Loose Ends/Final Entry

In this entry I will cover:
-El Fundo Panul
-the opera "The Magic Flute"
-Earthquake
-final thoughts on Santiago.

El Fundo Panul:
Last Friday I went to El Fundo Panul with some Stanford friends. We got the idea from an article that Professor Hadly sent out, which is linked here. While the article indicates that the locals are trying hard to prevent urban sprawl in the area, we did not really notice this being the case. First, almost no one knew where it was, including our taxi driver, so it is not at all well marked or well known. Second, there appears to be a farm at the entrance. When we walked farther up there was a greater preponderance of native fauna, but we also definitely saw eucalyptus and other species that are common to Mediterranean climates around the world.

One of the cows on the farm.

Beehives.The view of the city from the trail.

The Magic Flute:
We actually saw The Magic Flute in early November. The only explanation for why I have yet to post on it is that immediately afterwards I had to finish midterms, and then we went on the Bing Trip, and by the time the Bing Trip was over I had forgotten about posting it. We saw The Magic Flute at the Teatro Municipal in Santiago, which is a gorgeous theater with lots of box seats (we were seated in main area). It was very well done, and in particular the parts of the Queen of the Night, Papageno, and Sarastro were very well sung. In the Queen of the Night's second aria, she has a series of very high notes in short succession, that quite frequently is flubbed. Going into the opera I was dreading that song because it might be messed up, but the lady who sang the part of the Queen of the Night, Claudia Pereira, hit every note. Our coordinator, Rodrigo, who has sung professionally and has perfect pitch, confirmed that she sang every note correctly.

Earthquake:
On Saturday afternoon during lunch (3:15-3:20 pm or so) we experienced a tremor. It was an interesting experience, especially because the one person in my host household who was particularly frightened by it was my host mother. This may be explained by the fact that of the four of us, she is the only one who has actually experienced a very big, destructive earthquake firsthand. One of my friends whom I talked to at the airport said that while sitting eating lunch with his host family, he could see out the window that other apartment buildings across the street were moving from side to side. I found an article that stated that this earthquake was at a magnitude of 4.0 in Santiago, and that the epicenter was 65 miles to the northeast.

Final thoughts on Santiago:
In a number of ways, Santiago is an odd city. Many United States brands and songs are imported, and there is a definite sense of trying to become like the United States, as part of trying to become a first world nation. At the same time, there are old cultural factors that still remain important. People may jostle each other to get on and off the metro, but they offer their seats to and clear the way for elderly people. Some people still hold onto old superstitions (a new one I learned this week: if you pass salt directly to another person instead of setting it down on the table next to them, you will have a fight with them), but technologies like cable television and the internet are fast taking hold. Santiago has reduced smog levels by decreasing numbers of buses following the same routes, but the people complain about the crowding on the metro and the long wait for buses, instead of being thankful for the cleaner air. I would be very interested to head back in 5 to 10 years to see how much Santiago changes.

Street life

This is my attempt at photographing street life in Providencia. I tried to be discreet so that people wouldn't get mad at me for taking their photo, so that is why some of the angles are a bit odd. Unfortunately I am currently unable to correctly show vertical shots properly, so those are horizontal.

Near Manuel Montt metro station. I'm not sure how well you can see it, but that little building is actually a flower stand.

Church near my apartment. Nuestra Senora de la Divina Providencia (Our Lady of Divine Providence).
People walking down the street near Pedro de Valdivia metro stop.

Dos Caracoles mall. It consists of two spiral staircases full of little shops. (This one was supposed to be vertical.)

One thing I had hoped to get a photo of but could not figure out how to be discreet enough was street vendors. There are lots of people on the streets (especially near malls) with blankets spread on the ground displaying some merchandise. Some people sell cheap jewelry, some clothes, some even sell DVDs. I will continue to try to get a photo of that, because that is one thing I definitely did not see before coming to Santiago.

White Christmas

I decided to go to Starbucks to study this afternoon because last week I met with a group to work on a presentation for Spanish class and discovered that it is actually a nice place to work. So here I am, sitting in Starbucks on Avenida Pedro de Valdivia in 90 degree (Fahrenheit) weather, listening to Christmas music and seeing the Christmas decorations with images of evergreen trees and people skating on ice. The only places where there is ice in Chile right now (apart from in refrigerators) are up in the Andes and in the far south. It's almost summer (think early June at Stanford). And just when I was thinking how fitting it would be to hear "White Christmas" in Chile, sure enough, "White Christmas" started playing. Almost all of the songs I've heard here refer to cold weather at some point, and a lot of Christmas commercials on the TV seem to feature snow. I'm torn between which is more strange: to be in the Southern Hemisphere in December when I automatically think of cold weather and Christmas going together, or the fact that in Chile there is a clear association between Christmas and cold weather in advertisements and popular culture while it is abundantly clear to me that the weather on Christmas is probably usually 80 degrees and sunny here. Of course, all of the music I've heard at Starbucks is in English (and the same recordings I recognize hearing year after year), so Starbucks is probably an unusually strong dosage of imported culture from the United States.

They've played "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire" three times since I've gotten here. That may be bordering on excessive.

Another small thing I've noticed is the location of the sun. My bedroom window faces south, and I realized a week or so ago that the light never shines directly in. Of course, this makes perfect sense, but that's one of those things you never think about.

The General in his Labyrinth - Bolívar or Musharraf?

Reading the New York Times online this morning, I realize that my history paper is actually very relevant to current events, in particular Musharraf stepping down from his military role in Pakistan.

The paper assignment was to read The General in his Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez and discuss how it relates to wider themes in the history of Latin America in the nineteenth century (the topic of our class). The book tells the story of the last nine months of Simón Bolívar's life, and flashes back throughout to earlier times. The flashbacks really give a sense of how far he had fallen.

Bolívar believed in the importance of continental unity, that South America should be united under one government. He gradually became more pragmatic in his goals, but he still had too much of a focus on unity, and on order. His focus on order led him to take dictatorial powers, which in turn made him excessively unpopular. In the book Bolívar is a pathetic figure because he continually attempts to regain either power or popularity but cannot. At the end he says "How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!" He was lost in a labyrinth of the disintegration of his government, his regrets, and his inability to stop grasping for power.

In today's article in the NY Times, here is the part that I thought was particularly relevant to Bolívar:

In a speech after taking the oath, he defended his record in power, saying that he had always intended to lead the country toward democracy and to remove his uniform, but had to act in the interests of Pakistan’s stability. He said he had to impose the emergency and delay removing his uniform because of a clash between state institutions, namely the judiciary and the government, and the growing threat of terrorism.

“There is an unrealistic or even impractical obsession with your form of democracy, human rights and civil liberties, which you have taken centuries to acquire,” he said, addressing the diplomats.

Full article here.

Bolívar said very similar things. He advocated a transition to civilian government and believed that at some point a civilian government would be necessary. When he took dictatorial powers he believed them necessary in order to preserve order (echoed in Musharraf's phrase "in the interests of Pakistan's stability"). Bolívar faced more insurrections than strife within the government, but like Musharraf he saw a state of emergency.

The paragraph about democracy is also very relevant. Bolívar admired the government of the United States, going so far as to suggest that it might be a perfect government. However, he did not think that Latin America was ready for such a government.

If you replaced Pakistan with Venezuela, the clash between state institutions with a clash between powerful military politicians, and terrorism with insurrections, Bolívar easily could have made Musharraf's statement.

My history professor recommended another book by García Márquez, Autumn of the Patriarch. He says that this book combines elements of all Latin American dictators.

Wallace and Opossums

I just finished my term papers for my biology and history classes, so now seems like a good time to describe what I did in my term papers. Especially the biology one, since any Darwin people reading this blog will find it particularly relevant. :-)

For my biology class (the Evolution and Ecology of the South American Biota), I wrote about Alfred Russel Wallace's riverine barriers hypothesis and how it relates to mouse opossums.

(For those who don't know, Wallace was Darwin's co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin rushed into publishing The Origin of Species when he found out that, although he had been accumulating data on evolution for 20 years, Wallace had recently come to the same theory and might well take all the credit if he didn't act soon. We have Wallace to thank for the fact that Darwin published a 400 page book instead of the three volume master work he wanted to write. Wallace also had a gift for noticing geographic relationships between related species and hypothesized migrations based on the relationships. He is known as the father of biogeography.)

This is a photo of Wallace. Source

Wallace wrote a paper in 1852, "On the monkeys of the Amazon" in which he observed the following:

“The Amazon, the Rio Negro and the Madeira [rivers] formed the limits beyond which certain species never passed. The native hunters are perfectly acquainted with this fact, and always cross over the river when they want to procure particular animals, which are found even on the river's bank on one side, but never by any chance on the other.”

This is a map showing the distinct regions of the Amazon Basin that Wallace suggested.
The map comes from: Patton, J.L. & Costa, L.P. (2003) Molecular phylogeography and species limits in rainforest didelphid marsupials of South America. Predators with Pouches: The Biology of Carnivorous Marsupials (ed. by M. Jones, C. Dickman, and M. Archer), pp. 63–81. CSIRO Publishing, Australia.

He focused on primates in his paper, but a lot of recent research on the Amazon River as a biogeographical barrier has focused on mouse opossums. Mouse opossums are a group of marsupials within the opossum family.

This is a photo of a mouse opossum. They are nocturnal, live in trees, and have prehensile (grasping) tails. Source

A lot of the recent investigations using mouse opossums use DNA data in addition to physical comparisons between specimens (what Wallace did). Therefore, modern results can be much more definitive.

So my question was, with mouse opossums as the studied group, to what extent was Wallace correct that the rivers in the Amazon basin form barriers between species?

Some interesting data I found:

Steiner & Catzeflis (2004): 5 species from the Guiana region (north of the Amazon River) have distinct lineages from species south of the river. This means that the river has been a barrier for these species.

Patton & Costa (2003): In one species, Marmosa murina, there are four distinct genetic lineages. The division between two of them is the Amazon River.

Costa (2003): Mouse opossums in two southern genetic lineages are more closely related to each other than to two northern lineages, even though the only separation between one northern lineage and one southern lineage was the river.

These results indicated to me that there is a definite genetic distinction between the north and south sides of the Amazon River. Therefore, Wallace was correct, even though he relied on anecdotes for data. Also, many of the papers I cited had Wallace's 1852 paper in their bibliographies, which I thought was extremely cool since the majority of sources these papers cited were no more than 10 or 20 years old. All in all, writing this paper was a very interesting experience for me. I loved finding Wallace's original paper and comparing the style to modern papers. (Wallace's paper is available here. Unfortunately I cannot link directly to it.) I also love the fact that the work of a great scientist can still be relevant and insightful 150 years later. Wallace is truly amazing. :-)

Here are the citations for the papers I referenced:
Costa, L.P. (2003) The historical bridge between the Amazon and the Atlantic Forest of Brazil: a study of molecular phylogeography with small mammals. Journal of Biogeography, 30, 71–86.

Patton, J.L. & Costa, L.P. (2003) Molecular phylogeography and species limits in rainforest didelphid marsupials of South America. Predators with Pouches: The Biology of Carnivorous Marsupials (ed. by M. Jones, C. Dickman, and M. Archer), pp. 63–81. CSIRO Publishing, Australia.

Steiner, C. & Catzeflis, F.M. (2004) Genetic variation and geographical structure of five mouse-sized opossums (Marsupiala, Didelphidae) throughout the Guiana Region. Journal of Biogeography 31 (6), 959–973.

Visiting the doctor

So I had the very interesting experience of going to the doctor in Chile because I had bronchitis (this doctor's visit was over a week ago and I am fine now). First I entered the office, and was told to go down the hall. I walked down a long hall and came to another reception. At which point they told me to go to the NEXT reception. So I went still further down the hall to a room where there were about five different desks each with a lady working on a computer. This did not look like a reception area to me, but the only area past that was the information desk and that did not look right either. So I stopped at one of the five desks, and it turned out that was what I was supposed to do.

After I paid (in Chile you pay for doctor's visits with checks), the lady in the reception escorted me to the doctor's office. This doctor's office was rather different from those in the United States because it actually WAS this doctor's office where he works all day. There was no nurse to take my blood pressure first and ask questions. I only talked to the doctor, which was nice because it meant I didn't have to repeat myself. The doctor was a very jolly fellow, and asked questions about what I was doing in Chile because I was very clearly foreign. When I told him my age, he said something to the effect that I was still a kid. Thanks to having taken chem and bio classes, I was familiar enough with Celsius to know that the temperature reading he measured was a fever (37.7). I think that was the first time I've had my temperature measured with an armpit thermometer.

The doctor prescribed that I take antibiotics and an expectorant (medicine that makes you cough). The expectorant, Abrilar, is made from English ivy. It actually has a decent herb/honeyish taste, but the first couple nights when I took it were miserable because I couldn't stop coughing.

Salto de Petrohué and Lago de Todos los Santos PICTURES

Saturday of Bing trip.

River near Petrohué falls. I felt like I was at home!

Petrohué Falls.

Petrohué Falls again.

Volcán Osorno. View from boat in lake crossing.

Geoffrey (yes, that's the name of the waterfall).

Llamas on safari in Peulla.

LLAMA!

Rheas. They appeared to be doing some sort of weird mating dance.

Ostrich.

Emus.

Our safari truck. Yes, very touristy.

Chilean flag on back of boat.