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Santiago, Chile
Blog: Patrick and Katrina do the Globe - 10 September 2009
Santiago is best known as a capital city and a gateway for visitors to Chile and the South American west coast. At first glance, or more correctly at our first glance on an overcast day with no Andes in the distance, the city appeared as an urban jungle of tall, ugly skyscrapers.
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Sights to behold, downtown Santiago (and barrio brasil)
Blog: Bearshapedsphere - 9 September 2009
Today I saw several things that gave me pause, and while I failed to see many more, as I still have not perfected that 360 degree vision, what I saw brought me joy, in some strange way. Maybe it will you, too.So now (and I'm allowed to do this, because I went to law school), I enter into evidence, the following:Exhibit A. Chileans dressed in traditionalish Japanese garb, accompanied by a man in some sort of an exaggerated mortarboard or tophat. Perhaps this is related to a movie I know nothing about. I often know nothing about movies. Any thoughts?
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Vigilante Privado for Hire. What would you make him do?
Blog: Bearshapedsphere - 8 September 2009
Today I went to the bank, a fairly infrequent occurrence, given that I do most of my banking online, it's all very Jetsons-like (that's Los Supersónicos to you)here in Santiago, banking and healthcare being automated to a degree that the United States can only dream about.
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Santiago: You can't always get what you want, even if it's on the menu
Blog: Bearshapedsphere - 6 September 2009
Here in Chile we like to play a little game. It goes like this: See this thing on the menu? Well, I'd like to order it. You can't order it. Hmmm, what about this other thing? Nope, that either.
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Traditional Santiago, La Piojera, or a gringa finally gets out and about.
Blog: Bearshapedsphere - 2 September 2009
My friends have been taunting me with La Piojera since we first met. Oh sure, they say, let's go! La Piojera is great, it's traditional, it's messy, it's smoky, it's crazy, it's dangerous, it's fun. Let's go.To which I say, great! I'm on it.
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El mes de los gatos/ Kitty month
Blog: Bearshapedsphere - 30 August 2009
So the end of August means many things to you. Perhaps it's the end of the blackberry season, time to dust off your pencils and books, looking forward to Labor day. I have been somewhat remiss in not educating you on the finer points of August here in Santiago, which is that it is cat month.
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Photos Galore! Santiago east and west on a beautiful sunshiney day.
Blog: Bearshapedsphere - 21 August 2009
On a picture postcard day like this, one that comes after the rain, and before the next rain, and before the smog has a chance to creep back like a midnight-snack running houseguest who opens your fridge and moves stuff around, you can't help but want to hang out the window and take pictures.
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Brought to you from Electricity-free Wednesday (Chilectra vies with Telefónica for most hated service provider.)
Blog: Bearshapedsphere - 19 August 2009
It all started last night when I came home around midnight, and noticed the lobby suspiciously dark and the elevator out of order.
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SAG uses frightening ruminant imagery to instill fear in travelers.
Blog: Bearshapedsphere - 17 August 2009
Caution: You may spit out whatever you are eating somewhere around photo four. You have been warned.Four countries and seventeen hours later, I arrived to Santiago's spiffy airport and followed the usual hamster wheel to International Police, through the duty free shop and to pick up my luggage. Here, as is lately the case, I was asked on several occasions if I'd declared any food I might be carrying. Yes, I had, I responded (almond butter and grapenuts, if you were wondering).
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Confessions of a Travel Writer, the view from Chile
Blog: Bearshapedsphere - 13 August 2009
I stumbled on the last fifteen or twenty minutes of Confessions of a Travel Writer on the Travel channel quite by accident. I happened to be in the United States, and relaxing after a long family-intensive day by turning on the TV as my mother, who'd had an allergic reaction and was resting up from that, sat beside me.
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Supermarkets in DC, Santiago, and in a place near you!
Blog: Bearshapedsphere - 28 July 2009
The grocery store de rigeur in DC is the Safeway. Sure, there's that new Harris Teeter on Kalorama and this and that food warehouse here and there if you have a car and can make it to the burbs, but if not, Safeway's mainly your game.
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Steel vs. Iron, a study in words. Bearshapedsphere opines on language, again!
Blog: Bearshapedsphere - 8 July 2009
Although the packing fairies and cleaning patrol failed to show up, the ants in our pants brigade did a fine job of acceleratedly standing up and sitting down to back up the external hard drive onto another external hard drive, while doing the packing and cleaning for the missing fairies and aforementioned patrol. This mega backup task is one that I've had on my whiteboard next to "call dentist" for longer than I should probably admit. At least I can erase one of them now.
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Inédito! (Unheard of!) Pecan pie in Chile! And language musing.
Blog: Bearshapedsphere - 6 July 2009
Today on my way to the land of pink and trivia games and measuring of pregnant bellies with soft woolen yarn (darnit, didn't even come close!) I took the metro. I did this because, despite major obstacles, such as the great pecan seizing of 2008 and also the very overpricedly available pecans and Jumbo and Santa Isabel (2990 CLP for 100gr, or about US $25 a pound), and then the finding of pecans, but in their blasted shells, which lands!
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Extra passport pages and meeting Chris from Art of Noncomformity
Blog: Bearshapedsphere - 3 July 2009
When we're not playing elaborate six degrees of separation games in Santiago, where the number six is replaced with the number two, expats are giving each other travel ideas and tips for the weary and passport-pageless. The sewing in of extra passport pages is a thrill, to be sure, though they won't sew anything else, those discriminatrices.
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Colorless Santiago?
Blog: Bearshapedsphere - 1 July 2009
One day I was at BandH photo in New York, my second or third trip to the store, this time to discuss the possibility of buying a "penguin lens" which is what I still call my 70-300 (zoomcito) which I bought for the specific purpose of taking pictures of penguins on the Falkland Islands. (and I did!)
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US loses at soccer, and it's all my fault
Blog: Bearshapedsphere - 29 June 2009
Here's a blog entry in which the author (per usual) vastly overestimates her importance in the world.In the interest of full disclosure, here is a bilingual list of exactly how important sports are to me:not at allnot a whitbarelyun cominoun puchoun carajo(where the last three in Spanish basically mean a cumin seed, a cigarette butt, and a damn, in descending order of politeness).
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What's in a pichanga? Chilean food analogies that make you go hmmm.
Blog: Bearshapedsphere - 23 June 2009
In addition to word surgery, I do alot of other things with words. Mostly collect them into a word maelstrom, that I can choose from when I wish, but which I don't really know the etymology of or how they might be related to other words. Then I find out, and laugh and say aha!
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Identity Theft, or who wants to be Eileen?
Blog: Bearshapedsphere - 22 June 2009
One of the many hoops that the Chilean government has us gringos jumping through, like trained seals (or are those dolphins?) is going to Registro Civil to get a "certificado de antecedentes." This is a perforated form that they give to you at low cost (anyone know how much these days, I seem to recall 800ish pesos) that certifies that you have not been convicted of a criminal act here in Chile.
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Con todo respeto
Blog: Bearshapedsphere - 20 June 2009
Con todo respeto (with all due respect) is what you say to someone in Chile when you are trying to bring them down a notch in frustration, in anger, in hating you. In a place where people don't often yell at each other in anger, when someone does, you know you've got to look in your bag of tricks (with a nod to Felix the cat) and find that one phrase that you can use to defuse the situation before it blows up in your face (did you know you can also say diffuse the situation?
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Hold your tongue, or you could "meter la pata" (put your foot in your mouth)
Blog: Bearshapedsphere - 12 June 2009
Living in a fishbowl, like we do, where we are people who stand out in any visually discernible way, for being tall, for being gringas, for being the guy with the three greyhounds in their tiny vests that look like saddles (I love this guy), we get used to people looking at us.
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The famous Chilean traffic taco
Blog: Bearshapedsphere - 11 June 2009
Yesterday as I was biking up from my apartment to where I was meeting the lovely Emily for lunch, I got stuck in the mother of all tacos. Which makes it sound much tastier and crunchier than it was. Write it down kids, today's Chilean word is taco. A taco is one of about three things (that I can think of at the moment). A high-heeled shoe, a small pad of paper or a traffic jam. It can also, strangely, mean burrito, but that's a culinary problem, not a linguistic one.
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Stockpile? Whatever for! Better to go to the store 8 days a week!
Blog: Bearshapedsphere - 4 June 2009
If you, as a foreigner were to visit the average American home, you would be astounded at the quantity of stuff they have, well, stuffed, everywhere. I'm not talking about clothes and papers and books, things accumulated within a lifetime. I'm talking about consumables. I thought of this yesterday when the bathroom lightbulb blew at 9:30 at night, and I didn't even stop to think whether I had extras. I just knew I didn't. I wouldn't say that makes me better than anyone else, just less prepared. And then I thought about why.
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What's a polla? Chilean money-saving schemes.
Blog: Bearshapedsphere - 1 June 2009
I knew going into this week that I would be in arrears on a couple of things, one of them a group blog post on the dia de patromonio which I attended with Margaret/Peg and where we were schooled in many architectural details and then doused with a bucket of cold water on a sunshiney day, this in the form of the tour given by a torturee from the Pinochet era of house where he, along with many others, were held, tortured, and some killed (though obviously not him).
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Medical Records Management in Chile. A Maravilla. (and puppetry of the people, if you will).
Blog: Bearshapedsphere - 20 May 2009
In keeping with talking about how modern and unbelievable Chile is (in this post about how we pay taxes), which makes at least one of my friends think that the whole shebang is part of a giant conspiracy, puppet-goverment style, I want to talk to you about medical records management.
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Donkey milk and raise your hand if you'd like an artichoke.
Blog: Bearshapedsphere - 18 May 2009
Leche de burra! (she-donkey milk), Leche de burra! This is what one of my friends heard as a child as the local she-donkey milk salesman peddled his wares. Now I didn't ask, but I'm pretty sure this happened while he was living in the small southern (hexagonally-shaped, OMG, what a navigational nightmare for me) city of Coyhaique (Co-YI-kay), and not here in Santiago. Though people often talk about how Santiago used to be much more homey and countrified and provincial, I don't think anyone used to sell donkey milk on the street a short 30 years ago.
