Santiago first struck me as a cross between Los Angeles and a European city. The architecture, street layout, and traffic are all European in influence. The rest is reminiscent of Southern California.

Since Catherine grew up in Southern California and we both went to college there, it was like homecoming. Let me count the similarities with LA:
• It’s hot
• Everyone speaks Spanish
• The Andes mountains are dead ringers for the San Gabriels
• Men sell fruit and other items to your car in the middle of busy intersections
• The beach is only an hour drive from downtown – in Santiago that means a 50 mile drive to Valparaiso, in Los Angeles that means a five mile drive through bumper-to-bumper traffic to Santa Monica.
But the biggest similarity is the smog. Not the wimpy smog that Los Angeles currently has but the thick, pervasive blanket of brown that clouds everything and covered LA until a few decades ago. The kind of smog that burns your lungs when you jog and causes a morning ritual of coughing and sneezing that brings back fond memories of when I had more hair and a slimmer waist line.

One humbling aspect of this journey so far is witnessing Catherine’s language skills. She begins with knowledge of three languages: Russian, French and English. Within one week of entering a new country and new language she is chatting amiably with the natives while my own pitiful attempts at communication elicit either belly-laughs or hostile glares. One obvious reason for this is that Catherine is a beautiful woman and I am an ugly toad. A more complete explanation, however, is that my mangled pronunciation invariably transforms my daily greetings of pleasant intentions into something that the Chilean ear understands as “I am very pleased your gonads itchy.”

A perfect illustration of this happened one day when we were naively filming some murals inside the Baquedano Metro Station without “permiso.” The two carabineros that we attracted were unfailingly polite and friendly, but given Chile’s history of the 70’s and 80’s this situation made MY gonads itchy. In response, I effortlessly played the role of stupid American who can’t understand Spanish while Catherine fluently made our apologies, found out where to get the proper permit and inquired as to the health of their wives and children. At any rate we weren't hauled off to jail and got the general idea that we should go to the Metro offices and apply for a permit.

This pervasive Chilean friendliness became evident again a few days later when we stumbled into a mining operation. We were driving in Northern Chile from La Serena to the Las Campanas Observatories and passed a sign for the “Mina El Tofo”. We found that the El Tofo mine was once the world’s largest open pit iron mine until 1954. Since my father was a mining engineer and spent 20 years of his career at iron mines in Alabama, we had to check this out. Assuming the mine to be long since closed we blindly drove right in. Before long a large ore truck passed us and stopped. Now our van was little more than an irritating bug splat on this truck’s windshield, but the driver was very friendly, pointed out that mine trucks use the road and asked us to be careful. (More than likely he also tried to hit on Catherine, but given that I benefit only from her translation she probably left that part out). In any event, he must have radioed his office that a van-load of crazy foreigners was in the mine because a few minutes later a pick-up truck from the mining company drove by. The mine supervisor was also extremely courteous and understanding and showed us an obscure “public” road (more like a goat path) that we could use and a location where we could see the mine. I’m sure his friendliness was supplemented by the fact that he didn’t want the job of scraping our van off the undercarriage of an ore truck. But a country where the truckers and miners are this friendly has to have a lot going for it. We soon found ourselves on the top of a ridge with a magnificent view of the Pacific Ocean six miles away and 3000 feet below us on one side and this large iron mine on the other. All around lay the ruins and foundations of what must have been the houses of the engineers and supervisors of the mine from 50 years ago.

This trip offered an interesting juxtaposition of the old and the new Chilean economy - from a mine 50 years past its prime to one of the newest astronomical instruments in the world. While mining continues to play a big role in the Chilean economy, the country’s clear and dry skies have attracted significant capital investment for new observatories. We were fortunate to have an invitation to visit the Las Campanas Observatories, a magnificent facility operated by the Carnegie Institute of Washington that includes twin 6.5 meter telescopes. European and American universities and institutes are greatly expanding their facilities and plans are being developed by Caltech and others for telescopes as large as 30 meters in diameter! In addition to a tremendously clear view of the Southern hemisphere’s stars, we pestered Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institute as he captured data in his search for planets outside our solar system. Using clever, innovative techniques to separate the “wheat from the chaff” in their data, Paul’s team has found dozens of planets around relatively nearby stars. Our special thanks go to Tom Tombrello of Caltech and Wendy Freedman, Miguel Roth, and Emilio Cerda of the Carnegie Observatories for suggesting and coordinating our visit.

Our visit to the La Serena area ended with a mad dash to find the village of Lambert, Chile before our flight left. Catherine had noticed the name on a local map and we just had time to take a picture of this hamlet in an agricultural valley outside La Serena. Before we left on this trip, Catherine had found a history of mining in this region written in the 19th century by a certain Charles Lambert (no relation). We wondered if there was a connection to this town.

We returned to Santiago and I continued my quixotic quest to capture our trip on film. Since I have never done anything artistic in my life but have always been interested in film, I thought this trip would be a great opportunity to try something new. So before we left, I went out and bought a very good quality digital camera capable of capturing professional quality video. Now I say “capable” because my probability of filming professional quality video is about as good as me using a Stradivarius to play anything that the dogs wouldn’t yowl at. Whatever I produce, I will edit it into something that hopefully will have some educational merit. More than likely, the only merit it will have as a video Christmas present to our friends and family. Call it a DVD fruitcake if you will.

Speaking of dogs, Santiago has LOTS of them. Stray dogs are everywhere. Very pleasant and mild mannered, they leave everyone alone and people pretty much leave them alone. They sleep quietly during the day and know how to safely cross traffic that I’ve witnessed a few bipeds taking a tumble from. Most of the mutts have a strong German Shepard influence in their breeding. It’s as if either the Chilean military let all their police dogs loose when the junta lost power 16 years back or else there were a couple of very healthy, hearty and happy German Shepards a few generations ago.