Travel in Santiago: Bicicleta!

About a year and a half ago, I went with Scott and Caitlin to Feria Bio-Bio, just about the biggest market you've ever seen, full of anything you would ever want to win, from kittens to Nintendo systems, to cars to furniture to food. We all got bikes, myself included, and I've been using mine ever since to travel the perilous streets of Santaigo de Chile.

I use a pretty nice bike lane to go everywhere:

Play on words?

So we all know English is popular world-wide, but this is a little silly.

It's a sign at the coffee/palta sandwich stop at the Facultad de Humanidaded on the main Universidad de Chile campus.

I'm not sure how well the play on words from the "Give me a break, give me a break, give me off a break of that Kit-Kat bar!" jingle translates to "Give yourself a break / Give yourself a Kit-Kat", especially when probably only about three percent of Chileans (according to a national government survey) speak English.

In other news, Chile is still going absolutely nuts over the departure of Marcelo Bielsa, the Argentinian who coached La Roja in the World Cup, and is credited with giving Chile a respectable football team for the first time in, oh..... forty-three years? In other words, he is close to God, and is leaving due to the Chilean soccer league's politics, which were affected by a massive national conspiracy coming directly from the president's office.

Or not?

Either way, there is a popular facebook group titled "Forgive us, Bielsa, we know not what we do", which expresses well the national feeling about him at the moment, as well as a formal government investigation.

News!

I spent all today thinking it was Tuesday....

In other news, OBAMA'S COMING TO CHILE! :D

Asado

After the book fair came the asado - just for the heck of it.

Eating and playing the guitar:

Our attempts at a group picture. Unfortunately, the camera is on the ground, so you can't exactly see the Andes behind us.

Walking down the mountain at the end of the day.

Feria Internacional de Libros

All this month, Estacion Mapocho has been hosting the Feria Internacional de Libros - a humongous book fair with all the book vendors and printing companies of the city, as well as a good number of the embassies, all putting out their wares.

I went yesterday for the final day of the fair, to see if there were any good sales, and spent a little too much - I got Cuentas de Eva Luna (Isabel Allende), Veinte Poemas de Amor (Neruda), La Biblia de Barro (Navarro), and Cronica de la lengua castellana (Lineros? / Academia Chilena de la Lengua). I'm pretty excited about them all, and hopefully will set time aside to read over the next few weeks!

Estacion Mapocho is the old train station of Santiago, from when Chile had trains coming in and out of the city. It's now used for conferences and special events.

At-aulis 2.0

Moving the blog here... It's been a good four years with livejournal, but I need an easier way to post pictures, and besides, all the cool kids are here nowadays.