Santiago is Still Here

I was running a little late today, so breakfast was quick, and we were out the door. Our first visit was to the Goodyear tire plan here in Santiago. It was a spectacular visit. We met in a training room where we were again informed we had improper shoes, but that they were getting special permission from the safety department to let us through. . We were offered coffee, tea, and cookies while we waited, then were shown a couple videos about Chile and about Goodyear’s expansion at that plant. The operations director, who is from New York, then spoke to us about what was going on in the plant and how special the Chile plant is. I’ll spare you the details, but in short, they are expanding the plant and upgrading all the technology. The whole process is mostly automated now, where in most other plants, most of the tires are made by hand. Because of the expansion, there are many places where there is downtime, which makes the process inefficient and more expensive. The expansion will soon be finished, and after the dust has settled, they can start to implement the elements of lean systems to reduce waste and increase capacity. Part of what has enabled them to build the additions was the economic downturn, which caused the factory to slow and made room for upgrades.

Anyway, we were split into the men and the women and were taken onto the factory floor. It was so cool! There were so many crazy machines, and although all of them were fairly scattered, we were able to follow the rubber from beginning to end. We weren’t in cages above the action either; the directors took us right next to the machines and let us watch them work. Dave said that this would never fly in the states, so it was truly a rarity to be that close to the machinery. We were able to ask the director questions the whole time about how the factory operates, how machines work, operation theory, and about other things we noticed. I also kept close to Dave and asked him what he saw. He was very insightful because we was an inspector for the Shingo Prize, which is an award given to businesses who excel in lean principles, and which is based out of the USU campus. We met back with the chicas after the tour and were taken back out of the gates to our bus.

It was about lunchtime, so we went back to the mall we were yesterday and picked up some food. The Hard Rock Café Santiago is in the bottom of the shopping center, so Nate, Dave, Brennon, and I ate there. It was my first time at Hard Rock, and it was an expensive lunch. The food was really tasty though, but I wouldn’t say it was worth the price.

We had a short time there before we had to meet to walk to our next visit, which was at the US Embassy in Santiago. At the front gate we were greeted by a nice lady who checked us off the list and let us enter. We were escorted into a small teleconference room, where the head of economics and politics (or some title like that) for the embassy presented a lecture. It was not long winded or boring, but it was hard to stay awake. I was interested because I had wanted to work for embassies as a Foreign Service officer, so I knew some background info for parts of the stories. We sadly were not able to see the rest of the embassy I am assuming because of the high security clearance needed to get to other places. We, oddly, did not have to go through any security at all. Dave noticed and asked about it, and she said she had pulled some strings for us to make it quicker.

After we returned to the hotel, we guys went out for a walk. We crossed a large puente and stepped into some sketchy residential neighborhoods. We did not go in too deep, but you could tell by the condemned buildings and the type of lighting that it wasn’t something we wanted to explore. I guess it only was about 6 o’clock, but it gets dark here about then. We ran into some street vendors and tried some of her fried delights. The empanadas were almost empty except for a piece of cheese at the bottom, but the other scone-like pan was pretty good. I stole one from Nate, who had put some salsa on it. The salsa had a bite to it, but it was pretty good. Unshowingly, I was a little worried about eating from a street vendor, but I kinda wanted to, so why not? It was fried and cooked, right?

For dinner, Tyler saw this Shawarma place, so upon his pushing, we all went there. The reason he was so adamant was because on The Avengers, Iron Man says at the end of the final fight scene that they should all go get Shawarma later, and Tyler didn’t know what Shawarma was. The restaurant was overpriced ($1.50 for a half of a can of soda!), and the food wasn’t especially good. Shawarma is Middle Eastern; they cook the meat on a kabob and serve it in a pita type sandwich. I first thought the white stuff was mayo, but they reassured me it was yogurt (it tasted way too much like mayo). The meat was covered with tomatoes, which turned out to be way too much tomato. All in all, I am glad I got the Chilean version of Shawarma, but I bet there are other places where the Shawarma is delicious!

The rest of the night was spent trying to figure out something to do. Some people came up with ideas, but there was never enough support behind them to act. So we ended up just chatting in Erin and Natalie’s room.

I really like our group; I’ve said it before, and I am sure it will not be the last time I say it, but we have a chemistry that is fun. Everybody is different, but we all have fun.

A Day Late. Whoops.

We piled up ready to go by 8 this morning. The monotony of breakfast has not been unbearable, but I think by the time we leave, it will be. We were all dressed in our business casual for our meeting with PriceWaterhouseCoopers. We had driven for a twenty or thirty minutes or so, when our fearless leader Dave announces that our visit with PWC has been postponed due to miscommunications; We are not going to visit them on Thursday, so our plans for Thursday were switched to today. Our original plan on Thursday was to go to some mining companies and see their operations, but that had also fell through earlier in the week. So our plan for Thursday that we switched to this morning (are you following?) was to tour Santiago and drop by the mall. So in our button up shirts and blouses, we sat very fancily on the bus and watched the barrios of Santiago whiz by. We stopped at a park that had a view of Santiago’s largest building and hung out for a bit. We fed some ugly swans, cool birds with green bills, and flamingos. I kinda liked the flamingos; they remind me of the lawn ornament flamingos we used to mark the flooding of the river in ’06. There were many dogs there, and once a female showed up, they went bounding for her. They growled and sprinted past Erin, who screamed and freaked out.

The park was followed by a giant mall, which happened to be the bottom 6 floors of the largest skyscraper. The mall was fun, but everything was so overpriced. We would peruse, trying jackets and looking for shoes and ties, but we would put everything back on the rack when we saw the price tag. We ate lunch there, which was also relatively expensive, and by then, it was about time to go.

The traffic in Santiago is horrible, so we were moving slow toward our next destination. We arrived at the Watt’s manufacturing facility, where we were greeted by a pretty woman who didn’t speak English. They had a presentation that explained their brands and some of their workings. Those of us in Vijay’s maymester class were furiously taking notes because we have 4 papers to write about our visits. Because we were uninformed about proper clothes for the visit (we needed steel-toed boots), so we had to go where the niños go, which was a box high above production where we could not see everything we wanted. We compared ideas about applications of theories from operations and scribbled more notes, then left after a semi-uneventful visit, although it was cool to see some of the models of the processes from the lectures. They took us back to the first room and presented all of us Mormons with a gift: a bottle of wine from their wine brand. Of course, we were all very gracious, but it was very ironic to see a bunch of Mormon kids pack wine home.

Can you see the giant spider???? Cooper and I found it just outside Shannon and Liza's room. Blaeahhh.

We arrived back at our hotel very early in the evening, something we have yet to do. We had to make a stop at the grocery store (which is generally closed when we get back), then we dressed down and set out to find dinner. We walked to the Plaza Del Armas de Santiago, where we walked around for a bit, taking in the night life and keeping an eye out for a place to eat.

This a pic of the cathedral in the plaza del armas, with Cooper's face as well.

Before I tell this next story, I must give some context. Everybody down here is dark haired, dark eyed. Not all have dark skin; some are surprisingly fair skinned, but all of them have dark brown hair. There are two girls in our group that are blonde: Aniko and Erin. They have attracted so much attention from weird guys on the streets and in the workplaces. A guitarist started walking by Aniko and singing to her, something that made us guys worry some. Brennon followed closely as Aniko and Natalie giggled awkwardly. A guy intrusively came right into Erin’s face to look at her eyes, then left just as quickly. We have had to keep close as they have gone out.

So we saw a large group gathering and watching some guy, so we wandered that way to see what the show was. I think it was a comedian, but the Spanish was too fast for me. Erin is semi-short, but she wanted to see the show, so she made Tyler, the tallest in the group, put her on his shoulders. The whole world stopped for a moment, because not only did the tall white guy from North America just become taller, but he put a blonde haired beauty on his shoulders, which drew the attention of EVERYBODY. It was probably not a good thing, looking back, because we put a giant target on ourselves. The comedian stopped, said, “Hola,” then suddenly found a new set of jokes, none of which we understood, which made the jokes even funnier. We set sail shortly after, and I was keeping a watch on anybody that might have been following us.

Upon a recommendation from Susana and other girls who had eaten at the restaurant a couple nights before, we stopped at a Peruvian restaurant to have dinner. We had eaten not to much before, so I was not that hungry. Every body else ordered fairly large meals, and I ordered papa a la huanchaina, which is potatoes smothered in huanchaina sauce, and I can’t really describe it other than that. I was good, but it is fairly bland and not necessarily my favorite. Although, I can see how if you ate that for a couple years, you would learn to really love it.

We had good conversation and a couple of good laughs, then walked back to our hotel. Some of the girls wanted to go out clubbing, but none of the guys especially wanted to go with them, so we were able to talk them out of going. We plan on going tomorrow night anyway. I stayed in my room the rest of the night, reading my book The Kite Runner, along with my roommate, Nate, who was listening to a book. The others got together and played poker and other card games, which sounded fun. But I got to bed at a decent hour, which I did not the night before. I fell asleep writing my journal entry, which is why this is a day late. I’ll be sure to get today’s up tonight.

Monday, Monday (It doesn't even feel like Monday)

I am afraid breakfast here is going to get old; they have the same things every day: eggs with ham, bread and sandwich meat, a selection of native fruits (which are actually really good), yogurt, cereal, and two choices of jugos. After breakfast, we waited for a half an hour for our bus to show up, but even with that delay, we were ten minutes early to our first appointment.

The first stop was the Emiliana Vinyards, which is an organic vineyard focusing on natural ways to bring out the best flavors out of the grapes. It was actually really cool, the very little we saw of it. They have 1000 jectors (2.5 acres per jector) total, but only some part of that in this particular valley. They focus on biodynamic farming, which means they try and create their own ecosystem that is especially designed to naturally enhance the grapes. They own animals like chickens, alpacas, horses, sheep, etc., which they use the manure to fertilize the plants; they grow special flowers in special areas, harvest them, then treat them a certain way with the fertilizer to help boost the compost; they believe that the human component is also important, so they have a community garden they allow their employees to tend and other projects to take on. For example, they make organic wool from the alpacas, and cheese and chocolate from milk and cocoa, and other side projects. I was hoping they would let us take some sips of wine, but the school cannot buy alcohol, so we just had cheese and chocolate. The coolest part of the vineyard was the propellers scattered throughout the fields; they use them to prevent freezing when the valley gets too cold.

We hopped back on the bus and drove another hour-ish to the beautiful port city of Valparaíso. We did a semi-bus tour of the city; we got there, then drove to the top of the hills and walked down aways. The view was beautiful! The sky was very blue, lined with colorful houses. We would catch glimpses of the ocean as we weaved through the streets of stone. We walked a historic route (I don’t really know why it’s historic or popular. There wasn’t really that much besides a neat view and a strange house), then took this rickety elevator, met back up with our bus, and drove to lunch.

The restaurant was also high in the hills surrounding the mar, but on the other side. We had a super delicious meal. We had chirimolla, which is a fruit drink that I don’t like very much, but is very common, ceviche, which is fish cured in lemon juice, a mahi mahi filet, and a muy rico desert, but I cannot remember the name of it. It had the consistency of jello and pudding babies, covered with raspberries and raspberry sauce with a stick of dark chocolate.  I saw the bill (the school paid for the meal), and it was about $50 a person for the 3 courses. BUT IT WAS SO GOOD.

I bet that we will spend more time than we would like to on the bus. We traveled for another hour to Quillota, which is a quiet agricultural area. We met an awesome hombre who owns and runs the family avocado farm. They talked about their investments, their growth process, and their challenges in the market. It was cool to just ask questions of an entrepreneur who works hard everyday to make sure they can support them selves and those they employ.  I really enjoyed that visit.

When we were at the Emiliana vinyards, we had a professor from La Universidad Catolica de Valparaíso join us. He looks just like the professor from Jurassic Park, and we sang the theme song and made raptor noises all day. He facilitated the tour of the avocado farm, then took us to his center where he does his research. He is a leader of innovation. He has developed a system and methodology to encourage a culture of innovation. At first, his lecture about his work seemed socialistic (which stuck with most of the others in the group), but after he explained more, it really just seemed like a way of facilitating the creation of new ideas, which I really liked. He is currently working in horticulture, but in the past, he worked with traffic planners implementing his system. The details are too boring for a blog post, but I really enjoyed what he had to say. It was way bad timing though. It was the end of a very long day, it was dark (because it’s almost the longest day up top, it’s almost the shortest day down here), and we were all tired and wanted to get to our hotel. We graciously listened, graciously ate his cookies and juice, graciously used his bathrooms, then graciously left without getting attacked by dinosaurs.

We piled on the bus with about two hours ahead of us before we made it back to the hotel. We were maybe a half an hour into it when we heard a loud BANG and a bump, signaling that a tire had blew. We pulled over, and the inside of the driver’s dually had popped. I’m not sure why they didn’t just drive on it, but they pulled us out of the bus on the side of the interstate and changed the tire. It was way fun though. Because it was unplanned, we were able to loosen up and just mingle with everybody. The best part was that we were able to see the night sky! That was one of my goals while we were out here! I wanted to look and see how different it was not having familiar constellations and stars to point out. It was so beautiful! We were in the middle of nowhere, so there were no lights except from the cars on the autopista. The stars shone in no peculiar fashion, but it was awesome to just partake and bask in the fact that I am on the other side of the world. The most famous constellation in the southern hemisphere is the Southern Cross, which hotdog way points north and south, and hamburger way points east and west. You can only see it south of the equator, which makes it special to be here.

The bus was fixed, the drive was taken, and now the beds are calling. I stayed up way later than I should have, but our group is getting really close, and I love to be a part of it. (Pictured: Me, Nate, Natalie, Erin (ha sorry), Shannon, Susana)

Friday, Saturday, Saturday, Monday

I decided to not set an alarm and just wake up when my body does. I thought I would at least get some hint when my roommate got up to go snowboarding, but I slept hard all through the night. I woke up at the perfect time. I was able to get ready, eat breakfast, and meet the others for church all without being rushed. Two guys met up with an old mission companion who took them to El Colorado ski resort to snowboard. Two stayed here at the hotel: one because she is not LDS and the other because he slept in, even past breakfast. The rest of us walked a couple of cobble-paved blocks to the meetinghouse.

The ward was huge, especially from what I was expecting; they were probably the size of my singles ward. We filled up a couple of side rows up front and were greeted by a very kind and seemingly competent bishop and an old missionary couple who spoke little to no Spanish. The little old lady who was conducting asked if any of us could play the piano, and I volunteered. They don’t have grand pianos or organs down here; there was a crappy little keyboard plugged into the wall on the stand. They weren’t used to having a pianist to accompany them. I played some intro for the hymn, like normal, and the lady conducting gave me weird looks. But we were actually able to communicate well during the music, which was good because I knew there would be some musical differences in the himnos. It was fast Sunday, and everybody got up and spoke really fast, bearing their testimony. I only was able to follow a little, until one of our guys got up to speak. Alex is 27, married, and very peculiar. He doesn’t speak Spanish, so we were all bracing ourselves for an awkward couple of minutes, but he spoke very well and was well received.

After church we changed out of our Sunday clothes and put on our giant tourist signs and went to Cerro San Cristobal Hill, which is a hill in the middle of the city. There is a tram you pay to go up and down; once you get to the top, you can hike a little ways and reach a statue of the Virgin Mary (but I’m not thoroughly convinced it wasn’t Jesus). There were also many small shops and restaurants, but they were semi over priced.

The view on top was magnificent though. The city wraps almost all the way around the statue, and you couldn’t see the boundaries of the city (partly because of the smog). The Andes Mountains lined the horizon with their white peaks (remember it’s almost winter here).  Dave said that there hasn’t been a time he could see the mountains because of the thick smog, so we were grateful that yesterday had been completely clear and that today the smog was only partially covering the edges.

After descending on the same tram, we walked a couple blocks down and found a nice area for eating. Everybody ate at some Colombian restaurant, but the food was only ok, and the service was horrible; the poor girls at the other table waited almost an hour and a half for their food. There were also tiendas here, but they were way more expensive, especially for dumb trinkets that would just double as dust collectors in my bedroom.

We returned to the hotel the same time as our amigos who went snowboarding. We burned an hour ish, then four of us- Nate, Aniko, Natalie, and myself- buddied up with another one of Nate’s mission friends and had dinner. I was expecting that he would take us to a different part of Santiago, but I think he said that it was dangerous to drive in the city at night, so he just took the metro. So we just went on another walk, mostly to enjoy each other’s company. I had a churrasco italiano sandwich (which was just carne with tomates, lechuga, y mayonesa. A LOT OF MAYONESA. I got more fat from the mayo then from the meat).

I really enjoyed the company of Nate’s amigo, Filipe. He and Nate talked most of the time, but he was fun to talk to. Natalie impressed me with her Spanish; she definitely knows more than I do. But I knew what they were saying most of the time. We came back to the hotel when we finished dinner, and Nate, Filipe, y yo sat in our room and chatted with out the girls. Filipe started using some of the special vocabulary he learned from misionarios gringos, and it was semi-funny, semi-strange to have all meaning stripped from usually vulgar words. It was more funny though, especially with his thick Chilean accent.

The girls came back and we conversed for a while longer.  I still can’t tell if Nate and Natalie aren’t dating. Weirdos. Filipe left, the conversation died, and we all decided to go to bed. We have an early bus ride tomorrow (a las ocho en la manana).

Update on Luribel: She received tickets to Peru. Apparently, the rules for visas changed two months ago, and we were mostly ready to go then, so nobody checked. We’ll miss her here, but we are so glad she can come to Peru!

El Primero Dia en Chile!

I woke when Brennon tapped on my arm. Breakfast was coming. I guess I had been sleeping heavily because I hadn’t even heard the carts or seen the sun fully come up. But we were still on the cramped plane. The rest of the flight was alright, though. The sun was bright and above the horizon. It was cool to watch it progressively rise; I would wake up periodically and look outside. The flat horizon turned from blues to oranges and pinks until the bright sun blinded us on the flight. The well-trained stewardess had put down all of our windows with a hanger as we slept though.

When we landed, we Americans had to get our visa, which was $160 worth of contentment from the Chilean government delivered as a “reciprocation” fee. Most of us had to get one: Dave, our leader, already had one from previous excursions, and Luribel is Dominican. They went through a different line while we waited in the other one. We purchased our visas, went through immigrations, and then found our luggage at the claim. Dave had met the other two girls that were on a different flight (which if ours was on time, our two flights would have landed at the same time), and they had collected our baggage. We did an accounting and couldn’t find Luribel, so we proceeded through customs thinking she might be on the other side. We couldn’t find her there, so we sent a leader and our tour guide whom we had just met to investigate. Mistakenly, she hadn’t gotten her visa, so they were holding her in immigrations. Because she didn’t get her visa, they had to export her back to the states. The leaders couldn’t even get in to see her. After an hour of probing, we found the wall we were hitting was too thick, so we left to salvage our sad day. We all feel bad for her; not only did she have to sit in the airport for 15 hours until her flight leaves, but she had to do it all alone, missing on all the plans. I hope that she gets to meet us in Peru! It really put a damper on our day.

We loaded the bus and headed to a small touristic village where we got a real taste of the culture. There were dogs everywhere! I mean, everybody who has been to South America anywhere has said that there were dogs everywhere, but I never quite understood. They would just lie in the street, pee on park benches, hang out in the alleys, everywhere! They were quite tame as well, so they weren’t much of a bother.

Everybody was really forward, too. They would stick fliers in your face to make you eat at their restaurant or stop at their tienda. Some of the things they had were cool: a lot of pottery, sweaters, Indiana Jones hats, handmade jewelry, and tones of junk! I almost bought lana de alpaca socks, but I knew they weren’t alpaca, so I passed.  I’ll wait for Machu Pichu.

For dinner, we ate at probably the fanciest diner on the street. Inside, the bathrooms were free (a big deal), but the tables and chairs were all on dirt floors. It was a really fun and even clean atmosphere. We had fresh jugo, delicious empanadas, and tender pork and beef steaks, served over coals to keep it warm. We were also served desert, which was just raspberry ice cream. I accidentally said a couple things in Spanish, so our waitress kept talking to me like I knew what she was saying at 100 mph. I felt very stuck with my Spanish, but I think it will come a long way when I have used it regularly for 3 weeks.

After, we were taken to our hotel, our gracious guides said good-bye until Monday. We found our rooms and were finally able to clean up after a day’s worth of not showering, not brushing teeth, not shaving, not putting on deodorant, etc. We settled in, then met back together to have dinner and kill the evening. We walked the streets of Santiago, heading in the direction that would get us some sight seeing and dinner opportunities. We walked by the Presidential Palace, but it was fenced off more than usual. It got dark here at 6:30 ish, so most of the shops had shut down by the time we got out (which was only about 7:30). We ended up going to the Indianapolis Bar, which wasn’t a great choice. Then we walked back to our hotel because we were all still tired from the lack of quality sleep from the flight.

Luribel, we feel so bad! We really wish you could be here with us. I hope to see you when we get to Peru!

... Hello?... Is this thing still on?

Today was probably the least eventful of the trip, at least until about 10:00 in Dallas. I’ll get there, though.

After some finishing touches, I sat on my lawn, packed and waiting for my ride to Salt Lake. The Internet at our place had just given out (meaning all our neighbor’s Internet connections died), and I was just asked to give up the most convenient parking spot, so it ended up being the perfect time to leave. We five riding together crammed into Tyler’s truck, then picked up Natalie and Tyler’s mom and crammed into Tyler’s mom’s Expedition with our luggage. We said a grateful goodbye to our taxi and spent the next couple hours getting checked in and ready for our flight to Dallas.

As we flew over Utah, I tried to figure out where we were as we were over it, but geography is not that easy when you don’t have the lines to mark the boundaries. But I gave up over what I thought was Colorado (but in all honesty, it probably wasn’t even close to Colorado).

The lady I sat next to didn’t speak English, so I didn’t have much of a conversation with her besides telling her I sat next to her. She actually ended up on our same flight to Santiago.

As we were over New Mexico (they have lines there), there was a huge storm cloud. Imagine driving through Nebraska, flat and uneventful. That is how the horizon looks normally. But the clouds we flew past had so much dimension. The spectacular formations resembles nebulas, measured in miles instead of light-years, with pillars shooting from the enormous wall that spanned from the bottom of sight to top. Then it suddenly ended, like a drop-off in the ocean.

We had three hours to kill in Dallas. I had a LOADED baked potato, which I think will last me the rest of this three-hour flight. We toured the D terminal, which is actually fairly large, but it still didn’t kill much time. The stores were heartily over-priced, but our group made the wait fun.

Now, we are sitting on the plane to Santiago, as the plain sits waiting at the airport. We have been on for about an hour and a half, with our takeoff time an hour behind us. The pilot said there was a piece that needed to get fixed, and the maintenance people were lethargic in responding, so we have yet to undock from the terminal. I was hoping to spend this hour in the air, but I guess I’ll just call this an 11-hour flight.