Brown

Well, I made it to the Ivy Leagues. But only for three days.

I am in Providence Rhode Island, which is very small, very New England, and very liberal. But it's nothing compared to the folks I have to put up with at Brown University -- a bunch of Chavez luvin radicals.

The hotel I am staying in is very cool, built as a Masonic Temple in the 1920s, but never finished, so it stood empty for decades until Marriot boought it. Looking out my room window is a framed view of the Rhode Island capitol building.

I presented a paper today, which went well, and now I have to put up with two more days of propaganda. Oh well, I will just have to feign interest and look forward to the excellent chocolate chip cookies they serve at the coffee breaks.

Panizza

Good to know the LSE academics remember me.........

I promised pictures

Here are some pictures of my trip to Costa Rica. Now a bit of down time before my next trip to the US next week.

Do you know the way to San José?

I remember when some friends travelled to Costa Rica some ten or twelve years ago, and when the returned they wouldn't shut up about how great it was.

I don't remember the details, but I presume they didn't spend much time in San José, becuase it's really a dump. I guess there must be nice parts, but I am staying downtown and it is not nice.

Plus, it is what they call winter here, which means it's 27 and humid and it rains all day. The difference with summer, which is during winter, if you get my drift, is that it doesn't rain all day. But right now, it's raining all day, which makes my weeks of anticipation for a mini summer break rather misplaced.

Anyway, I am hoping to get out into the rain forest (I am really clear now on where that name comes from) before heading back to Santiago. If I do, I'll try to take pictures. And if I do, I will try to upload them.

Day Off

With classes out, and not yet having begun to mark the big honkin stack of final exams before me, I had to go downtown to pick up a document, and took my camera along. These are the pics of Robbie's Day Off, with apologies to Ferris Bueller.

My friend's Flickr

My friend Luis, who works for the Minister of Public Works, took a picture of me as we were leaving a meeting at the Presidential Palace last week. Then I presume he did some editing, since I don't recall the street looking quite like this:

Finally, after 20 years

Some of you may recall that in the (northern) summer of 1988, after high school ended, I came down to Chile to visit my family and to ski. I remember I borrowed a bag from my friend Reid to put my skis in, and down we came.

Except that it was one of the driest antipodean winters on record, and so there was no snow. I even extended my trip by a couple of weeks in the hopes that some of the white stuff would fall. Nuttin. My skis and I went back to Toronto without having touched the Andes, and Reid's ski bag had several more frequent flier points.

Then, several years ago I moved down here, brought my skis, this time bought second hand from Dr Harry Palter, and everything else, looking forward to a lifetime of skiing the Andes. Then I realised that the road up to the slopes is, to quote John Lennon, Long and Windey and not in the best shape. Every winter a few cars discover that it's a long drop over the edge.

So my fear got the better of me and I never went.

Until last week.

I took a day in which I have no classes, picked up a friend, bit the bullet, bought a nice pair of Spyder ski pants since I couldn't find my old ones, and went.

The road wasn't so bad, although I was glad I was not driving. It was certainly less gravelly than I remember, and since it is early in the season, there was no snow on it. About half way up there are stands where you can rent chains for the tires, and then a bit later there's a checkpoint where the police stop to ask if you have chains. We said yes.

The first resort on the road is Farellones, but there we were headed to El Colorado, which is about 1 km further up hill. At Farellones there was no snow, but just past it small puffs of dirty snow started appearing by the side of the road.

Next problem: El Colorado is about 10000 ft above sea level, so some people feel a bit dizzy when they get up there. Fortunately I didn't, and I was so psyched by a) the nice, warm sunny day, b) that I had survived the trip up, and c) to go skiing, that I wasn't really thinking about the altitude. But as you will see from the pictures, the altitude means that there are no trees. So it's a bit wierd to find this small town composed entirely of nice chalets, a few small apt buildings, and no trees. Also wierd that the different runs are basically marked by poles sticking in the ground, which are pretty easy to miss. You can see the tree line here:

The crowd was mostly high school and college age -- not sure why they were not doing in school -- and affluent. I have never seen so many SUVs in my life. But the place is so big, and the weekday crowd was sufficiently small, that you only really encountered them at lunch, when we bought two rather tasteless cheeseburgers (with tomato and avocado) and two drinks (inlcuding one pisco sour, of course) for about 30 bucks!!!

I am told that El Colorado is like that, mostly young people who go for the day, whereas La Parva is more exlusive and Valle Nevado caters more to foreigners. Since they are all only about an hour from Santiago, I will have to check them out.