these places….after they’re kinda destroyed (after all, the kids who live here have no money to pay for upkeep…and if they did, most people wouldn’t spend thousands maintaining an old house, when they might get kicked out tomorrow). this corner house with a stone facade had beautiful wood floors and nice detail-work, but was a bit of a fixer-upper. inside, amidst a fog of smoke were about 50 people. people were dancing, in a corner room rain was flooding the floor and in the back they had a coat check and were selling drinks. the first band we saw wore wrapping paper, and kinda looked and sounded like some insects. then came a clown who juggled under the vaulted ceiling, rode around the lobby in a unicycle and made a bunch of noise. the following band, though, was really good. unfortunately, our hostess led us out after just a few songs to see a small art exhibition in the house and to meet the high artist himself. the artist was friendly although seemed like he was on the edge of snapping at any moment, so we led a pretty muted and uncontroversial conversation. his friend didn’t say anything and looked like a drug dealer that you’d see on the corner selling crack…i was a bit afraid he was going to pull out a machete or pistol from his ski jacket, so we didn’t have much eye contact. around 1:30am, as i realized that our new group of friends were a bit crazy (including our friendly hostess) i also realized that my hostal was going to lock it’s doors soon….so i rushed home, before getting to see the gypsy concert.

yes, between a random job search and an even randomer party at an abandoned mansion with live music….pretty ridiculous….but also quite fun. below is a pic from the mansion.”

this morning i walked around valpo some more, saw some museums, etc. one kinda ridiculous thing they have are ascensores (lifts) speckled throughout the city. each lift is a small carriage on a rail that brings people up and down a hundred meters or so. they’re kinda like san francisco’s cable cars…a definite tourist attraction, but also used by the locals.

i also walked to pablo neruda’s house, which doesn’t look like much from the outside but is very interesting from the inside. each floor is pretty small (big enough for 2-3 rooms)…but he occupied 4 floors. the interior decoration is interesting…although it can be a bit much…a bit tacky, at times. but the views from the house are incredible.

from there, i drove about 10 min north to vino del mar…which is kinda like the la jolla of this area. it’s sunny, beautiful ocean and full of nice restaurants/houses. in particular, there are a few ridiculous estates. one, castillo wulff, is a castle-like building on the rocky ocean beach. another 100 year old estate is the palacio rioja, which is instead in the style of neo-classic french. both are beautiful and exotic. there’s also the presidential palace (…a bit like camp david, i think) and a number of other cool places. according to the security guard of the presidential palace, the neighboring house (still a nice neighborhood but not with the same incredible view of the ocean) rents for about 1.5k/month.

labor is cheap in latin america…and it has some pretty significant impacts on the culture here. for instance, today, i saw a man walkng around a residential neighborhood selling brooms. granted, brooms may be in higher demand here (owners are more responsible for sweeping their sidewalks than in the us…plus, people and dogs dirty the sidewalk more often here)…but still, selling brooms door to door can’t result in huge profits. the bigger, implications, though, have to do with the use of products and in technology development. for instance, most things here are full-service….from laundry to gas to photocopies. it’s partly that customers enjoy the full-service experience, but probably more due to the relative cost of labor and equipment — it’s cheaper to hire somebody trained to make photocopies than to risk having the copier broken in a self-service environment. with such cheap labor, automation and artificial intelligence aren’t as necessary either. a vending machine is more expensive to operate here than a person selling candy on the side of the road. in fact, i bet many fewer houses having dishwashers here, even among those who can afford them. another huge market segment that is ignored is making existing technologies easier/faster….in the us, time is money, but here…time is, well, time. at my last company, the major selling point for our products (that was stressed to hospitals) is that our devices made their procedures faster….which is important when each minute in the operating room can cost as much as $60. here, the bigger selling point would be if the product could be (safely) reused multiple times…even if it was harder to use than competing tools. it seems like the major innovations here involve increasing the quantity of services or making the existing product cheaper to operate (electricity, replacement parts, etc….minus labor). for instance, some markets in peru now allow the stands to share a single credit card machine…thus allowing the stands to accept credit cards. i noticed another example in ecuador, when i had an inner tube placed in my tire (the side walls were badly damaged). because tires are so expensive, they’re used until there’s no rubber left. they’ll patch and patch them. right now, they use old rubber tires, rubber cement and inner tubes to patch the damaged tire….you’d think this might be a place for innovation: maybe a nifty little tool/part which could allow anyone to patch a tire easily, consistently and in just a few minutes (like the tire plug kits they sell in the states). well, here, mechanics tend to take pride in their work (kind of an old-school mentality….i can do it better than a machine can) and they would rather spend an extra couple hours and save a few bucks. that’s also partly because in many industries there is much more competition than customers, so they really do have free time. i wonder if it’s a hard cycle to get out of….cheap labor. anyway, just a ramblng thought.

valparaiso is the place most reminiscent of san francisco thus far. well, maybe it’s not so much that it reminds me of san francisco, but of any ‘nice’ mid-size western city (san francisco, boston, prague, etc.). the city seems to get most of it’s money from the port, service and tourism industries. coming in a few blocks from the water, you reach a pretty big hill…and most of the city is built on this slope. surprisingly houses tend to survive the earthquakes and landslides. i say ‘surprising’, because quite a few houses are ~100 years old and, from my room, many look like they would have trouble standing on flat ground.

i was originally planning on staying at a hostel in a cool house from 1925. i found the place, and everything seemed fine. but, when i drove my car to the place (i was parked about half a mile away), i got lost…and ended up at another hostel. i figured it wouldn’t hurt to check it out….and it ended up being cheaper and without the smell of cigarettes. the place (with a shared bathroom) costs 6,000 pesos. which is about $12, and brings me to today’s rant: it’s nice when a foreign currency is equivalent to a little more than the dollar…but not too much more. like in peru, 3 nuevos soles equals 1 dollar…so when you get something for 30, it ends up being $10 and you feel like you’re getting a bargain. in chile, though, you drop the zero’s (divide by 1000) and multiply by two….so my room for 6k pesos suddenly becomes $12…which is still cheap, but not a crazy bargain like $6 would be.

tomorrow i’ll get to walk around and check out the museums, etc. i enjoy being in a place where the nice-looking restaurants are not catered specifically to the tourists. it’s a bit of a shock, though, to be around so many cigarettes. i actually hadn’t really noticed cigarettes this whole trip…until chile.

a windmill plant off the coast (parque eolico canela: 18.15 MW). and check out this interesting manufacturing method for the nearby mirador (styrofoam and concrete)

well, i finally broke down and bought a new muffler today. what was wrong with the old one? well…i) most of it was rusted; ii) parts both internal and external had flaked off (meaning that it was not as good as a sound damper and was likely to break off again); iii) it was dented in a couple places (backing into the rock a couple days ago probably didn’t help); and iv) one of the brackets holding the muffler to the car was coming loose. the new one cost $40, and was actually made by the mechanic…he has a stock of about 30 different mufflers of all shapes and sizes that he’s made. we’ll see how long before my exhaust breaks again.

today i drove around the valle del elqui — a small region that seems to mimic the napa valley (or at least try). the region is predominately covered with grape trees for making pisco. although there are now health restaurants, retreats, etc. on the way to pisco elqui (a small town at the end), i stopped by the capel pisco manufacturing plant. most of the equipment was down for maintenance, although we did get to see them packaging some bottles and sampled some pisco at the end. apparently pisco is a liquor in between wine and cognac. failed the samples ‘test’ in drowning colors. i though the first sample taste a bit like lychee (it was pineapple and guayaba), the second like rum/absinthe (it was their top shelf, and apparently tastes quite different) and the third like whiskey (it supposedly tastes like rum).

i also saw my first loquot (nispero/nespera) tree in latin america! unfortunately, the fruit was still a bit green. i’m getting closer to my dream of swimming in a pool of loquots, much like scrooge mcduck did in his vault of gold in the opening song for the tv cartoon duck tales.

later, at night, i almost went up to another observatory — unfortunately, it was closed because of the clouds. apparently chile is big on astronomy….i guess in the countryside there’s little pollution (light/smog) and a relatively stable/cloudless climate.

internet is surprisingly fast and good in chile (compared with the rest of latin america). most days i take about 1 gigabyte of images on the time-lapse camera. although i have an external hard drive, i had some issues with it…so instead try to upload the pictures to my server back in the us. so far, the internet has been good enough throughout most of the trip for me to do so without a problem: some nights i’ll upload nothing…but other nights i might upload two or three days worth. excluding the hotel in flores, guatemala (which according to my ftp program uploaded at a speed of 90 KB/s), the average upload speed in latin america is about 20 KB/s with a maximum of 40ish KB/s. In Chile, almost all places have internet (even remote desert towns), and the average upload speed is around 50ish KB/s (with a narrow standard deviation). also, the internet and power haven’t cut-out in the middle of the night (yet). it’s nice…since before entering chile i was backed up by almost two weeks worth of pictures….and now i’m only about a week behind. hopefully i can be back down to zero before leaving for argentina.

lastly, i’m gonna fix my muffler again tomorrow. not sure whether i’ll go with the patch ($15) or a new muffler ($40). having a dirty car can be useful sometimes…like for drawing on when talking to an exhaust repairman in a foreign country.

today i swung by the rock museum in copiapo, then continued south to la serena. la serena is a nice little city of a couple hundred thousand people. not too much to do here: see some churches (they have a couple dozen), check out the mall (still waiting for the bruno movie), see the beach (the rocky coastline of chile is reminiscent of northern california), eat some food, etc. a few notes on chile:

1) speed bumps are strangely absent from chile. so far, i’ve encountered two in the whole country…what a relief! ..although i did back into a rock today on the beach, and my muffler is broken again (…my bad).

2) chileans drive completely different from the other latin americans i have seen so far. they’ll stop for pedestrians. they don’t honk all the time. they’ll obey road signs…even ridiculous ones….like a stop sign in the middle of the desert where the train crosses the road (most latin americans would only slow down if there was a speed bump and most americans would just yield, but chileans come to a complete stop).

3) i’m now positive that chileans are obsessed with 80s rock. tonight, at dinner, on the tv they played a 30minute montage of music videos from the 80s. on the walk home, i got my own little mash-up as each store played michael jackson, madonna, etc.

4) the term joven (young person) is used a lot. even people who are obviously younger than me call me joven.

5) different countries sell different grades of gasoline. in some places, i used 84 octane. in chile, the minimum is 93 (in peru, super was 95).

6) although sandstorms may sound cool….well, they actually really are pretty cool. but they pitted my windshield pretty badly, so it’s harder to drive into the sun now….looks like i might have to be doing more afternoon driving as i head east to iguazu falls.

what an interesting pocket of fog in the middle of the atacama desert.

so who knew that there were more varieties of avocado than hass? …apparently everyone else. today i tried a negra de la cruz, which is very good: a bit sweeter, wetter and more fibrous than the hass.

writing from the chilean national park ‘pan de azucar’. unfortunately, the (supposedly rare) wind has continued and it’s a bit breezy here by the shore. it is still very nice, though. the water is clear and cold. the shore is littered with small rocks and seashells. although i can’t see them, a nearby island houses many penguins. the rocky shore is beautiful and inspires the imagination in much the same way that clouds can on a nice summer day. the park is almost completely deserted now, but i bet it’s packed in the summertime…and maybe on weekends too (it’s sunday night here).

they have small shelters on the beach for camping ($7) as well as nice little cabins ($20, with small kitchens, bathrooms, living room, etc.). the construction is pretty interesting. the roofs are made of wood and dried reeds (or a type of leaf?). the walls are made of wood (structure), straw (insulation) and dried mud (exterior). alas, no internet.