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15: "To the north, to the desert: Part 4"
Blog: Dispatches from the Provinces of Argentina - 10 September 2009
Lucy and I got up and went to a café. I got coffee and pancakes with manjar, which is the Chilean dulce de leche. In Chile the coffee is almost always Nescafé. Nobody seems to no why.
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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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Valparaiso, Chile
Blog: Patrick and Katrina do the Globe - 8 September 2009
When we bought our bus ticket from Mendoza to Valparaiso, Chile, we weren't just buying transit from one place to another, but also a spectacular bus tour through one of the great mountain ranges of the world.
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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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New Chilean government website translation leaves native speakers quizzical, at best.
Blog: Bearshapedsphere - 26 August 2009
Shattered meat. That's the topic of today's post. But first, the backstory. There's always a backstory.
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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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Ascensors, in Valparaíso, Chile – Most Interesting Form of Public Transport
Blog: The Travel Tart - Offbeat Tales From A Travel Addict - 12 August 2009
The Chilean town of Valparaíso is located on the Pacific, west of the capital of Santiago. The most notable thing about Valparaíso is its barrios (or suburbs) that are engrained into the hilly surrounds, and the method of transport required to access them from the flat city centre are called Ascensors.
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11: "To the north, to the desert: Part 3"
Blog: Dispatches from the Provinces of Argentina - 9 August 2009
I got up at 8, showered, packed my bags, and walked to the terminal in Jujuy for my bus to Chile.
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The Spectacular Bus Ride from San Pedro de Atacama to Salta
Blog: velvet escape's blog - 3 August 2009
‘The Spectacular Bus Ride from San Pedro de Atacama to Salta’ (a page from my Travel Journal) “Hurry, hurry…,” the man said to me, “the bus is leaving in a few minutes”. I was sure I was going to miss my bus to Salta. I arrived at the travel agency, as instructed when I bought my ticket, [...]
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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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The Hills of Valparaíso
Blog: Atlas Parasite - 20 July 2009
It’s no wonder that Pablo Neruda lived in Valparaíso among other painters and writers. Once I was there, I felt that art was pushing to come out in some form or another from my pores. It’s just that much of an inspiring place. You have the ocean, the hills, the houses, the colors, the people. [...]Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
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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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Mystical Rapa Nui
Blog: velvet escape's blog - 4 July 2009
Mystical Rapa Nui A page from my Travel Journal I don’t think I’ve ever been to a place that’s so isolated than Easter Island, or Rapa Nui as it’s called by the locals. It was quite amusing seeing our flight path from Tahiti – it was literally from one dot to another and the rest of the [...]
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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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Valdivia: Retro Chile
Blog: Aerohaveno: A Travel Blog - 2 July 2009
Valdivia, Chile, is everything promised by the glowing description in the Lonely Planet guide, a very beautiful city on the conjunction of three rivers.
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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!
