Colo Colo

Tuesday, April 29th – Day 133

I came back to Santiago because I fly up to Calama on Thursday.
Colo Colo is playing tonight, and this may be my only chance to see a top-level soccer match while I’m here. If you read the previous post, I mentioned that Colo Colo is the working man’s team – kind of like the Oakland Raiders of Chilean soccer. That’s because Colo Colo is a poverty stricken barrio here. Two people I know said that I should avoid the game because their stadium is in a bad neighborhood and their fans are unruly (local girls). One person said “Dude, you should go!” (local guy). I took the subway.

Walking across the parking lot of the stadium, I could hear what sounded like (and turned out to be) the largest diesel generator in the world. I know the game is on TV, but c’mon, there’s only one small TV truck. Turns out that the use the generator to power the stadium lights. Electricity is not that consistent in this part of the city, and a sudden loss of power could be a real problem.

I know enough to stay away from the cheap seats, so I buy the most expensive ticket available - $7,000 pesos. It’s general admission, and stadium feels virtually empty, except for one corner where the knuckleheads gather. Their section is packed, and is separated from the rest of the stadium by a 15 foot fence that is topped with barbed-wire. It kind of looks like they’re in a prison yard.

In this parts of the world, whistling is the equivalent of “booing”. The first people to come out onto the pitch are the referees, escorted by riot police, and they are greeted by nothing but whistles. Then the other team comes out and there is more whistling. When Colo Colo comes out, the knuckleheads start singing. And they continue to sing, non-stop, throughout the entire match.

There are different songs for different situations. At the beginning, the song is about how Colo Colo is going to kick your ass tonight. There’s another song for making fun of the other teams mistakes. Colo Colo got behind, and there’s a song for encouraging the team to work harder to score. Once they scored, there’s a song to tell their team how good they are. Then, they go back to “we’re going to kick your ass tonight”. Anyway, this goes on the entire night.

My only disappointment is that they don’t sell beer. I guess that would be sort of like throwing gasoline onto a fire. But since everybody should be sober, it looks like you can bring in whatever fireworks you want. Several times, the fans set off stuff that blasted a hundred feet into the air with two or three rounds of explosions.

Colo Colo appears to be the perennial champions of the Chilean professional league, and they have the trophy room to prove it. Ultimately, this match ended in a 2-2 tie, so the fans were not terribly happy or sad, and everything was pretty orderly as we left. To get into the subway station, you had to walk through a gauntlet of riot police, probably 30 men on each side. It was a pretty strong show of force, and would certainly take the edge off of any situation that might come close to getting out of hand.

La Serena / Colquimbo

Monday, April 28th – Day 132

I was going to say in Pisco to catch some more stars last night, but it was cloudy, so I drove to La Serena. Colquimbo is a small town a few km to the south, and a nice stretch of beach connects the two cities.

Colquimbo looks kind of like a much smaller version of Valparaiso. They have this odd looking cross that was built to celebrate the year 2000. Not sure if it’s finished or not, but you can go up to the top and walk out into the arms. You get great views, and between each of the widows they have busts of all the important Cardinals from Chile.

The beach was beautiful and fairly deserted as we are past the tourist season.

A Couple I Forgot - Shopping

Wednesday, April 16 – Day 121

Went to the Parque Arauco, shopping mall today. It’s on the east side of town in an area called Las Condes, which looks like any major city in America. This is the wealthy part of town, and it is full of gleaming new hi-rise office buildings and condos. The Harley dealership is nearby, so I picked up a t-shirt, and then stopped by the bar at the Ritz Carlton for a very nice wine tasting and a cigar. After blowing a couple hundred bucks on some fabulous vino that I’ll never be able to get back home and hanging out with the beautiful people, the pisco sour happy hour back at my hostel provided a stark contrast in lifestyles.

I’m staying in pretty cheap places because, well, it’s cheap. There’s always a lot of people coming and going, so its’ easy to meet and exchange information on various places. The downside is that they are all tourists, and most are trying to get by on US$20.00 a day while I’m more like a US$20.00 bottle of wine with dinner sort of guy.

Anyway, pisco is the “national liquor” of Chile, kind of like the Brazilian caschaca or the Argentine fernete. It’s a 35 to 50 proof, and distilled from a particular grape that was imported from Peru a long time ago. The grapes are grown specifically in the Elqui Valley in the north, and there’s even a town there called Pisco. The drink is made with lemon or lime juice, sugar, ice and a small amount of egg white. The whole concoction is blended into a foam, and then topped with cinnamon or bitters. Properly made, they are really pretty good. Lean too heavy on the pisco or the lemon, however, and they taste like crap.

A Couple I Forgot - Plaza de las Armas

Tuesday, April 15, - Day 120

Plaza de las Armas is the central square of Santiago. It used to be an army training ground, and this is where it gets its name.

The Catedral, sits on one corner of the Plaza, and it’s the 4th church built on this site. The first was built in 1541, the year the city was founded, and all three previous buildings were leveled by earthquakes. Construction on this building was started in 1748.

The church is very ornate, but not overdone, and there are a few prominant dead guys inside and a line of people waiting to confess their sins. There is a special alcove dedicated to Pope John Paul's last visit that is absolutely amazing. With actual worshipers inside, I decided against taking any pictures.

Inside the front door and to the left is a separate small sanctuary, and on its altar is a +/- 5 ft. statue of the Virgin Mary holding a baby Jesus. It's called the Virgin of Mount Carmen (the place in France where it came from) and was made in 1823. Mary and Jesus wear very ornate outfits, and crowns that were blessed by the Pope. The Pope then gave the crowns to the city 1936, making this statue the primary religious icon of the city. It's taken out and carried around the city in a procession once every year.

A couple days after I visited the church, a local homeless guy wandered in and set the statue on fire. The outfits and the crowns, were completely destroyed. About 80% of the original paint was burned off the statue, but most of the damage is said to be superficial. I stopped by today, and they now have a flag with a picture of the statue in it's place.

There are other similar statues of Carmen, and this picture came from the church in Pisco.

I wonder if this guy has any chance of getting into Heaven?

A Couple I Forgot - La Moneda

Monday, April 14 – Day 119

Filed for an extension on my taxes today. My estimate is that I’m going to owe Uncle Sam a few grand, and to avoid penalties, you’re supposed to send him a check along with the form. I mailed from here in Chile, using the cheapest international postage available and kept the receipt just in case. I’ll be interested in seeing how long it takes that check to clear. Ha!

Palacio de la Moneda, built in the late 1700’s, is the former mint building. After Chile’s independence, it became the residence of the country’s President. On September 11, 1973, the day of Pinochet’s coup, it was bombed by the air force. President Allende survived, but committed suicide in the palace before he could be arrested by Pinochet’s men. The palace was rebuilt and serves as the office of the President, but is no longer a residence.

Pinochet’s coup took place just a few years before Argentina’s “Dirty War”, which makes me realize that, with “Operation Condor” being a multi-country effort to stamp out subversives throughout South America, this whole Continent had to be pretty a screwed up place.

Pisco

Sunday, April 27 – Day 131

I mentioned before that pisco is the national liquor of Chile. It’s made here in the Elqui Valle, and the city of Pisco is only about 20 miles from Vicuna – how convenient. It’s a tiny little town at the end of a two-lane road that dead-ends into a mountain.

Pisco is made from a grape that has a lot of natural sugar, so if you ferment it all, it makes a wine with a pretty-high alcohol content. It’s further distilled, like brandy, and then aged in oak barrels to give it various taste characteristics.

They make a lot of very cheap pisco, and that’s the stuff that you use to make a pisco sour – add the lemon juice, ice, sugar, a touch of egg-white, and cinnamon. With better pisco, you just use 2 parts pisco and 1 part lemon juice, and shake over ice. The best pisco is taken straight-up, just like brandy.

Cerro Tololo

Saturday, April 26 – Day 130

I’m the only American on the tour today and it’s done entirely in Spanish. That’s OK, my Spanish is getting pretty good and I know enough about telescopes to make it work.

There are numerous observatories atop Cerro Tololo, but we common folk are not allowed anywhere near the really cool stuff. We started with a tour of a 1.5 meter telescope that is housed in one of 5 smaller observatories that are right next to Cerro Tololo. We’re able to walk around and get right up next to this scope, then the tour guide described how it works and moved it around and to show us all the parts.

Inside Cerro Tololo, we are only allowed to stand in one spot, and not even the tour guide gets to be close to the instrument. With a primary mirror of 4 meters (over 12 feet), it is absolutely huge, and just being able to walk in and look at it makes the trip worthwhile. Even though this telescope is a bit of an antique, it costs about US$10,000 per night to use, and every night is booked for the next three years. One of the current projects is, you guessed it, confirming that Lyman-alpha emitting galaxies at redshift 3.1 are the first high-redshift items to be identified as the precursors of typical present–day L* galaxies. For a sense of scale, look at the guy walking at the base of the observatory.

The largest telescope on the mountain is the Gemini South 8.1 meter scope. Its primary mirror is 26 feet across, making it one of the 5 largest telescopes in the world, and it cost US$176 million to build. No wonder they won’t let tourists come in and kick the tires.

One of the more interesting points that the guide made, was that professional astronomers actually spend very little time looking at things through these big telescopes. Almost all of the telescope’s time is devoted to capturing non-visible information. Starlight is diffracted and its spectrum is analyzed reveal the various elements of its composition. Redshifts and blueshifts are analyzed to show if things are coming or going, and all of this is being done by computers that are sometimes on the other side of the world. Pretty crazy stuff.

Vicuna

Friday, April 25 – Day 129

Took an overnight bus to La Serena, which is about 400 km north of Valparaiso. It’s a coastal city of about 125,000 people, and is the second oldest city in Chile. From there, I rented a car and drove 50 km inland to a small town called Vicuna.

Vicuna has a population of about 3,000, and is popular for only two reasons; first, Gabriela Mistral is from here – she’s another Nobel Prize winning poet (1936), and second, the cluster of observatories on top of Cerro Tololo. This is the southern end of the Atacama Desert, which has some of the darkest skies in the world. Most of the world’s leading astronomy organizations have facilities and equipment here.

As city lights began to affect the performance of the telescopes, the scientist worked with the city to convert all the outdoor lights to sodium vapor bulbs because the wavelength of sodium doesn’t interfere as much with the starlight. The sodium bulbs actually produce more light that mercury vapor bulbs and cost less to operate, but they are more expensive. For the city’s cooperation, the scientists built a public observatory for the city and gave them some pretty cool equipment.

The city offers guided tours for $5,000 pesos, so I went up this evening and had a look. We got to view a few planets through their 12 inch Schmitt-Cassiagrain (2.5x larger mirror than my telescope, but 15x more expensive), and then looked at some cool stars through a 14 inch Dobsonian. There were a few too many people on the tour for my taste, and we only got to see 5 or 6 objects over the course of an hour and a half, but just being out under the stars was worth it. I still learned a lot and got to see some Southern Hemisphere stuff that we never get to see from the North.

About a month ago, I got on a list for a day-time tour the namesake Cerro Tololo telescope, which has a primary mirror of 4 meters. It was one of the largest in the world when it was built in 1960’s, and the telescope’s mount alone weighs 50 tons. The tour starts tomorrow at 9:15am, and the front gate to the mountain is about 20 km away. Despite my best intentions to go to bed early, I found myself in a local dance hall at 3:15 am. I really hate it when that happens.

More Valparaiso pics

Valparaiso

Tuesday, April 22 – Day 126

I took a bus to Valparaiso this afternoon. It’s a coastal city of about 200,000, and is home to the country’s largest port. It’s also the 2nd most popular tourist destination in the country.

This is a hard looking town. I know two people that have been mugged here. One girl actually got her camera stolen from her while she was taking a picture. The other, a guy, got knocked over as a kid tried to get his wallet while attacking him from behind. He ended up with a sprained ankle and couldn’t walk for 4 days. The problem here is that kids under 16 can’t be prosecuted. The police are only obligated to try and call their parents. The kids just make up a name and number, and when the police can’t get through, they just let them go.

My first impression was not very favorable. Every one of the buildings look like they should be condemned, and none of the people that live here look very happy. I really can’t imagine what the tourist draw is, but I did spend the first night a really cool hotel. It’s in a 100 year old building, but the inside is done in a very modern style, kind of like a W Hotel.

On the second day, I started to pay a little more attention to things. The whole city sits on big crescent-shaped hill with a very steep descent to the ocean. All of the building and houses are very old, but only about half of them really need to be condemned. The rest of them are really pretty cool. The colors and textures are amazing. And while some of the buildings are pretty simple, there’s a ton of neat architectural detail on most. By the end of the third day, I had probably taken over 200 pictures.

Maipu Valley - The Devil´s Cellar

Monday, April 21 – Day 125

The Maipu valley is right on the outskirts of Santiago, and a lot of really good wine is made here. I did a tour that covered 1) Vina Aquitana, an 18 year old winery that includes one of the principals of Chateau Margeaux as an owner, and 2) Concho y Toro, the largest winery in South America, and the 10th largest producer in the world.

Concho y Toro is about 150 years old, but it’s not the oldest winery in Chile. Don Melchor started the winery in 1853 by bringing in some grape vines from Bordeaux. He made some pretty good vino, but began to find that bottles started to go missing from his cellar. Suspecting that some of the locals were stealing from him, the legend has it that he began to tell everyone that the Devil himself lived there in the cellar, and after that, no more of the wine disappeared. Part of the tour takes you to the original cellar, and this is where the namesake barrels of “Don Melchor” cabernet are stored. It is regarded as perhaps the best wine in Chile, if not the world (#4 in Wine Spectator’s Top 100), and sells for US$120.00 here at the winery. And it does taste very good.

Clos Alpata Winery

Montes Winery

Friday, April 18 – Day 123

I visited two excellent wineries today. My taxi driver Alejandro picked me up at 11:30 (no need to rush into these things), and dropped me off at the front door of the Montes winery.

Montes is one of the larger wine producers in Chile and has been around for quite some time. This specific winery, however, is relatively new. They hired a feng shui expert to advise on the design, and play Gregorian chants to the wine barrels in the cellar. The wine was great, I got to meet one of the four owners, and there were only two other people on the tour. Pretty cool.

The B&B owner gave me a suggestion for lunch, but Alejandro said that it was a place for touristas. So I asked him, “Where do you have lunch, Alejandro?” He told me of a cafeteria that he likes, but said that it’s usually just full of locals. Perfect. I told him to take me there, and that I’d buy his lunch. He didn’t speak a word of English, but was patient enough with my Spanish that I was able to learn a lot about him and his city, and I thought was just as much fun as the wine tour.

My second winery was Clos Alpata, which is big, big money. It’s run by a lady that is a member of the Lapostolle family – the 2nd largest wine producer in the Chile. She married a guy that is part of the Mariner family from France. And that would be the Grand Mariner family. They spent an insane amount of money and dug a whole six stories down into a granite mountainside to build this winery. The design is stunning, but you see very little of it from the road.

The whole process is based upon using gravity to move the wine around – less mechanical pumping, less oxidation. You finish on the bottom floor were the barrels are kept at the perfect temperature and humidity by Mother Nature. There’s an altar-like table with a glass top in the middle of the room, and that’s where we did our tasting. It’s kind of dark, so you can’t see much. Then the guide turned on a light beneath us, and we could then see through the table, and down into the owner’s private cellar. One end of the table opens to reveal a staircase that leads down to 10,000 bottles of the world’s finest wines. Now that’s a nice touch.


Saturday, April 19 – Day 124

The History Museum in Santa Cruz is owned by a local guy that is reported to be a former arms dealer. He has the most stunning collection of pre-Columbian artifacts in Chile, and just about everything else he could find. Dinosaur bones and mastodon teeth, war artifacts, typewriters cameras and printing presses, 400 year old religious decrees from the Vatican and King of Spain, horse-drawn carriages, and steam engines. It’s a really odd collection of stuff, but very impressive.

Santa Cruz Lodging

Thursday, April 17 – Day 122

A lot of great wines are made in the Maipu valley, which is just on the outskirts of Santiago. Santa Cruz, however, about 140 km south, is regarded as the “Napa Valley” of Chile. The bus ride takes about two hours, and costs $2,000 pesos (US$5.00). Both Mendoza and Santa Cruz are said to be like Napa and Sonoma used to be in the 1970’s – less crowded, less commercial, and less expensive.

There is only one hotel, which is a tourist magnet, so I’m stayed in a small B&B that is 2 km out of town and surrounded by a vineyard. This is by far, the nicest accommodation I’ve had. With help from the owner, I rented a taxi driver for my excursion tomorrow. At $US50.00 for the entire day, it’s cheaper than renting a car, and he knows where he’s going.

A Day of Culture

Friday, April 11 – Day 116

I went to “La Chascona” today with a couple of girls that I met in Bariloche. It’s the house of Pablo Neruda, winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize for literature. Though I didn’t know it, he is apparently regarded as one of the most influential poets of the 20th century. Most of his work is romantic – again, who knew? As a communist sympathizer, he was a rather controversial figure. This became a problem when President Gonzales Videla outlawed communism and issued a warrant for his arrest. He died of “cancer” in 1973, 12 days after Pinochet’s coup d’état. Pinochet denied a public funeral, but thousands disobeyed the curfew and filled the streets, marking the first public protest against the new military dictatorship.

Later in the evening, I went to see the national symphony. The concert hall is at Plaza Italia, and it’s only a block from where I’m staying. They are playing short piece from Tchaikovsky, a concerto for piano and orchestra by Camille Saint-Saens, and then Beethoven’s 4th symphony. The pianist for the middle piece was a Korean lady, and guess what, she studied at Indiana University! How small is this world? Anyway, the concert was great, and not a single person clapped at the wrong time.

Saturday, April 12 – Day 117

There’s a big soccer game today, Colo Colo vs. Universidad de Chile, which are the two largest teams in Chile. Like the general population, Chilean futbol teams are stratified along class lines, with U de Chile having a wealthy fan base and Colo Colo being the symbol of the Mapuche and the working class. This makes for an intense rivalry and symbolizes the massive problem of inequality in this country.

Regardless of who wins, the knuckle-headed fans of both teams have a tradition of gathering in Plaza Italia after the match to “show support for their team”. Plaza Italia is a block from where I’m staying, and the manager of the hostel said that I shouldn’t go out into that mess because as an obvious foreigner, there is a good chance that I’d get mugged just for sport.

Well, who could resist a chance like that? About a half hour after the match, I could hear the crowd start to gather. Since it still seemed early enough, I thought I’d go ahead and have a look. I needed to find some dinner anyway, so I didn’t plan to stick around long.

There were bunches of riot police in full regalia. Helmets, shields, batons, and lots of body armor. They looked like a pure military force. The motorcycle cops use dirt bikes so they can hop curbs and chase people up stairs and over rough terrain. I also noticed that a lot of the businesses along the square had closed early and shut their steel garage doors to cover their storefronts. Hmmm…..

One guy got a little confrontational with a policeman and was quickly surrounded. These cops don’t look like the kind of guys that are going to take a lot of shit from a drunken futbol hooligan, and he quickly changed his manner. I would have loved to taken some pictures, but I didn’t take my camera because I thought that would only invite the mugging that the hostel manager had suggested. Anyway, that was all that I needed to see, so I left the area in search of more friendly company.