Chile in the News!!

Though unfortunately not for good reasons... via NYT:

Lawmaking via Wikipedia

By Mike Nizza

A senator in Chile is under fire for a foray into open-source lawmaking: he apparently cribbed a huge section of a Wikipedia entry for a legal brief, The Santiago Times reports:

The brief proposed prohibiting the import and development of nanotechnology in Chile. It included seven articles, six of which were lifted directly from the web site, and lacked quotation marks or citations. In addition, the brief was complete with the web site’s spelling and grammar errors, and underlined, hyperlinked words.

The senator, Alejandro Navarro, “maintains that his actions were not those of a plagiarist, and that he simply used the web site as a source,” La Tercera reported.

While the Senate decides whether to send his case to the ethics commission, Mr. Navarro, who is a Socialist, may want to familiarize himself with the encyclopedia’s copyright policy, which would have sanctioned his huge cut-and-paste job, provided he gave proper credit.

But there’s also the problem of Wikipedia’s inherently moving-target nature putting his efforts out of date. He published the brief in late December; since then, Wikipedia’s entry on nanotechnology has been changed more than 500 times.

To get around that problem, of course, the law itself could be wikified. Well, maybe that would not be such a good idea…

At least the papers we write for school where we source Wikipedia only get read by the teacher... what was the senator thinking??

Rethinking this blog...

First off, an apology to the three people who probably read this blog on a less than regular basis- I'm sorry for not posting more often, especially after I excitedly told you before I left that I'd keep you up to date on my life in Santiago through consistent posts here. Not having internet at home for my laptop has taken its toll, as has my underestimation of the time and effort it would take to update this blog regularly.

However, I don't want to drop out of the blogosphere completely, and I still want to keep everyone updated on my life in Chile. So, I propose a slight change in the way this blog works- instead of me posting entries on all the things I've been up to since the last time I posted, instead I'll just put up pictures, hopefully most with captions, to give you guys a sense of my life here. Of course, if you want to know more, you're more than welcome to email me to ask for updates and I'll gladly write back, but turning this into a picture blog will be easier for me and will mean much more frequent updates. And who know, maybe the blogging bug will bite again and I'll be driven to start posting text entries too!

Contaminación del aire; or, Why is my tissue black?

When we arrived in Santiago at the beginning of the semester, we were told about the city's epic air pollution. According to what we learned in one of our orientation sessions, Santiago has one of the worst air quality levels in the world- about equal to Bangkok and Manila, and twice as bad as Los Angeles. Santiaguinos have one of the highest rates of asthma in all of Latin America, and last year during the winter, one out of every three or four days was declared an air emergency. To try to reduce the pollution levels, the city government has introduced car restrictions, where cars aren't allowed on the road one day a week, and where the elderly and other at-risk people are urged to stay inside. And the city's gorgeous views of the cordillera looming over it are normally resigned to memory, since the smog in the valley has nowhere to escape.

The view of the Andes, on a clear day, from the bus stop by my house.

At the beginning of the program though, the skies were really clear (at least, compared to my expectations). The cordillera was visible, the air seemed clean, and my host family couldn't stop talking about how much less pollution there was compared to years past. The relative clarity of the air was probably due to the new transportation system, which took thousands of buses off the street and replaced them with ones that ran 70% cleaner. The air was so clean, in fact, that the start of the vehicular restrictions that would limit the number of cars on the roads was postponed a month, something that hasn't happened in a long time.

But in the past week or so, our air quality honeymoon has ended. Looking out my program's office window on the 17th floor now, I can't see more than a half mile though the gray, sooty smog. My family keeps the doors and windows closed to keep the pollution out (as well as to keep the house from freezing, although 50 degrees is perfectly comfortable for them- but that's another matter). And people riding bikes on the street wrap shawls around their faces to keep their air as clean as possible.

I had thought that NYC was plenty polluted, but in comparison to here it's like a rural paradise. Here, most of the time the cordillera is hidden behind the smog that sits above the city. And Santiago is the only place I've been where my snot comes out black because of all the air pollution (sorry for the graphic image, but it's a topic of conversation among the people in my program). I guess it just underlines how different the rest of the world lives than the US- even in a developed country like Chile, air pollution like this is normal. And there are many other parts of the world where it's worse. One thing's for sure- next fall, I'll definietly appreciate running in Central Park and breathing the fresh air there a lot more than I've appreciated it before.

Continent-trotting

OK, time for what's becoming the bi-monthly update of this blog, which is surely losing readers faster than I can think of a witty comparison. In any case, a lot's been going on with me, and as a service to you kind few who have kept the faith and persisted in checking this blog, I'll fill you in.

I've become very familiar with the Santiago airport and bus station over the past weeks because of the slightly ridiculous amount of travelling I've been doing. Over the Easter weekend, I went with 5 of my friends from the program to Mendoza, Argentina, a 6 hour bus ride away from Santiago. The bus ride is gorgeous- the road snakes up the Chilean side of the Andes until it hits a wall of mountains, when it goes into a two mile long tunnel that drops you off on the other side of the continental divide in Argentina with a view of the pampas streching out as far as you can see. In Mendoza, we spent one day doing a bike tour of the local wineries, which counds like a great idea until you realize that at every winery you get a free sample of wine, which combined with the free bottle of wine at lunch and heavy bags full of 'souveniers' makes for a very dangerous trip back to the bike rental place. Still, if you happen to find yourself in Mendoza, it's a great way to know the area- just be sure to pace yourself and go with a group that drinks all the wine their given instead of giving it to you.

The view going back down the Andes into Argentina.

One of the shocking things about being in Argentina is realizing how cheap everything is there. Clothes are ridiculously inexpensive- we found Cristian Dior ties for $50, when the exact same ties would have cost five times as much back home. One of the best dinners I've ever had, with 3 courses and wine for siz people, came out to be $90. Total. And I felt increbily guilty being charged $1.50 for a 20 minutes crosstown taxi ride. The scars of the financial crisis of 2001 aren't just present in the prices of things, but also in the stories of the Argentines who were affected. We stayed with a woman in her house- a very nice building with space to sleep 10 people- who had a high paying job before the crash, but after was reduced to renting out rooms to backpackers and travellers.

After Mendoza, I spent 36 hours in Santiago before embarking on another journey, this time to Patagonia and Torres del Paine National Park. Patagonia was every bit as incredible as I'd heard it would be- barren rolling plains, trees growing sideways, freezing persistent winds. And then you get to Torres del Paine, and everything changes. There's no adequate way to describe the Paine Massif in words- they look more like an illustration out of a fantasy novel than anyhting in the real world (one park employeee told us that Chilean call the park Mordor). Twisted spires of rock, razor-thin ridges, hanging valleys with glaciers sitting in them- it's all so surreal. At least, when the weather's nice and you can see them. For most of our four day backpacking trip, it was cloudy, rainy, windy, and snowy, but the few times when the sun came out made it all worth it. Our hike was also fun because of the people we met doing it- for the last few days we hiked with a Canadian and a Dutchman who were spending a few months backpacking separatly around South America. Because of all this, even though we were wet, grumpy, and tired after getting back in Santiago on Monday morning for class, the trip was totally worth it.

Los Cuernos del Paine, in Torres del Paine National Park

Finally, last weekend our program took us to La Serena, a seven hour bus ride to the north, for a little R&R. We went to a Pisco distillery (Chile's national liquor, like a fruity, much smoother vodka, though that description doesn't really do it justice. All I know for sure is that International sells it in NYC, and I will be buying lots of it come fall.), a Gabriela Mistral Museum, and an observatory (Cerro Tololo, the largest in the southern hemisphere), though it was too cloudy to see any stars.

It's suffice to say that classes have taken a backseat the past three weeks (though thank god for pass/fail!). I have a couple midterms coming up in the next couple weeks, and then nothing really until finals time which is in... July. But classes aren't going to put a stop to travelling- I'm aprovechando of the 4 day weekend and heading off to Rio de Janeiro, followed in a couple more weeks by Buenos Aires (hopefully). I'll try to report back more often, but if not I'll be sure to do a picture dump sometime soon. And if anyone has any tips on travelling to Rio, shot me an email!

Chilean reaction to Virginia Tech events

There's really not much I can say about what happened on Monday that hasn't already been said. Shocking, tragic, appauling, etc, etc. It's really scary to think that this kind of tragedy can happen anywhere at anytime, to anyone. You think that school is a safe place to spend your formative years, a shelter from all the bad things that happen in the world, but then these things happen and it just hits you that even on campus (even at Columbia, with its gates and guards and sense of impenetrability), you're just as vulnerable as anywhere else.

Being in Chile has let me compare the US to the rest of the world, and the one thing that I keep realizing is how messed up and different (in the mad sense) we are from everyone else. Here, students protest all the time, but never with the intention of hurting anyone- disturbances are political in nature, just to make a point. In the US, you hardly see the level of political protests that there are here; instead, it seems that students just jump from feeling upset with something to grabbing a weapon. It's like we're missing some rational impulse, something that makes up stop and reflect on what we're about to do.

It's not like US and Chilean students are that different- almost all of the risk factors that US "experts" point to as causing gun violence are just as present here as they are back home. My host brother plays violent video games all the time. The same rap music with violent lyrics is played in the clubs and on the radio. Chileans have one of the highest rates of depression on the world. But instead of resorting to violence, Chileans debate, throw small rocks at armored police cars, or just internalize their feelings.

About the only thing that's different here is gun use, and that's the one cultural difference that Chileans can't wrap their head around. When my history professor today mentioned that the NRA said that the VT massacre could have been prevent if students and teachers were allowed to carry guns, there was an audible gasp in the classroom. In Chile, the only people who carry guns are the armed forces (ARMED forces, as in firearms, as in what makes their force special and distinct is that they carry them), and they only raise them against Chileans during a coup. Here, it's impossible for a prvate citizen to get a gun. My host family couldn't beleive that all you needed to get a gun in the US was an ID and money.

I'm not saying that all the US needs to do to prevent these kinds of things from happening is to ban guns. Surely, we need a massive dose of national psychoanalysis and lessons in anger management. But it's so freaking obvious that these kinds of things would never happen if guns were harder to get. It's the same argument as preventing suicide- if you put a fence in front of a bridge, people will think twice about jumping, because they'll have the time to think twice. Murder, like suicide, is an impulsive thing, and given the chance, most people are rational enough to think it over and calm down. Maybe stricter gun control won't prevent all events like this from occurring, but even if it stops only a few, its a step in the right direction.

This week in Chile...

I'm finally getting into the swing of things here. Classes have gotten out of the introductory stage and into the actual material that we'll be covering for the rest of the semester. The length of the introductory time has been one major difference between classes at Columbia and classes here. We spent two weeks basically going over syllabuses, introductory background material, and listening to professors going off on totally unrelated tangents (including, in just one class, a rant on awfulness of English food, Christopher Columbus' wife, and the Alien movies). To be fair, this happened to a greater extent at La Chile than at La Catolica, which is one of the many differences between those two schools- Catolica is much more in the mold of a US school, with a beautiful campus, studious and serious students, and focused classes, while La Chile has a little more of a hectic feeling, with less central organization and a more political student body.

The political bent of the La Chile students (and ones at other public schools) has been really evident this week, in the form of various protests and riots that have taken place on campuses around Santiago. This week is the anniversary of the murder of a student organizer during the Dictadura, which many Chilean students are using as a reason for all sorts of protests (including, among other things, for educational reforms, cheaper bus fares, anarchist rallies, and of course anti-Iraq).

The rallies got off to a start yesterday, and your humble blogger managed to inadvertenty get a front row seat to them while waiting for a bus. From out of nowhere, 20 or so hooded students walked out onto the street with signs, banners, and bombas Molotov, and began to throw them at a McDonalds across the street from the university. The police (who know the drill and had already taken up positions in front of the arcos dorados) responded by throwing tear gas at the protestors, who resourcefully picked them up and threw them back at the police. Figuring it wasn't a good idea to be 50 feet away from all of this, we decided to walk up the street to the next bus stop. Unfortunately, the protestors beat us there, as they had already taken up positions in front of a guanaco (water cannon truck) and were trying, it seemed and without much success, to light it on fire. We stood next to an overturned street sign and watched for a couple minutes as the protestors got soaked, but had to run away when the guanaco did a 180 and pointed directly at us, menacingly dripping water from its hose. (I would love to post photos, but Monday also happened to be the only day I didn't bring my camera with me. Alas.)

The side effects of the protests have been many, all positive- the cancelling of a quiz for tomorrow (that I hadn't dont any of the reading for), the cancelling of my only class on Thursday (which happens to be incredibly boring, US history in Spanish), and ample opportunity for make-up photographs. Also, it's given me and a friend a perfect excuse to escape Santaigo for the weekend and go to Mendoza, Argentina. I'm not really sure what's there, but it'll be nice to escape the polluted air and noise of the city, even it just means chilling and walking around for a weekend.

That's all for now, I'll post more when the protests get exciting and when I get some pictures. Ciao.

Subway Surfing

One of the most difficult things for me to get used to in Santiago has been the Chilean concept of personal space. Meaning, of course, a complete lack of any. Walking down the street it's a completely common occurance to be bumped into, run off the sidewalk, nearly hit by bikes, and basically feel like everyone is intentionally trying to make you feel under assault. Riding the bus or metro is a similar experience. The trains are so packed that it's normal to have 5 people pressed right up against you, forcing you to hold your bookbag over your head like someone wading across a river. Even when is nobody on the bus, you feel like people are hovering around you. Today on the way to class, I was sitting next to a guy about my age in the back row of the bus, who even though no one was sitting in the seat on his other side, was insistent of spreading his legs and pressing up against me, practically shoving me out the window. Maybe Chileans are just conditioned to press up against each other.

Still, I have never seem as many people cram into buses or trains as I have here. An example- Monday, coming back from class during rush hour, there were so many people on the bus that I was literally forced to sit in somebody's lap, while 10 people were running along side the bus trying to jump through the back exit door, which has been conviniently pried open and not allowed to close due to the people crammed into the back stairway. I would have felt scared at the image of hurtling down the street at 50 miles an hour with the back door of the bus wide open, but I was so tightly wedged into the nice woman's lap behind me that short of an explosion ripping the bus in two, I wasn't going anywhere under any circumstances. Including having to get off (if I had a peso for the amount of times I've been unable to get off at my stop... I'd still be poor, but with a large pile of 1 peso coins).

Compare this to New York, where everyone puts up little barriers around themselves on the subway- newspapers, iPods, elbows, surly glares. And people get genuinely uncomfortable at the prospect of having to ride in a packed subway car- you can almost feel the sign of relief when people get off the 1 train at 103rd St after being packed in after the 96th Street switch from the 2/3. As for me, I gotta admit that while I love certain aspects of the transit system here, I'm too much of an American (with my 40 acres and a mule and all) to get too comfortable here. Dodging bikes and people on the sidewalk is one thing, but it takes a lot of get accustomed to continual invasion of my personal space.