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.