Earthquake madness

We were awoken last night by the 8.8 earthquake that hit chile. We ran to our children’s rooms after we realized it was not the usual 10 sec shaker which is so common here given the subduction zone of the pacific and continental plate here which among other things produces the Andean mountain range with dozens of sub 20,000 ft peeks. We huddled under the doorways with a kid each in hand. Thankfully our house survived structually, although we could hear shattering glass throughout the house. It seemed to go on forever, reports say 90 secs but if you told me it was 5 minutes I would believe you.

Afterwards we gathered outside in the yard with Tata Emilio who is with us. We managed to get back to sleep eventually and rode out the aftershocks which were impressive unto themselves and super frequent, just had a biggish one again a good 9 hours later.

Our house suffered some damage including lots of blown out shelves, smashed tv, some shattered windows, 18 inches of the pool water level tossed out, etc etc but nothing important, we are thrilled to be safe and to learn that all of our immediate family is as well. However we got news of an immediate horrifying tragedy in our extended family involving loss of life of young children, a visceral reminder of the seriousness of the situation and i’m sure of similar news that will be affecting many folks here and where tsunami lands.

Thankyou to all ofour friends and family that have written with concern and well wishes, we will update more when can, for now we have no phoneor electric or water and cell phone battery is almost dead. Prayers to all those affected. Much love, forest and Cristina and the boys.

Buying a car in Chile–why Latins get called “Lazy”

So i’m trying to buy a car in Chile, and i’m running head on yet again into some of the basic cultural differences between the hyper efficient commercial society of the USA and China (in this regard, China is really on the same page as the USA), and the much more casual and laid back experience of commerce here in Chile.  Here are some maddening and frustrating examples of where my expectations are not in alignment with the society:

• Closed on Sundays.  Sure, that might be a day when car buyers might flock to showrooms in the USA, but apparently here neither buyers nor sellers want to be bothered on the day God told everyone to relax.  Too bad for me and my family, who drove into town in hopes of taking a look at some cars.
• Closed at lunch!  Yep, you heard right, at lunch time, the sales guys are all “out to lunch” so to speak, so my phone call to the Audi, Volkswagon, Subaru, and Mini dealers were all in vain.  At least the VW guys answered the phone and told me “sorry, we’re at lunch”, where as the other dealers the phone just rang, and rang, and rang… amazing!  They don’t even have their crap together enough to put a answering machine on the line so they can capture the lead!  When are car buyers supposed to go shopping if not at lunch during the work week, or Sunday on the weekend!  lol
• Not really interested in negotiating!  So i get a quote for $19m pesos for a Subaru Impreza WRX (about 35% more than the USA), which is fine, so i think “well, i’ll do some comparison shopping and see what the other dealers in town say?”  So i call another dealer, and he tells me he doesn’t have the car in stock, and that he can offer me the same price.  I say, hey, the other dealer has the car, i test drove, and that’s the price he’s giving me, to which he said “ok”.  The guy had zero interest in talking to me about making a deal… this flies in the face of every single ounce of capitalist/commerce instincts that are born into us in the USA.  He didn’t even try to tell me that he could (a) make a better price, (b) offer better service, (c) get me a color or features that I might want more, (d) offer to be friendlier or anything else he could make up.  Nothing… he just said, “ok”.  And that was it.  There’s no real competition here, there is basically a monopoly in every industry, so the Subaru dealer brings X cars to the country each year, and all are sold at good margin, so there’s no incentive to compete with eachother… nasty stuff!

The Eagle Has Landed

Well, time to cool our heels for awhile, stop moseying.  It feels like we have been on perpetual vacation since June.  But now we are settled into an AWESOME colonial-style furnished house in the country outskirts of Santiago. We are a good 20 minutes outside the actual capital and have again found ourselves in a rural part of the world that feels like another era.  It’s like being in a Latin American tele-novela without any actual drama other then where in this big house are Caetano’s shoes when we need them.

No housewarming barbecues until Forest returns from his looong cold trip to Beijing at the end of the month.  Kids don’t start school until March, so it feels like an endless Summer for the Keys.  We are having a great time and have been enjoying the family visits from the States (Andy Casanueva family, Joaquin, Emilio who is staying with us for awhile), re-encountering semi-locals like Maria and Randy, and catching up with the Chilean family.

In case you are wondering how Carlos is taking this all in, here are some words from the little 8.5 year old man himself:

So how was it leaving pisco elqui?

Thumbs up. Well, thumbs to the side because in Pisco Elqui, you can walk to the ice cream store by yourself.  You can walk to school, and back, it’s peaceful and quiet.

Leaving was okay because now I don’t get to walk to the ice cream store, but it was a boring lifestyle.  i didn’t have a book to read (Carlos blew through all the books we brought down for him within our first month in Chile and has been on a steady comics diet).

After Elqui, you spent some time at the beach in Zapallar. How was that?

That was pretty good, we got some Christmas Legos which was our daily play for awhile. Seeing the family was good, fun.  The best part was the presents that they brought (and 100 lbs of Legos we’ve accumulated over the years).  The beach was pretty fun, but not fun to go there every day (we were there for about 2 weeks).  if i could play video games for 3 hours every day, then eventually i would get bored.  Anything if you do it too much it will make you bored.  At the beach i just sat there.  We had some water guns, played with Camila, but I spent 40% just lying there (doesn’t it sound like torture?).

The food?

The food in Chile is not really the best.  I miss Chinese food, dim sum.  The chinese rice.  (For the record, the rest of us like it pretty well).

How is the new house in Chicureo?

It’s pretty good.  It’s fun. We have a separate gaming room with lovely couches, two bean bags. My room is great, it has a nice desk, nice lamps. A big closet with room to store Legos.

How about your summer camp?

Summer camp stinks. i’d rather take up my day with other things, not necessarily video games.  Like jogging, or taking a bike around the neighborhood. Taking a bike around anywhere. Playing Legos, doing the geography book or math book. Other exercises.

But don’t you do some of those things in camp?

In camp, when we go to the pool, you can’t just go for 40 minutes.  you have to stay for an hour and a half, or get out, and sit there.The fact that I am trapped behind metal bars, forced to do activities, without the freedom to just jolly run off from camp when I’m tired, doesn’t work. There’s so many kids, it’s crazy.

I want to go to school. I’m bored of summer, it’s way too long.  I just hope it’s fun.  The small presentation I got, being there for half a day, didn’t give me the full picture.

I think it’s going to be okay.  As for the Spanish, I think in maybe 5 months I might be speaking fluently.  When I start actually going  to school, i might have the opportunity to learn  something.

How much Spanish have you picked up?

Since when I came to Chile i didn’t know anything, I think I have learnt 10% of what there is to know to start speaking fluently.

I miss WAB (Western Academy of Beijing). Back then I hated it, but now I think it was a stupid thing to hate it.  I got told off a lot (so it seemed to him at the time), but other then that it was pretty fun.  I miss my friends.

Will you make any friends here in chile?

Maybe. The kids don’t ask me more then what’s my name how old I am and what school i’m going to.  They don’t ask if I’ve been anywhere else.  I can’t learn spanish if no one talks to me.

They’re talking to you. You just don’t understand everything yet.

Everyone talks so fast.

They do. You’re doing great.

Santa @ the Beach in Southern Hemisphere

In what is clearly the most damning evidence that Santa Claus and Cristianity in general are ill suited to southern hemisphere culture, we are enjoying the pagan winter equinox festival which coincides with the coldest and darkest season in europe, summer equinox style at the beach in Zapallar with family.  Balmy days, sun setting at 9:30pm, and santa arriving at the beach do deliver colorful balloons at sunset while the kids scream and go crazy—good times!

Happy holidays everyone!

Roads

Only one road goes in and out of this town.  No one goes to work in an office. Kids don’t play organized sports of any kind, and although there is a big open dirt field to play futbol, hardly anyone does. There are three nice bars and 2 divey ones. Everyone hates the foggy coastal city La Serena. I have yet to meet someone who doesn’t do some kind of art, craft or music. You can get Pisco Sour flavored ice cream. When we need to buy one or two things for a meal, we go to the local almacen that has stuff behind a counter. When we want to stock up on meat and produce, we drive 45 minutes to Vicuna, a bigger town that has one store for veggies, one store for meat and dairy, and one for dry goods like beans and rice.  The kids get a comic book  and use their pocket money to buy "Gogos," the latest craze in small, collectible plastic playthings, or maybe we’ll indulge them with a Bilz, the Chilean "Bebida de Fantasia," a bright red soda that tastes like heaven.  We are always happy to come back to the warm embrace of the dry hills that envelope our valley cabana.

In the Greek classic the Odyssey, and in Tennyson’s poem "the Lotos Eaters," Odysseus and his men get mired in a land of languid air and intoxicating flowers which the sailors want never to abandon. Why go back to a land of toil, they ask, when one can spend days looking at the view? From their awesome terrace? Drinking wine and eating cheap avocados every day?? To hell with the crappy internet connection. Oh, wait, what was I talking about? The Land of Lotus Eaters or Pisco Elqui?

We settled in here 2 months ago, and have been loving it.  However, when the boys break for Summer vacation in mid-December, we will take off.  We spent the last month diligently researching areas to live for the next couple of years, and it was a hard decision to rule out Pisco Elqui, on the grounds that Forest’s business will be very hard to manage out here with the internet infrastructure being sub-optimal, adding time to international travel (it’s another 1-hour connecting flight up here from Santiago and only one a day).

Staying with the "Ch" theme, we will move to Chicureo in January:  20 minutes outside the capital, semi-country, semi-urban, great Montessori school, lovely house with big yard.

I’m sad.

I feel like Robert Plant when he sang "Baby, you know I’m gonna leave you. I’m a leave you in the summertime. Leave you when the summer comes along."

People have asked how we are able to do this. Move around. We have our methods. But it isn’t so so so easy.  My feelings get all stirred up. I cry. We talk. And then we ramble on.

Punta Choros and Isla Damas

This weekend we picked the kids up after school and headed down to the coast to explore the Isla Damas national park area, famous for fauna lining the islands just off the coast.  The Humboldt current runs along the coast of most of southern Chile, with icy cold waters that come up in a subduction zone that brings rich nutrients from the depths up to the surface where fish can gorge themselves, and then a sequence of predators can gorge on them and each other in a fantasmagorific orgy of consumption.  Bottle nose dolphins, orcas and other whales, dozens of migratory birds, sea lions and otters, etc. line the coast feasting on eachother.

The drive on yet another dirt road was fun as always, the thrill has far from eluded me (to date), and led to a windswept peninsula/point with the little town of Punta Choros.  I had found some cute cabins on the web earlier in the day, and they were even better in person.

We were undeterred by the wind and set off for several great hikes along the coast, with mostly clear skies over the weekend and warm temperatures if you could lay down low enough to get out of the wind!

Sunsets were fantastic as usual, and a local fisherman sold us a dozen LARGE abalone for about $1.50 USD per… it was yet another abalone orgy, as we prepared them with mayonaise, stir fried with pasta, and ate them on little toasted breads.

The evenings were fun, we didn’ t have internet connection or tv, but we did have our portable electronics and plenty of electricity to power them…

The highlight was the “3 hour tour” (we explained the meaning of that phrase to the kids, who thought that it sounded hilarious (Gilligan’s Island) to the islands.  As luck would have it, my camera ran out of battery power very early on the outing, so i missed dozens of great wildlife shots of dolphins and sea lions, which were a thrill to see in such high density in their wild environments.  The dolphins were everywhere, jumping high into the air at several points, and following our boats around playfully as usual (we see quite a bit of them in Santa Barbara shores in California).  Here’s a poor stand’in photo wise:

 

Just 30 minutes into our drive back home sunday morning, both the boy asked “when can we come back”, so this clearly ranked as a top 10 destination for them—they really like being in beach cabins i guess?

Desert drive to coast, yummier than a Dessert!

Emilio and I did an amazing overland trip from Pisco Elqui.  When you look at a map of chile on Google Maps, you get a very false impression that all roads are created equally.  In our part of Chile, maybe 10% of the roads are paved, so a good local map not only distinguishes between paved/not but also between degrees of “not paved”, which range from packed gravel, to packed dirt, to loose dirt, and then the lowest form of them all, loose dirt SINGLE TRACK, roads that are so gnarly that you not only need a 4×4 vehicle, but also to drive with trepidation because at any moment you could find yourself facing down another vehicle, on the middle of a steep hill with no guardrails.  The first leg of our weekend outing was on such a road, south from Vicuna into the Rio Hurtado valley.

 

The first hour we probably were making 40km per hour progress, but then the road got really hard core and we were down to 20km/p/h for long stretches.  It took us over 3 hrs to go less than 40 miles.  But it was the most fun i’ve ever had with a 4×4 vehicle, and the vistas were just incredible… the air is so dry, you can literally see mountains in the distance that are 100s of miles away.

Once we got to Hurtado the road opened up and eventually became paved, as we made our way into Ovalle for a yummy lunch at the local “Social Club”.  Afterwards we continued along a paved road down to Combarbala, through river valleys and past mile after mile of grapes, avocadoes, and other fruits being squeezed from the desert by modern irrigation marvels (we saw several large irrigation damns).

The cacti were fantastic, some flowering with bizarre fruits.  Late in the afternoon we hit the coast at Huentelauquen and made our way down to Los Vilos, a windy place to say the least, but still charming.  We found a funky little hotel with a great deck view of the bay:

and then we walked out to the point of town to catch the sunset, followed by a feast of abalones and wine before snuggling up in our beds (i had forgotten how humid the coast is, i much prefer the dry as bone desert air in our village)

The next morning we did some exploration of the coast between Pichidangui and Los Vilos for possible property investment, the highlight of which was this piece of land, complete with amazing cliff and ocean inlets—a bit pricey at $130,000 USD for 1.5 acres. 

On the plus side, it does include water and electricity… unlike other properties we saw that were 1/10th the price, but playfully offered as “eco-lots” because you are on your own to produce solar/etc. for your water and power needs.

Here we are at Pichidangui beach, which tata of course wanted to immediately ravage with a quick swim (i held him off till later in the day, in Totoralillo closer to Serena).