For fall break last week, I headed north of the border with a fellow Sun editor to visit a friend from home who goes to school in Montréal. While I had visited her a couple of times before, I’ve always visited at the beginning of January when her spring semester is just starting and the mercury refuses to budge above 15F. Visiting during a more comfortable time of the year allowed us to explore the city for once, not to mention experience the autumn scenery on the six hour drive. And, since I was definitely not alone in my choice of fall break destination, I met up with three other Cornellians at a pub in Montréal, continuing the trend of the world being full of Cornellians wherever I happen to be (Shanghai, the Caribbean, JFK airport, etc.).
Fall break always seems to come at the point when your sleep schedule has been squeezed into the strangest hours, when exhaustion from piles of prelims and papers makes every day pass increasingly slowly, and when the idea of a change of scene is very welcome. While it was strange not heading home to Connecticut for fall break, the two extra days off were still exactly what I needed: a relaxing distraction. On Monday (Columbus Day in the US and Canadian Thanksgiving up north), I accomplished absolutely nothing besides procuring some Montréal bagels for my apartment; accomplishing nothing after weeks of tackling a seemingly infinite to-do list is a wonderful, wonderful feeling.
Upon my return to Ithaca, I was, of course, met with the consequences of my inactivity: a wall of work (some that I knew about, some that seemed to appear from nowhere) that made the short week seem painfully long. Also adding to that stress was the fact that it snowed on Wednesday. Not cool. Now I’m back into the swing of things, trying to tear down the post-it notes on the wall behind my computer as quickly as I put them up. At least it’s not snowing anymore.
I was wearing shorts last week, if I recall correctly. Ithaca was still basking in the seemingly endless sunshine that, in a normal year, would have ceased to exist after orientation week (or so it always seems…).
Then came this week. The mercury plummeted and the skies turned grey; we won’t be making it out of the 40s today, and the wind chill is in the mid 30s. Maybe not so coincidentally, this week marked the unofficial start of prelim season. Every professor on campus feels the need to get at least one major test or assignment in during the couple of weeks leading up to our long Columbus Day weekend. Seats will become harder to come by in the library, partially because nobody wants to play frisbee on the arts quad when it’s 37 and drizzling. Soon enough, though, we’ll have a long weekend to recharge. Judging from what I’ve heard from my fellow Daily Sun editors, I wouldn’t be surprised to run into friends on the streets of Montréal in a couple of weekends.
The Monday after spring break is one of the more obnoxious days of the academic year. Nearly everyone on campus has just spent a slightly less stressful week spread out across the globe. The stream of cars on Route 79 entering Ithaca on Sunday evening carries better-rested students whose sunburn still kind of hurts and who are just starting to get back to work on the bus ride in from New York City. The transition from break to school is never an easy one, but this year it was a bit tougher because, when I arrived in Ithaca for what is supposedly spring, it was snowing. Thank you, mother nature, for reminding us that, no, Ithaca doesn’t observe spring like the rest of the world does. Kind of like Arizona not doing the whole Daylight Savings Time thing, but colder.
Group projects pick up where they left off, even though everyone’s brain is still somewhere else for those first few days. Paper topics loom ominously on your computer’s desktop, waiting to be contemplated, researched, and outlined. Prelims sneak up from behind. Perhaps most terrifying: there’s only a little over a month of classes left in the semester. Back to work we go.
Last Wednesday, we got a decent amount of snow at Cornell; something to the tune of six inches or so. Far from paralyzing all human activity, the snowstorm made for some good photo opportunities around campus. Jenn and I decided to embark from Collegetown at around 6pm, starting in the Cascadilla Gorge area. The photo trek brought us through the engineering and arts quads before reaching the clocktower, Ho Plaza, and eventually Cornell Law School. We called it quits after about 2.5 hours; by the end, few extremities had any feeling left, but I’d say the photos were worth the time and effort. See a selection of them in the slideshow below.
Slideshow
The photos in the slideshow aren’t in any particular order.
Posts about my travels in Argentina and Uruguay are upcoming…eventually. Yesterday the hard drive on my laptop died (for the third time in its 2.5 year lifetime), rendering me without my photos for the time being. Fortunately, I have everything backed up on an external hard drive, so no photos have been lost to my knowledge.
In half an hour, I leave Chile for good. A mix of sadness to be leaving and excitement to see friends and family stateside is combining with the ugly forecast for snow and wintry mix (ithacation, is that you?) in the NYC area, which will most likely hinder my plans to get into LaGuardia Airport in New York on time at 1PM tomorrow. The next post might be from CT, or it might be from Miami.
Now accepting recommendations for hotels near Miami airport.
Gülce and I arrived in Mendoza on Sunday morning after a half-hour flight over the Andes from Santiago. We’re making all of our journeys on this trip on LAN Airlines, save for the segment between Buenos Aires and Montevideo, thanks to LAN’s unbeatable South America Airpass (which gives serious airfare discounts to foreigners in South America who’ve flown down to the continent on select airlines). We’re combining that with hostel stays in the cities of Mendoza, Argentina; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Montevideo, Uruguay.
Over the course of our two days in Mendoza, we found ourselves constantly comparing Argentina with Chile in more ways than one. We don’t feel like we stick out as much as foreigners here in Argentina, probably because there’s a significant number of tourists in Mendoza and because the Argentinean population as a whole is more European than that of Chile. The Argentinean people in general are much more full of life and a bit more outgoing than their neighbors on the other side of the Andes.
That said, we’ve been seriously confused about basic issues such as the correct time. From what we learned tonight, various parts of Argentina have different time zones based on their geographical locations and their ties with the national government. Something like that would be unthinkable in Chile (for both geographical and institutional reasons). Even my computer, connected to the internet, is mistaken as to the correct time in Buenos Aires. Very strange.
The food has been incredible; from the $10 per person all-you-can-eat buffet we went to on our first night in town (which resulted us in eating about 90 cows between four people) to the ravioli dish I had last night that has got to rank as one of the top Italian dishes I’ve ever eaten, the quality and price of food is seriously impressive.
Mendoza was a perfect introduction to Argentina. It has a metropolitan area of about 800,000 people, making it sizable but not too huge. Every street is lined with shady trees, plazas and parks abound, and classic cars fill the streets (there were basically zero classic cars in Chile; strange contrast). While not consuming entire cows, we passed a lot of our time aimlessly wandering through the city, browsing various open-air markets, and we spent much of the day on Monday walking to and exploring Parque San Martín at the western edge of the city.
Despite the hot temperatures, we managed to cover a good 7-8 miles during the day, which included a visit to the seemingly abandoned soccer complex used for the World Cup, last held in Argentina in 1978. We also climbed Cerro de la Gloria, a big hill at the eastern edge of Parque San Martín with great views of the Andes and the city of Mendoza. At the top is a series of statues and monuments to General San Martín (an independence hero in Argentina and Latin America as a whole) and the Army of the Andes.
Those familiar with Mendoza are probably wondering why we didn’t hit a single vineyard during our brief stay in the city; to be honest, Gülce and I had experienced enough wine producution during our excursion to Curicó and Lontué back in Chile in September. We had learned in depth about the process of producing wine, we had purchased high-quality, cheap wine, and we had consumed it, too. There wasn’t much novelty in doing it all over again on the other side of the Andes.
Earlier this evening, we arrived in hot and humid Buenos Aires, where we’ll be until Sunday, when we head to Uruguay. I’ll try to update more frequently, but there’s so much to see and do that I don’t want to spend all day writing about experiences instead of having new ones.
Slideshow
Below you will find an embedded slideshow of photos of our adventures in Mendoza and Buenos Aires. Photos are in chronological order.
Facebook statuses tell the story: it’s snowing at Cornell…and sticking. This unofficial entry to winter never fails to brighten (if but for a moment) an increasingly dark fall semester, with deadlines for final papers and projects looming in the not-so-distant future along with the promise of the brief respite provided by Thanksgiving Break. Sitting at what is basically the other end of the world, the closest I can get to pressing my nose against a frosty window is Cornell’s live view webcam. It didn’t get dark in Puerto Montt tonight until about 9:30PM; we’re a little over a month away from the longest day of the year in the southern hemisphere, and it’ll only get warmer from here on out.
There will be some serious climate shock happening when I set foot in the Northeast again in a little over a month.
Since we’re now in the month of November, those of us doing SIT’s Economic Development & Globalization program here in Chile are now embarking on our Independent Study Projects (ISPs), which last until the end of the month. Four of the ten students in the group have chosen to leave Santiago to conduct field research on their topics of choice, and I just arrived in my destination this morning. The four of us have stretched out from the shipping port of Arica on the Chile-Peru border to Puerto Montt, the capital of Chile’s tenth region of Los Lagos, often referred to as the gateway to Patagonia.
I arrived this morning on a double-decker bus outfitted with some seriously comfy reclining leather seats. Since seats are assigned on long-distance buses in Chile, I made sure to get a seat in the front row of the upper deck. The decision paid off with a great view of the landscapes of southern Chile after the sun rose around 6:30, when the bus first stopped in the city of Osorno. After making a few more stops along the highway and in the town of Frutillar, we made our way into some cloudier weather and arrived in Puerto Montt, which was living up to its nickname of Muerto Montt, mostly because it was 8:30 on a Sunday morning.
After a short cab ride to the hostel I’ll be calling home til the 22nd of the month, I unpacked and made myself at home in my single room.
Weather-wise, it actually feels like November here (the northern hemisphere’s version), rather than July, which is what Santiago had been feeling like. The temperature is hovering in the mid-50’s and it’s overcast, with occasional rain showers (like Ithaca!). Come to think of it, rain isn’t something I’ve experienced since the last time I was in the south of Chile (that time, in the eighth region), which was the later half of September. Wow.
So, what am I doing here? Well, for my ISP, I’m investigating the responses from public and private sources to environmental and sanitary issues in Chile’s salmon aquaculture industry. During my stay in the area, I’m hoping to conduct a range of interviews with representatives from businesses, governmental agencies, and NGOs to get a better idea of what’s happening, what should be done, who should be leading the movement forward, etc. Puerto Montt is known as the salmon capital of Chile, and the salmon industry is all over this region, from the gigantic freshwater Lake Llanquihue (yan-KEE-way) about 20 minutes to the north, to the island of Chiloé (chee-lo-EH) to the southwest.
Below is a map of my semester so far, which is always accessible by clicking ‘Other Pages’ above and then clicking on the ‘Chile’ graphic. The southernmost point on the map is Puerto Montt, to give you an idea of where I am in the world. I’m at the latitude of part of Argentina, this part of Chile, and some of New Zealand. Not much else.
Stepping out of Santiago’s airport for the first time in late August, I could see my breath; it was far cry from the hot and humid weather we had left behind when we departed from Miami. After enduring a month and a half of not-so-warm temperatures, mid october brought some relief as spring in the southern hemisphere finally made itself felt. Santiago is now in a perpetual state of warm, dry weather that I’m loving every minute of, but it just doesn’t feel right.
Last night, kids were walking down the street in their costumes as the sun refused to set and the air lacked that cool, crisp feeling that I’ve always associated with Halloween. Meanwhile, as I watched a dubbed version of The Day After Tomorrow on TV last night, I saw the first Christmas-themed commercial since I’ve been down here. Without the holiday buffer of US Thanksgiving, Chile wastes no time getting excited for Christmas. The weirdest part of Christmas down here? I’ve been hearing Christmas carols / wintry songs (instrumental version of “Sleigh Ride”, anyone?) on the radio since the week I arrived, and yesterday my host cousin was whistling “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” as he did some work.
And we get deeper and deeper into holiday season, the feeling will probably just get weirder and weirder.
While every day of my semester has been unique so far (with the uniqueness to continue all semester long, since we have different class schedules and excursions depending on the week/day), here’s a rundown of today to give you a feel for daily life in Santiago de Chile.
7:30AM: Alarm goes off next to my bed. Snooze.
7:40AM: Alarm goes off next to my bed. Snooze.
7:50AM: Alarm goes off next to my bed. Ok…now I’ll actually get up. As with every day, it’s hard to get out of bed in the morning since the vast majority of Chilean homes aren’t heated, and it’s winter here. The comfort of my four layers of blankets will have to wait until tonight. Put on a Patagonia wool sweater and wearily make my way to the table for breakfast.
7:55AM: Eat breakfast, which has already been laid out on the table by my host mother before she left for work. Heat up some water in the kitchen for the requisite first couple cups of tea of the day. Eat some sliced bananas mixed with yogurt and some white bread with apricot marmelade. Clear table.
8:15AM: Head to the calefont (gas-fueled hot water heater that is typically found in Chilean homes) at the end of the kitchen. Turn gas valve to start flow of propane, light match, stick it in calefont, prepare for shower.
8:20AM: Head to the bathroom, which is always FREEZING in the morning thanks to its perpetually open vertical slit-like window. I guess I could close it one day, but nobody seems to have touched it, so I’ll just keep it as is. Builds character. Proceed to tweak the individual hot and cold water valves until I reach a happy medium somewhere between burn-your-skin-off hot and antarctic cold (harder to achieve than you might think).
8:35AM: Check weather forecast online, get dressed accordingly. Open curtains. Stare at Andes mountains for a bit. Put on layers of warm clothing, even though the forecast says 65 and partly sunny. At this hour, it’s only in the low 40s outside.
8:45AM: Brush teeth, pack up things for class. Make sure I have at least one still camera and one video camera in my bag for whatever might need to be documented that day.
8:55AM: Head out the door, but not before grabbing my bagged lunch on the kitchen counter and turning off the calefont (nobody likes death by negligent calefonting). Walk a couple of blocks east to meet up with Gülce, one of the girls in my group who lives nearby.
9:00AM: Walk 3/4 mile down Avenida Simón Bolivar to Avenida Ossa, where we descend into the Simón Bolivar metro station.
9:20AM: Pass my Tarjeta BIP! by the proximity reader at the turnstile. Card doesn’t register. Works after a few tries. Screen on turnstile tells me I have 880 pesos left on my card — enough for a couple more peak-hour rides (420 pesos per ride). Guess I’ll have to recharge this afternoon.
9:22AM: Wait on the platform for the next Tobalaba-bound train. It’s peak rush hour, so the next train arrives about 45 seconds after the previous one leaves the station. While waiting for the train, catch up on the news being displayed on the several widescreen Samsung TVs that are mounted over the platform.
9:23AM: Next metro train arrives…fortunately it isn’t packed beyond belief. Board train, take backpack off and put it between my legs on the floor, and watch highlights from last night’s World Cup qualifier game between Brazil and Chile on one of the three flat screen TVs in the metro car. Get stared at for obviously not being a Chilean, since I’m taller than a good 95% of the people on the train, and I’m blond.
9:35AM: After three stops, arrive at Tobalaba station, which marks the end of Line 4 of the metro. Disembark with everyone else on the train and join the stampede to connect to Line 1.
9:38AM: Board San Pablo-bound Line 1 metro at Tobalaba and head towards our stop of Estación Central.
9:43AM: Doors have been open at Salvador station for a good two mintues now…everyone on board starting to get fidgety.
9:45AM: Announcement on the train tells us that the train is delayed. I think we’re all aware.
9:50AM: Announcement on the train orders an immediate evacuation of the train. Nobody’s panicking, so I guess there’s no need to worry about a bomb or anything. A second announcement follows, telling us that service between Salvador and Baquedano (the next station) has been suspended. Everyone leaves the station and is handed a ticket with the word “Evacuación” on it by a Metro de Santiago employee.
9:55AM: Make a call to Eduardo, the assistant director of my program, to tell him that Gülce and I have just been evacuated off the metro and will definitely be late for the 10AM start of this morning’s lecture at the Universidad de Santiago de Chile (USACH). Upon surfacing to street level, we observe the curbs are crowded with evacuated metro passengers trying to get a ride on the already-packed micros (city buses). There’s no way we’re gonna fit on one of these buses unless we strap ourselves to the roof, so we start walking towards Baquedano station.
10:05AM: Descend into Baquedano station and overhear an announcement that explains that all service between Escuela Militar and Salvador (everywhere east of where I am now) has been suspended. Good thing we’re heading west. Board new metro train and continue to Estación Central.
10:15AM: Get off at Estación Central and make the short walk to the Faculty of Administration and Economics at USACH.
10:20AM: Almost an hour and a half after leaving my apartment, I’m at class (Economic Development & Globalization seminar) in our classroom that is sponsored by Ernst & Young. Lecturer today is talking about agriculture policy in Latin America…right up my alley! Even better, he actually has a good powerpoint presentation, unlike a bunch of the other profs we’ve had in our seminar. Our class comprises of us 10 Americans with SIT and five Chileans who are in the class more for intercultural exchange than for their own knowledge.
11:00AM: Coffee break in the middle of the seminar (10AM-12PM). Walk to the cafeteria in the next building over to get an excellent café cortado that’s dispensed from a NesCafé machine. Can’t beat a 50 cent cup of quality coffee. We’re actually given coffee vouchers every day at USACH, so make that a free cup of quality coffee.
11:15AM: Return to the classroom for 45 more minutes of lecture.
12:00PM: At the end of the lecture, the professor asks us our majors and mine elicits laughter from the group because it is so perfectly aligned with what this guy studies. He gives his business card to everyone in the class and asks us to contact him in the future if we have any further questions. He’ll definitely be a good contact later in the semester when I’m working on my Independent Study Project (ISP). Stick around USACH for an hour as I finish up essays about our summer reading books (technocratic democracy anyone? anyone at all?) that are due this afternoon.
1:00PM: Hop on the Escuela Militar-bound metro at Estación Central. Whatever disruption happened earlier has been taken care of.
1:25PM: Arrive at Tobalaba and go to print my essays at an internet café.
1:40PM: Head back across Avenida 11 de Septiembre to the SIT / WorldLearning offices and eat my packed lunch with some of my compañeros del grupo.
2:30PM: First session of our two credit Field Studies Seminar…one of our less frequent classes. Discuss the process of experiential learning and cultural analysis with Fernando, our program’s director.
4:00PM: Class is done for the day. Head down to the Tobalaba metro station to head back to Simón Bolivar with three groupmates. Recharge my Tarjeta BIP! with 5000 pesos of credit (~$10). Stop by the cafe/bakery inside the metro station to grab a water before heading down to the platform.
4:25PM: Arrive at Simón Bolivar and proceed a block south to CineHoyts3D, a monstrosity of a movie theater located in a relatively boring part of Avenida Ossa (it’s bordered by a gas station and private homes). Get in line for tickets to Tony Manero, a movie about a dancer during the repressive Pinochet era of Chile in the 1970s.
4:30PM: I’ve checked in for international flights faster than the people ahead of me are buying their movie tickets. Turns out if you have Movistar cell service in Chile, you get a discount at CineHoyts, so all of these people are waiting for discount code text messages as they buy their tickets. It’s already plenty cheap compared to the US…about $5.
4:35PM: After getting ticket to Tony Manero, proceed to snack bar. Debating whether I should go to the Dunkin Donuts that’s right next to the snack bar. Nah…gotta have popcorn.
4:40PM: Head upstairs to the third floor of this 16-screen multiplex. There’s a full-fledged café on the second floor, and another full snack bar on the third. Our theater has some serious stadium seating and there around four other people here.
7:15PM: Emerge from CineHoyts with puzzled faces and minds. A serial killer who aspires to be John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Fever (comically translated in Spanish as ‘Fiebre de Sábado por la noche’)? Really? Was all of that blunt trauma really necessary? Could they have developed maybe ONE other character besides the protagonist? Very strange movie.
7:30PM: Arrive home. Go online, check email, facebook, flickr, etc. Read on the website of a Santiago newspaper that this morning’s metro disruption was caused by a woman falling onto the tracks (or throwing herself onto the tracks) at the Los Leones station. Whether or not it was a suicide attempt is unclear, but she was alive following the incident/accident and was taken to a hospital by paramedics judging by a video I watched online.
8:00PM: My host mother returns home from work, comes to say hi, and starts preparing dinner.
8:45PM: Dinner is served. Tonight: Lentils with parmesean cheese (yum) and a plate of boiled (?) cauliflower or something like it. Followed by some white bread with apricot jam and manjar (’man-har’), which is a brown cream made from sugar and boiled milk that resembles peanut butter in consistency but caramel in flavor. Finished off with a cup of tea and a small cup of Chicha, a slightly fizzy, tangy, and sweet Chilean liquor made from grapes but stronger than wine. Apparently the upcoming Fiestas Patrias holiday on September 18th is all about drinking Chicha and eating empanadas. mmm.
9:45PM: Retreat back to my room and take care of some reading, and this blog post.
