Wrap-up

It has been too long since my last post, so here's  brief summary of some things I can remember. As I walked into the office in the Agronomy department a few weeks ago, I discovered a circle of maybe 25 people, students, faculty, and staff, reciting prayers from photocopied programs, and a small altar against the windows with an image of Nuestra Señora de Carmen, flanked by candles. It was a reminder that the university takes seriously the Catholic bit in its name. This wasn't a one-time deal, either, since it was the Mes de María and a roving prayer sessions hit every department on campus once a week. The month ended, of course, on December 8, the feast of the Immaculate Conception. December 8 is a national holiday here, and because it fell on a Thursday, most people took off Friday as well to make it a long weekend. Not anticipating this, we failed to make timely plans and spent most of the weekend in Santiago, enjoying the blaring horns, piercing sirens, and the 30+C heat (I have come to love SI units). This did mean I was able to do my Saturday morning bike ride to the top of Cerro San Cristobal, following the signs toward the virgin. The comuna de Providencia is kind enough to block the park's roads to auto traffic on Sat and Sun mornings, so it is the safest riding in town. On the descent, I do have to watch the dozens of feral dogs who appear abruptly from the woods and wander across the road.

A couple of weeks ago we traveled to Vilches, a small community in the Andean foothills where new friends, Ted and Maruja, have lived for many years. The contrast of rural living with the amenities we become so accustomed to in Santiago was stark. The first morning I was greeted by a friendly tarantula in the kitchen. I bravely ran away and let Deidre sweep it out the door. I know they're generally harmless, but why do they have to have so many legs, and move so unpredictably?

One day we hiked into the Reserva Natural un the road a few km (see, isn't that smoother than 'mi'?), where the views were stunning. I'm always surprised by the amount of camping happening in Chile, and there were plenty of campers here. I just don't remember seeing tent camping in Peru or Bolivia. With the excellent bus service, you can get almost anywhere without a car, it seems, and there were a lot of people packing out of the park in time to catch the last bus back down the hill.

On the way out, we stopped at an interesting house built in the form of the famous churches of Chiloe. the reason for stopping was to see the sewage treatment system. It is called a Toha system, and this one was, as I understand it, designed by a professor at the U. de Chile. Rather than deal with graywater, which can be relatively easily re-used for flushing toilets or for irrigation, this system treats the real sewage on site. This one was a little wooden hut filled with sawdust and the same red worms we use in our worm bin at home. The toilet waste is pumped into a primitive sprinkler system above the sawdust, and the liquid that drains out the bottom is purified with UV light and discharged. Amazingly, there was no smell at all. I want one for my house! 

Otherwise, we spend a lot of time walking, to go swimming, to take the kids to Spanish lessons, going to museums (the kids are saturated with museum visits). We sit in the ubiquitous little parks, snacking on bread and cheese or empanadas, though I'm the only one with any interest in eating them.

There are some creative names for stores, restaurants, and food products, sometimes intentional, that entertain us.

Christmas season is upon us, but it is easy to forget that with the hot summer weather. The weekend newspaper is filled with all of the expected temptations for the compulsive shopper. Yesterday's paper included, nestled between ads for electric razors, high tech desk lamps, and a list of online shopping resources, and article "con menos regalos y más dedicación, la Navidad puede ser sustentable"which seems like a good thing to throw into the dialog, even if the context seems kind of absurd. There are plastic trees popping up all over, and we even have a Charlie Brown type thing sitting on our coffee table. Kind of pathetic, but it serves the purpose just fine.

Patterns

There is something comforting about having a regular pattern in life, though it does decrease the enthusiasm for writing about it. M-F I ride to work in the morning, enjoy a very basic almuerzo at the cafeteria next to my building (everyone takes the time each day to have a meal together at lunchtime, a tradition that seems counter to the intense "I'll eat a sandwich at my desk while working and therefore be more productive" wheel-spinning that governs my life back North), and ride my bike home around 5 or 6 pm. A couple of times per week we meet up at a pool and swim for an hour or so. So you see, there's not much interesting there.

 I have only had one real work-related field trip, to a town called Ovalle up north, near La Serena. It's in the Elqui valley, known for its wine and other produce, and for attracting an eclectic crowd of new agey visitors. I of course was more taken by the civil infrastructure we visited, a dam, small hydropower plant, diversion structures, and of course, penstocks. I don't think it is so much about conquering nature or anything so overtly masculine like that. But seeing a steel pipe running down a steep hillside in the Andes, carrying little flow but at a tremendous pressure, I appreciate the power of nature, and seeing how we can take a piece of that to generate energy to do something really useful, like run a television set or crush grapes into pisco. I also have a desire to take my hydraulics class here to show them these incredible installations.

That's not to say I'm swayed by the massive hydropower projects being crammed down the public's throat here, about which I defer to the sober, thoughtful reflections of Dr. Peter Goodwin, someone I was fortunate to take some classes from at UC Berkeley long ago. For hydropower, it seems that scale is important.

The picture below shows one reason why large dams can be problematic here: in a dynamic landscape like this there is tremendous erosion and sediment transport down the rivers. the river bed and valley here are meters deep in loose gravel and sand, which will diminish, or at least complicate, the ability of a large dam to provide a long-term sustainable solution to energy or water supply. A couple of days ago I visited in the civil engineering department at the Católica a physical model of a proposed dam that included a few measures to try to cope with the sediment load that would enter the dam. Not an easy problem to solve. Not for me, anyway.

Delays

I have been so busy with work lately that writing in this blog has become a distant second in my priority list. There's the spiral of few entries reducing the number of views, and a small number of views providing little incentive to spend an evening writing here. Also, the difficulty in simultaneously finding the device I snapped a photo on, the appropriate cable to download it, and a functioning computer has been a frequent barrier.

So I have a few photos at my disposal so I'll post them now, without worrying about giving any commentary of any interest. A small group of us from the PUC went for a bike ride, my first off-road riding in many years. We were dropped off  on the outskirts of Santiago in a small town (if that) called Ermita. We crossed the Mapocho and found the trail was much rougher than anticipated, with lots of rock slides and impossibly steep sections. But the views were amazing, and despite several technical difficulties, we did reach Santiago again. It took almost 6 hours instead of the 2 that had been estimated. Very fun, and a high point of the month for me.

 

Aside from that, life has been fairly ordinary. No teargas exposure this week, at least for us (another Fulbright fellow who is at the U Chile (which as a public school has students on strike) was letting us know how the Carabineros (the national police, basically) have been very aggressive with teargassing and spraying water (apparently the water is laced with an irritant, so it's more like a chemical wash than just water) canons onto the campus, even disrupting a major hydraulics conference happening on campus. Of course, their aggression is predictably met with some rocks and paint from a handful of 'encapuchados' (literally 'hooded ones') which allows the escalation of the exchange, and the news follows the script by showing how out of control the students are with dramatic selective footage, looped to give the impression of endless chaos.

We visited someone who lives in the neighborhood of Renca, where we saw a 'dog show' on the plaza. Random people marched their untrained dogs (all Jack Russells, so I guess it wasn't completely random) around inside a small fenced area, while an occasional stray wandered in as well. They were promoting spaying and neutering, a desperately needed service here (I mean for pets), and other novel concepts like not abandoning dogs, and picking up the crap they leave behind. The street dogs are not very mean here, at least, probably because they appear well fed, though we were also warned that feeding street dogs causes them to consider the street their home and then they'll be defensive of it. I still prefer Bolivia's policy of feeding the street dogs to the large cats at the zoo.

OK, I know everyone (OK, I mean in case there is anyone) who reads this, hydroclimate, while featured in the title, has been getting short shrift. I did participate in a trip up north to a small town called Ovalle, near La Serena. We visited a reservoir and surveyed a complex water storage and distribution system to satisfy the cities and the agricultural orchards (avocados and pisco grapes for the most part, though white wine grapes were expanding too). I have some photos, but they were apparently downloaded somewhere else, so I'll post them later. It was another time where, traveling with faculty and research staff from the PUC, and meeting with a very accomplished faculty member at the university in Ovalle, that I realize how strong a research community they have here, highlighting my occasional pondering of what I'm even doing here. But here I am anyway, and nobody seems to mind.

I started with the concept of freedom last entry, and there's more where that came from. My typical bike route to campus includes a few sections that are like that shown here, where people express their own vision of freedom. The car coming at me head on is driving on the wrong side of the road (giant arrows mark the direction, so it's not ambiguous), and the bicyclist follows suit, riding to the left of the auto just to keep me on my toes. If there is no traffic using the street in the direction it was desinged for, why can't someone use it as they please? It's really just freedom to use things as we see efficiency demands.

The street in front of our apartment building suffers from this tyranny of free expression as well. There are two left-turn lanes, just outside our bedroom windows, and there is a left turn arrow that stays green long after the arrow for straight traffic becomes red. But rather than wait in the correct lane, people wanting to go straight constantly (really every single light change, all day and night) ride up the left turn lane then stop at the light so they can be first in line to go straight when it changes. The pathetic rule-followers, expecting to be able to turn left at a green arrow become stuck behind these people, and lean on their horns. The city respects this individual freedom by having their only action to this being the posting of a small 'no tocar bocina' sign under a tree at the curb. I lend my support to this scene by wearing ear plugs to bed.

Freedom

Sadly, when I see the word Freedom I hear Mel Gibson's voice in Braveheart.  It is a recurring theme in Chile, from the mundane to the movement trying to fundamentally change education. The latter is ongoing, since the latest round of talks between the students and the government seem to have collapsed. The conservative government is very stubborn, and is predictably not responsive to the demand that education be free, or even arranged differently in any substantial way. The students are also holding firm, and aren't all that interested in offers for lower interest rates for loans and expanded scholarships.  So the government forces have tried to kick the students out of some of the schools they have been occupying, which spurs the reaction of rocks and paint being thrown at the police vehicles, and the liberal use of teargas against the students.

I stumbled into a scene a couple of blocks from our apartment where I snapped these photos, and then the wind changed direction and a diluted teargas cloud introduced me to the acrid smell that precedes anything intense, which our whole family ran into a couple of days later. Last Thursday, as we climbed up out of the metro toward the bus terminal, the station had very few people in it, and most of them had scarves of other clothing over their faces. As we stepped off the train it smelled strongly of overheated brakes or some kind of fire, and it quickly became much more intense. Throats were burning and eyes running, we ran, gasping for breath for the nearest exit, which unfortunately was a few hallways and flights of stairs away. It turns out the police has attempted to re-take the campus of the University of Santiago, just above the Metro station, and their liberal use of teargas filled the station. Was that a bad parenting moment?

Anyway, we boarded our bus quickly enough to escape it. We had to leave the country to renew our visas, so we're in Mendoza, Argentina for a long weekend. It's quite nice, though expensive and much more touristy than I expected. The wine is cheap though, and it is very good. This morning, while we expected sun, the sky looked gray. It turns out the Chilean volcano Puyehue awoke again yesterday, sending ash over much of Argentina again. Our lungs aren't getting a break here. And tomorrow we head back to Chile again, and there are city-wide protests planned for tomorrow and the next day. Such excitement!

A dark day

Horrible news. I will miss you, Dan.

a trip

Last week the Fulbright people brought me and the other 4 Fulbright fellows in Chile together in Valpariaso, a bohemian city on the coast a little over an hour's bus ride away. We gathered on the campus of La Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, where we each gave a short presentation on our planned and ongoing activities here. After that we were treated to lunch and a visit to one of Pablo Neruda's houses (it is amazing that a poet could own so many houses), which was thoughtfully eccentric. While everyone else returned to Santiago that afternoon, we stayed for a couple of days.

Valparaiso has many parts that are grungy, with an air of a port city that has struggled to keep an economic base alive. The streetscapes are at least as colorful as anything I've seen, though from above they all share the same rusty corrugated metal look. The street art was ubiquitous, and of pretty decent quality most of the time. The ascensores, little train car things that haul you up and down the steep hillsides for 20 cents or so, a big tourist attraction, were impressively run down.

Sadly, after less than 36 hours there it became evident that a couple of us had consumed something that was not right. Our plans to return were delayed by a day while we just laid around the hotel room waiting for our bodies to recover to the point where we could handle the bus ride back to Santiago.

It was Fiestas Patrias weekend last weekend (18 Sept), so there were parades, rodeos, traditional dancing, and lots of meat eating. We didn't have the energy to do much related to it once we were back in Santiago (and we had done some of those activities the prior weekend). We did catch the TV report covering the terremoto (a mixture of white wine, pisco, sugar, and pineapple ice cream) drinking contest, with probably 15 minutes of footage of people raising pitchers of this foul mixture to their lips. In the paper that morning we saw a picture of a 79 year old woman, a legendary terremoto chugger apparently, who they reported 'drank like a 15 year old girl.' Now my translation could be off, but it is still disturbing on too many levels.

Anyway, life is busier now. I will be leading a two-day workshop for which I am not at all prepared, so there's some pressure building. My Spanish skills are not improving, which is disappointing, though I know what is needed is just more effort. It's just hard to muster that at the end of a long day's work. Tomorrow is Dia Mundial Sin Autos, which I'm looking forward to. More on that to come. Otherwise, everybody is happy.

Thoughts

I believe, as much as anything else, in serendipity. Within the last week I have been pummeled by climate change events. I could drone on for hours about this, but I'll try to contain myself. First, a recent article on which I was a co-author raised the ire of a visible meteorologist, someone who has long-standing disputes with some aspects of climate research (though notably, not with the effect of greenhouse gases on temperatures, or that human activities are driving rising temperatures). His main complaints relate to our willingness, despite our acknowledgment of uncertainty, to suggest ways to quantify some aspects of that uncertainty for the use of people responsible for planning. Of course, we do not state that this is the only thing planners should consider (and what representative of a water district, for instance, would plan for the future based solely on climate projections, regardless of how uncertainty is characterized?), and of course they should (and do) incorporate other societally driven changes (population growth, land use changes, and so on). That the new generation of climate (or earth system) models include some biophysical feedbacks between land cover and the atmosphere is an exciting advancement, and to see how this changes projections (and estimates of uncertainties) will produce new knowledge. So this person's inflammatory objections hone in on a frequently repeated message of his: that risk and vulnerability assessments should be pursued by communities considering all stresses on the system and that climate projections are a useless component of these assessments. Our paper by contrast summarizes how planners can determine for themselves, in ways that reflect the state of scientific understanding, for their region, time frame, resources, and acceptable risk level, to what degree climate projections should influence their planning decisions. So what’s so objectionable about that?


Occasionally in the morning we tap into NPR (thanks to this interweb thing) to listen to the tepid, moderate take on the day’s U.S. news. I was assaulted this morning by the voice of Rick Perry, an apparent republican candidate for president (are elections really over a year away?), who like so many others is fervently anti-government while suckling at the ample government teat for his salary, health care, and pension, and he even uses his political power to amass personal wealth. OK, he’s a corrupt hypocrite, but here’s the connection to my uneven line of thought: he also belched up the bile that he believes global warming is a hoax. After the experience of Bob Inglis who was willing to let the science of our changing climate affect his opinion that maybe we should do something about unfettered greenhouse gas emissions and was thus promptly replaced by a tea party representative, it is understandable that those who want to maintain their privilege as government employees will avoid facts and just toe the required line on this issue. The fact that the tea party is an entity manufactured by the notorious Koch brothers, who made their billions in the fossil fuel industry is not a secret, so how is it that this sort of disingenuous line spouted by Perry is not completely dismissed? (An aside: I've found that this isn't an issue so much in Chile. No matter what one's political persuasion there is a basic understanding of the findings of climate science, so while how to deal with climate change is argued, that it's happening and will intensify is pretty accepted. Chile essentially has no native fossil fuel industry. Could that be related?)  A study that came out of Yale this week shows most tea party members either think global warming isn’t caused by humans, or that it isn’t happening at all (but they're not alone: there's even a decent slice of democrats in this category). More shockingly, they are the group most likely to think of themselves as “very well informed” and that they “do not need any more information“ about global warming to make up their mind. So it seems like a sort of fundamentalism is the problem, a search by many people to just reach a conclusion and close the issue. There is obvious comfort in that, especially if you latch onto a belief that absolves us of any responsibility for negative impacts to the world our children and grandchildren will inherit. So, what to do? It seems that the answer lies in developing an image of a future that is actually fun, not just a list of things we really should give up. In the academic community I have seen stirs of this, cloaked in language about "intrinsic values" but really pretty good stuff. I'll climb off my soap box now.

Integrating fun and sustainability happened last Tuesday night, when I joined the Santiago ride of the Furiosos Ciclistas. One other person from the PUC and I joined several hundred other cyclists for a nighttime ride through downtown. It was a healthy mix of ages, falling between Critical Mass (though with very little confrontation with cars) and the San José Bike Party (though with no detectable alcohol or herbal combustibles). We did two loops: one through the old downtown area, ringing bells and chanting "somo ... caleta ... andamo bicicleta" (yes, there are supposed to be some 's's in there, but they are generally discarded in Chile). The second loop brought us past the multi-day vigil happening in front of the VTR TV station that lost it's reporter and crew in a plane crash last week. There were probably 15 minutes of somber silence there, which was a logistical issue since we completely blocked the entrance and exit, then we headed down the hill and back to the Plaza Italia, which is the starting point for everything here. To experience, even for an hour, a healthy crowd of friendly cyclists enjoying wide, smooth streets without cars or buses, really does give a sense that a better, and more fun, world is possible.

What kind of world is this?

If only it were so...
But instead we get the complicated place we live. Last Friday a small plane crashed into the sea in southern Chile, and all 21 passengers were killed. (That's nearly as many as were killed in auto accidents over a recent holiday weekend. Isn't news cheerful?). Among them was an extremely popular TV host and his crew, so the news has been featuring this story everywhere. Despite this, the president kept his appointment to meet with students, which appears to be a positive development toward resolving some of the disputes over education reform (and larger structural changes, though that may be too much to expect).

A painted protest sign in the channel of the Rio Mapocho reminded us of another ongoing issue related to the plans to build a massive hydroelectric project, the HidroAysén, in a relatively pristine area in the Patagonia region in southern Chile. This has been widely reported in scientific and popular press around the world. There is widespread opposition (there's an impressively produced and organized web site here). It does seem that, without having seen a single building with insulation, and only rarely things like double-paned windows, it is hard for a government to make a strong case for an urgently-needed increase in energy supply. The heating in a house typically consists of an estufa, a steel box with an open flame of burning gas in front. The heat generated by this is absorbed by whatever mass is right next to it, and most quickly escapes through the drafty windows and into cold concrete walls. It's so wasteful I'd rather be cold than light one of these things. Though of course when I find one that's on I do tend to stand next to it. So is building massive dams, permanently submerging stunning valleys (where indigenous people live), and running a 1200 mile long set of transmission lines the best solution for energy? To my outsider eyes it seems pretty misguided. I have heard some say that the energy is really aimed to supply more cheap energy to private mining companies, so the public won't even see a tangible benefit. Maybe this is another manifestation of the Chinese approach to using dams as social engineering, or maybe it just falls under the same criticism Peter Gleick levels toward the World Bank, that governments may (think they) know how to spend $7 billion on one huge water project, but they don't know how to manage 7000 $1 million projects even if they'd reap far more cumulative benefits.

So, how will my work on climate change impacts on water resources fit into the large-scale water development plans of the country? I'm still in the think of working out computer systems and re-writing code to get into that. But hopefully there will be more on this topic.

Another day of biking, work, and empanadas

We switched to daylight savings time last Saturday night, so now the sun doesn't rise until after 7. Today was overcast, so it stayed a little cold and gloomy. But of course it was still biking weather. My new route is more direct and requires a little more aggressive riding, but it's not that different from any other busy urban area. The first third of the route includes a ciclovia, which is incredibly well used. I snapped this photo while riding across Francisco Bilbao (I have found that you need to use the full name of the street to avoid ambiguity; I had been saying I lived on Yañez, but this didn't seem to help people. This may be partly due to influential families having many relatives be the source of street names. Like the peach tree family in Atlanta). One thing you may make out is the scarf across the face of the oncoming cyclist. Maybe a third of the cyclists this morning had either that or a surgical mask. I had read about the poor air quality in Santiago, and thought maybe I should look at it again. I went to the government air quality map, which was less than satisfying. A web search produces distressing statistics on the loose standards for declaring air quality emergencies, the impacts of contamination on children and on and on. The wealthiest neighborhoods, at higher elevations further from the center of town escape much of this problem. Santiago suffers this problem most in the winter, when inversions trap smog and particulates near the surface. Since we're moving into Spring, maybe I will be able to continue to live in denial of this. We're not going to move, I can't change where I work, and I'm not going to get off my bicycle. But maybe I will buy a surgical mask.

The national strike of this Wednesday and Thursday was again complicated enough where I can't say I really understand the nuances of the struggle. There was a crowd of union marchers in front of our apartment building who joined with a team of students at the intersection, where they banged pots, blew horns and whistles, and sporadically occupied the intersection. This demonstration was peaceful, though this was apparently not the case in other spots. There are competing accusations about whether these are a few bad apples among the protesters or if this is caused by the police infiltrating the protests (they admit to infiltrating, but of course not to inciting violence). Anyway, it makes for dramatic photos and stories on the international scene (even NPR picked it up). And again, I'll point toward the bearshapedshpere blog for a good personal account and amazing photos documenting the strike. On Wednesday I was advised to stay home, but Thursday, despite the strike, I rode the ~10 km to the campus because I just had too much to do, and I'm very productive at home. There were several spots of charred pavement where burning barricades had been erected the night before, and a heavy smell of smoke hung in the air. But mostly it felt like a normal day once I was sequestered in my office.

We have cable

Today the técnicos from our internet provider came by the apartment and now we're connected with a wi-fi/cable/telephone package that reminds me we're not missioners. When they installed it, as seems to be typical, they didn't remove old, non-functioning lines, but just added new ones to the tangled mess. But it all seems to be working, so I won't complain.

Work is now a regular occurrence, which is how I am most comfortable. I have made some minor progress on generating volumes of data, which I do very effectively. There is a greater sense of focus now that we're all aligning our goals for the next few months. I'm seeing how well I do at using a linux machine as my primary computer, which is surprisingly easy so far. The spanish keyboard is the biggest challenge. Or maybe it is just my Spanish. I started taking lessons tonight, since I am tired of being so clumsy with my Spanish, or at least not getting any better as the weeks go by. Anyway, I still enjoy the view from my office window, which offered a fine snapshot of lifting condensation level as a front collided with the Andes. I'm sure the cell phone camera won't do it justice, but here it is anyway.

Plumbing

Our first weeks here we stayed in a house of a friend (a tremendously generous person we know through Maryknoll) in the working class suburb of Santiago called Ñuñoa, which I loved first of all because two ñs in a short word is fun. It is a family friendly neighborhood, with little playgrounds on almost every block, walkable, quiet streets, and because it is further East, great views of the Andes.  One morning while washing dishes a large buddle appeared on the floor, which I traced to a badly deteriorated drain. They don't have traps like in the US, but these weird siphon things, which I had to learn about as I assembled this PVC mess with virtually no tools. It seemed to work, and doing something apparently useful made me feel good, as opposed to the usual incompetence I feel trying to explain to a hardware store clerk what I'm looking for or trying to do.

The apartment we just moved into is similarly challenged, with the newly installed washing machine depositing its drainage water onto the kitchen floor. As a renter now, it felt more appropriate to have the owner deal with it, and the plumber she called, a very nice older fellow who lives down the block, showed up to assess it. At my urging we moved the washer into the shower (there are 3 full baths, so we can lose one to this), and this is the final product. The essence of the work was to make it function, and it seems to do that, as we can adjust the water temperature by using the shower knobs and the discharge goes right down the drain. Excellent!

Alright, that's way too much about plumbing. But all the time spent in hardware stores has highlighted a value of time that is different than in our lives in the US. When it's my turn to deal with the guy at the hardware store down the street, I can ask as many questions as I like, engage in idle chatter, or whatever, and they don't make me feel rushed. In general people make time for interactions, and even expect it. When we stopped by the apartment to look at it, the owner (an elderly widow who lived in the apartment until fairly recently), her son, and a neighbor were all there. We shared a big bottle of coke and some cake (from the local Lider chain, which was recently bought by Wal-mart...), and sat around the table chatting. The business we were transacting was worthy of maybe 20 minutes, but we were there probably 2 hours. It is challenging for me to think about having enough things on hand to be sure we can offer similar hospitality to visitors, and to leave plenty of unallocated time in my schedule to accommodate this sort of thing.

A sense of place

Without regular internet access these days, there's no ability to upload photos with this post. After three weeks of looking for housing, we finally have moved into an apartment. It's dirty and has a very strange and inconvenient layout, but the location is great. Our first night there (Tuesday 8/9) the power went out mysteriously, and was reconnected just before the sun set. The student protests, which have been prohibited from the city center, migrated to other congregating spots, one of which was right at our intersection. We listened to pounding drums and banging pots (the "cacerolazos" that are mentioned in a decent report here) until about midnight, and fortunately the tear gas (another useful vocabulary word: bombas lacrimógenas) wasn't in our area that night. Some background (in English) on the protests, and lots of good photos, are posted on a blog by another norteamericano living in Santiago. It's hard to know where all of this is headed, with something like 80% support for the students, and the president with a 25% approval rating. Though I imagine the 25% that support the president represent a disproportionate fraction of the country's wealth. More of the mundane life details will follow once I can post some photos.

Uprising

So the funny giraffe students in the earlier post have become more serious. Public school students throughout Chile are demanding more just education (it's complicated), and things have escalated tonight. While we ate another lunch devoid of any vegetable matter, at a place that felt like a diner, I saw on the TV protesters in the street, tear gas clouding the air, and water cannons blasting the students to disperse their unauthorized gathering. I noticed that this was happening not far from where we were, and saw some reports from the intersection of Yañez and Providencia, where the apartment is for which we are supposed to sign a lease on Monday. When we returned to our sort-of suburban enclave of Ñuñoa, people were in the streets, or at least out in front of their apartments and houses, banging pots and pans with wooden spoons, showing solidarity with the students. The president's 25% approval rating may be starting to show in more tangible ways.

I go to work

This week I started working at the PUC, so now I'm actually fulfilling some of my Fulbright responsibilities instead of just looking for housing in a strange city. They had a nice office waiting for me with a plaque on the door with my temporary name "profesor visitante" and there's a bathroom across the hall with a similar sign. The view from the window is amazing with the snow capped Andes right there. You just can't get away from those things.

Today I biked in (maybe 8 km) and the traffic was manageable. The lack of street signs left me overshooting a few spots, but with prominent geographical features it is hard to lose your direction. One sight along the way was a kid from the high school dressed as a giraffe. There were two of them, and they'd dance, and then make an announcement about their cause and ask for coins to help out. The public schools are in the midst of a student strike (a "toma") where they occupy the school and skewer the chair legs into the fence surrounding the property. They seem pretty organized, and have made demands for more equality between schools in rich and poor neighborhoods, free public education through university, and some other things. The government is sort of responding, but not really. That sort of thing is very counter to the far right, business orientation of the government. It's hard to see how this will turn out.

I crossed an urban creek near the San Joaquin campus of the PUC that looked like chocolate milk after the rain yesterday. It is comforting to see civil engineering features like this, which could easily be in San Jose. Former agricultural land turned into suburbs, with the concomitant flooding and erosion issues.

A bike ride in Santiago

I took out a rusty bike that had been leaning against the side of the house and rode a few km (using culturally appropriate SI units). I looked at the Ride the City site for Santiago, which is like google maps but tailored for cyclists, highlighting bike paths, showing bike repair shops. It was helpful in locating streets with ciclovias, like this one. A left side, 2-way bike lane on a cramped 3-lane one way busy street. The space for bikes was just barely enough for passing without clipping handlebars, and an unfortunate feature of this design is that any slack space must bump into the left traffic lane. It was heavily used, and was flexible in design. It was separated from the road in some places, and they were creative in accommodating obstacles. A goal of the city is to have something like 550 km of these paths within the next few years, which is impressive. I have read several feature articles in the paper on cycling, so it is on people's radar. Nationwide and in Santiago the use of bikes is at about 3% of all trips, according to an article I read in El Mercurio yesterday.

 I can't help but contrast this with the South Bay, where I remember a number around 1% of trips being made by bike. And in Santiago, there's an amazingly clean, efficient and cheap metro system as an option too, which makes the 3% number more impressive. Another contrast is that the bike ways are really ad hoc, following no apparent design standards. They are not lanes where one can go 15 or 20 mph, but only provide a safe lane for people to get to work, which makes expanding the network cheaper, and actually seems to serve the needs of many people fairly well. The spandex crowd will still ride in the traffic lanes, and I do the same when I get frustrated with the constant starting and stopping of the ciclovias. It will be nice to see how the use increases as the weather warms.

On the downhill slope

Last week, while in the plane from California to Chile, I turned 50. Nothing changed. We were all so sleep deprived that the rest of the day was consumed by naps and a slow realization that we were now in the lower hemisphere. It also meant leaving a perfectly mild south Bay Area summer for the cold Santiago winter. Once I figure out how to download photos from the cell phone I'll post some of them here. In the meantime, I dug up a cartoon that captures my reflection on aging.

The beginning

My resistance to starting a blog is due to a couple of factors: 1) I don't really understand what a blog is for (aside from just another web page), 2) I don't know why anyone would want to read generic postings on my work or life. Too many times someone has asked what I do, and after a couple of minutes of answering, with growing excitement as I describe the connection between civil engineering infrastructure, climate, urban design, and on and on, it slowly dawns on me that I totally missed the cue that their question was a polite one, needing a simple "I teach" or if elaboration is needed "I teach at a university." But I have been promised by many that blogs are a productive use of time, a valuable way to organize one's thoughts, and even a way to facilitate community building. The last bit was enough to get me to give it a try. If anyone actually does read this, I ask your patience as I figure out how to tailor these postings to be meaningful, interesting, and concise.