As I stated in the previous post, last Friday was the ultimate week of classes for my tefl course, but due to problems finding a reliable student for one particular project I just finished with all the coursework today. As much as I enjoyed the whole thing it’s definitely a relief to be finished. Now it’s just a matter of getting out there and finding a job.

So towards the end of last week my friend Randall showed up in Santiago and hung around throughout the weekend. We met at the hostel in Buenos Aires and I mentioned him in a previous post here. He’s been traveling around Latin America taking for several months and is now nearing the end of his trip. A really interesting guy and a great artist. Here’s a photo of him sitting on the roof of my apartment.

Here is the link to his flickr site which houses his photography .
I highly recommend checking it out. He’s an excellent photographer and in addition to photographing countless genuinely powerful snapshots of normal life here in Latin America he has been lucky enough to stumble across some truly momentous events. The one that stands out the to most to me is the Oaxaca student protest in Mexico. On the lighter side he’s managed to infiltrate the press box of a lucha libre (Mexican WWF wrestling, basically) and has crashed some really fascinating (and fun) carnivals. Also on his site he has a few sets that contain scans of his paintings and sculptures which are absolutely worth a look as well. So go check it out.

I spent a good part of the weekend showing him around Santiago and exploring areas that I’d never seen myself either. Also the charger for my camera finally showed up (thanks Mom) and he gave me a lot of advise on composition and how to take better photos. I soaked up his advice and it really does seem to me that the photos I’m taking now are a lot more interesting. I still don’t like to spend all my time behind a lens but now I’m more confident I can do a better job when I am back there and enjoy it more as well.

That Saturday night I went out with everybody from the TEFL course to celebrate our last day. It was a lot of fun of course and I ended up meeting some really cool Chileans. The next day Randall and I took the Metro to Santa Lucia, which is one of my favorite spots in Santiago. It’s a park built onto a small sort of mountain that was designed something over a century ago by some renowned French designer. Is filled with nooks and crannies, has castles and churches perched on the most awkward spots, and all sorts of surprises waiting around each corner. A really fun place to explore and the kind of place you would want to take your girlfriend. If you’ve ever read Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle he talks about climbing Cerro Santa Lucia. There is a garden named in his honor and this photo you are seeing of me to your left is just above that garden and just below the summit. Randall took this shot. I don’t have any of my own pictures from there because I only received my battery charger right after we returned to the apartment that day. I can promise you that I’ll be returning and taking some though.

Sunday was pretty interesting. In the morning Randall and I decided to head towards a market called Bio Bio, which I’d heard a lot about, including that you could buy anything there from used toilet paper to a new car. So obviously I’d been dying to check it out for some time. My roommate gave us completely awful directions to get there and told us it was in a different part of Santiago than it really is, so we ended up riding the metro quite a ways until it came out above ground. After a while we spied an abandoned complex of buildings that looked really interesting and we decided to get off and go check it out.

After investigating pretty thoroughly we are both still pretty uncertain what the whole thing was. The buildings seemed pretty diverse and they were definitely part of some kind of industry or public works. The building in which most of these pictures were taken in must have been the office for whatever the whole business was. There was some really cool graffiti there, as you can see through the window to the left. Here is that work close up.

And even closer to the eyes. I really enjoy this photo. I am really digging the piece of wood nailed into the right eye. Really alludes to that proverb about removing the log from your eye before you remove the splinter from mine. Doubt that the artist actually meant to say that though, and my guess is that it was there before since there is white paint on it. One of the really great things about these particular abandoned buildings was that the eroded out windows provided a lot of framing opportunities for taking pictures.

Here’s another piece of graffiti that I really like which was on a wall standing off completely by itself.

Definitely the cooler aspects of this graffiti are in the details, especially in the hands. All the other significant graffiti nearby was done so that it could be seen from the highway, but this piece really needs to be searched out. Regarding the photo, I like the complimentary angle of the billboard above the graffiti. And also the contrast between the two types of images. At least to me, what was done illegally on this wall is much more welcome than what was was put on that billboard legally.

Here’s Randall in a whole in a wall. Look at how happy he looks.

I’m really not sure what any of the stuff going on in this picture is but the textures are interesting. You’ve got the rubble, the tile, the wet-looking stone and the cement around the frame where the tile has come off. Seems that it was a bathroom at some point in the past… Probably still is. Actually, the whole place really smelled like shit. Attribute it to my good taste that I didn’t actually photograph the piles that were about (yes, I somehow managed to resist) and that I’m not posting any of the other photos I took where it is one of the present decorative objects. (you can always go to my flickr and look though. It’ll be like Where’s Waldo, or more like Where’s Mister Hankey.) We found a room there that was set up with some beds and stuff so there were some bums living in there, which was no surprise.

Here is one of the other buildings in the complex. If any of you have any idea what this is I would really appreciate you letting me know.

After leaving the abandoned buildings we went to where my roommate told me Bio Bio was. I asked somebody which direction we needed to walk to get there and it turned out to be like six metro stops away. But that would never stop any determined and mildly competent fellows so we managed to get ourselves there, to some disappointment. It seemed that you really could buy anything there at Bio Bio and probably for a good price too, but if you weren’t going with buying something in mind there’s not much else worth seeing. It’s not like the much more interesting fairs I saw both in Valparaiso or Buenos Aires and mostly consisted of several large warehouses with endless rows of vendor’s stalls. I still would imagine that Santiago has several more genuine fairs to offer, but Bio Bio isn’t one of them.

After that we hopped back on the metro and went up to la Plaza de Armas. This is the plaza that conquistador Pedro de Valdivia established as the center of Chile way back in the day. When we arrived we were lucky enough to find them setting up for a free concert by Plácido Domingo. If you’re like me and only have a rudimentary knowledge of opera you will probably have to be reminded that Domingo is one of the Three Tenors, so he’s pretty big stuff.

La Plaza de Armas is typically one of the more lively spots in the city, and was definitely much more so with preparations going on for the show.

The statue in the foreground is a tribute to the indigenous peoples of Chile and the Cathedral to the left is la Catedral Metropolitana. You can see the stage set up there and the crowd which has been there for almost the entire day waiting to see Plácido Domingo sing.

Here is the same thing from a different angle. There were still several hours before the concert was to start so we went in to check out the cathedral.

Here is a view of the central corridor.

Here’s a statue of Jesus. You can see that somebody has laid a bag of raisins at his feet. I Could think of worse shows of faith. Over to the right there is a statue of an angel slaying a demon. ‘Tis definitely something cool. I like to think that the angel in the statue has made a mistake though and has got the wrong demon. Makes you feel sorry for him a little to think of him like that, doesn’t it?

Here’s something kind of cool below here. Please let me know if you know the technical name of that alter thing.

After we left the cathedral and came across the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art, and since it is free on Sundays we decided to spend the hour we had before it closed looking around. The place is really amazing and it’s definitely a place that I would like to return to and spend more time at in the future. It contains artwork not just from the indigenous peoples from Chile but all over Latin America. We weren’t allowed to take any photos but if you are curious the museum’s website has photographs of all the pieces here.

After leaving the museum we ambled back to the plaza. Here’s another cool church that I saw only about a block from la Catedral Metropolitana.

We hung out in Plaza de Armas for quite a while while he took pictures. At this point it was getting too dark for me to get much worthwhile out of my camera but since his camera is much more powerful he was still going. We actually ended up walking out of the plaza right before Plácido Domingo began performing and weren’t able to get back in because there were too many people. We listened to a couple of songs but since we weren’t able to see anything we ended up leaving.

I’ve got more photos of all this business on my flicker . Check ‘em out.
Randall left the next day to go visit the South of Chile but probably will be stopping by again for about a day or so before heading back to the US next week.

Oddly enough I ‘stumbled upon’ another ‘free’ concert tonight, so to speak. It was actually a concert that I had intended on going to but had forgotten the date. It was Roger Waters of Pink Floyd performing The Dark Side of the Moon, and surprisingly enough I was able to hear it fairly well from my bedroom window. I listened to the whole concert then and enjoyed it but am glad I didn’t go. The cheapest tickets were more than forty-five dollars and escalated from there. Also I really love going to concerts but when it is a really huge one and I’m far away it always seems kind of lame to me, like I could have had the same experience just watching a DVD of the performance. The other thing was that he just played the Dark Side of the Moon, which is great but only 45 minutes long, and that’s a really short show for the money people were putting out to see it. But I’ve got to say it was pretty awesome hearing from my apartment and my luck for free shows has been at its pinnacle this week. Hope it keeps up.

So I’ve been told that the quality of my writing on this site has deteriorated. This is probably the case, since my last couple of posts have been pretty rushed. This one will be no different. Right now I am about four weeks behind and I want to get this thing up to date. Hopefully pretty soon I’ll be able to write like I mean it again. But still I’m playing catch-up, so don’t expect too much.

What’s going on now, in brief? Just finished my TEFL class. It’s worked out pretty well. Will be looking for work soon.

But I’m catching up. Where do I really begin? After I left Iguazú Falls I spent two entire days on a bus coming back to Santiago, Chile. What was it that I mentioned in the last post about the bus ride that was so funny? Up ’til now I still regret not taking a photo of it. I meant to, but the planets were not aligned correctly, or something. So unfortunately I didn’t get the pic, but the whole thing really kept my kicks going for 48 hours.

Across the aisle from me, close enough that I could have touched had I wanted too, sat a transvestite next to a nun. For the entire trip? So much time, you ask? Yes, almost the whole trip. They talked once, though I have no idea of what. It was brief, and lamentably I was too far away to hear.

At Mendoza I switched buses and took off to Santiago. Passed close by the highest mountain outside of Asia; Aconcagua. This trip across the Andes between Mendoza and Santiago is really incredible. Hopefully I get the chance sometime to come up here and spend some time.
Here are some pics that I shot off at the border crossing at El Paso de los Libertadores.

The customs house.

The view in the other direction. This is pretty close to Portillo, one of the more renowned ski resorts in Latin America. Got to make it up here when winter comes.

After that hellishly long bus ride I arrived in Santiago just in time for the first day of implementation of some major changes had been made to the public transportation system, Transantiago. The changes were intended to better integrate the subway and the buses and streamline the whole system but the whole thing has ended up being a nightmare. The first week I was here a couple of city buses were confiscated by angry passengers who had waited for more than two hours for a bus. Thank god that I only needed to use the subway to get to my classes, since at least that’s still functioning much better than the buses. It seems that things are improving slowly and hopefully the whole system will be working as it was intended soon.

Right after getting off the bus from Argentina I went down to the metro station, which was complete chaos. Carrying both of my backpacks it took me about thirty minutes to get downstairs to the boarding platform from the ticket booth, which normally takes no more than thirty seconds or so.

I ended up making it to the apartment just fine, though pretty late. Early the next morning it was straight to class.

My apartment here is in a really nice neighborhood and is very comfortable. There’s a jogging trail really close by and a flock of parrots living in the neighborhood. My roommates are really great and we’re getting along really well. The two are both Colombian doctors. So if I end up staying in Santiago there are a lot of good things going here.

A view of the Andes foothills from my bedroom window.

After my first week of classes I went to Valparaíso for the weekend, which was great. I spent some time with some good friends and picked up my laptop and some other stuff. Don’t know if I’m going to be living there or in Santiago. I would really prefer to be in Valparaíso, but it depends on what kinds of jobs I find.

My TEFL class went pretty well overall, though I had one particular demo class that was pretty rough. It’s taken up most of my time for the last month, but I think I’ve learned a lot and it’s been fun. It will really help me a lot in my teaching.

There was one weekend that a friend of mine gave me a mohawk and the whole crew of us went out for the night.

This is what the ‘hawk looked like. I know you must be thinking that’s it’s pretty friggin’ rad. I had to drink some beer in the picture to make it look even cooler.

My roommate Cesar and me at the club.

Cesar and our buddy Juan, another Colombian. Gotta love the smoke in this photo.

After a while the dj stopped playing music and everyone stopped dancing. This guy in the photo came out and started performing, which all ended up being pretty interesting. The guy is from Ecuador and his stage name is Delfin (which means dolphin). His girlfriend died in one of the World Trade Center towers during the September 11 attacks in New York. The song he played was a sort of dedication to the whole sad business and there was an accompanying video playing on several screens to go with it. Delfin ended up leaving the club at the same time we did and I talked to him for a bit. Pretty nice guy.

Unfortunately, the mohawk didn’t survive the weekend. At least my mom is happy about that. But the thing really is that the awesomeness of the ‘hawk didn’t change the fact that it was too much work to maintain. Here is the set with the other photos I’ve taken over the last month here in Chile.

So finally I am caught up to the start of this weekend. Finally as well the charger for the batteries in my camera showed up. I took some really nice photos around Santiago this past weekend. Should be putting them up soon.

Also, I still hope to post that video from Iguazú Falls, but I’ve had some troubles getting it set up. Hopefully it’ll be here soon.