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.