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.