some photos

So the within the first week of living here in Valparaiso, a huge forest fire broke out. It started others whose smoke enveloped the city and rained ash down on us. This is a picture from my patio looking out over the port of Valparaiso. you can just make out the water in the middle of the photo. Obviously the line of smoke is pretty clear. The little white flecks that were lit up by the flash are ash. I have never seen such surreal scenes. The sun when covered by the smoke looked like a giant blood red orb. Apparently the officals claimed it was the worse outbreak of fires in the last twenty years. My friend who goes to school in L.A. said that the fires this past fall there weren´t as bad as these ones. A nice welcome to the city!

The next picture is of me and some friends who did the Chilean version of Habitat for Humanity. We spent the whole day using huge ass prybars to dig holes for the posts of the house. It was no easy task and pretty much sucked...but we had fun and I got to represent the Advantaggeous Crew. Another thing is that Apparently the hole in the ozone layer is right above Chile. You have to wear sunscreen or you get burnt in less and an hour. On the right is a girl named Sara who actually took this course last semester. She decided to take this semseter off and do some volunteer work down here for a few months. To the right of her is a Chilean named Christian whose family hosts a student in the program. On his right is a kid named Brennan who´s from Glouscester. Next to me is the host brother of Brennan, his name is Ulises. Overall its a pretty good crew.

Twice a week we have lectures at a university. The university is perched about 50ft up on this hill that overlooks the city. You take a bus to the entrance of the univeristy and then climb up about 400 steps to the actual building. This is the view from the top. You can see the road below. In the afternoon the sun sets in the left of the picture and its an amazing view.

This last picture is of one of the fishmarkets. Here they are called caletas. This market, called Caleta Portales is where the local fisherman unload their catches or even sell them directly from their boat. Chilean sea bass anyone? We came here as part of our program. We had to go out and talk to the fisherman and talk to them about the problems of being a small artesenal fisherman in Chile today. Apparently there are quite a few. There are huge multinational companies that come with massive ships that catch all the fish and leave none for the local fisherman. There is a law that sets a line where the locals can fish and where the big businesses can fish, but the businesses pay no attention to that. I guess the fisherman are notoriously active about their livelyhood and a few years ago they barged into the congress with a boat and lit it on fire...hmmm.