Cathedrals, Bank Lines, The Disappeared And Their Killers

I really owe you more than pictures, but it’s hard keeping track of and sorting out my impressions and what I’ve been told.  People I see on the streets - what they look like, what they wear, their constant cell phone use - look exactly like the people I see in the US.  Pizza and hamburguesas and beer are among the most popular foods here in Cordoba. But these folks live among buildings that, in a few cases, go back to the 1500s.  They walk down narrow streets with little shops on every block - at least in this neighborhood - with fresh fruit and vegetables, eggs, and a few other items, that are right next to bakeries with all sorts of decadent sweets.  There’s history here (not counting the original people prior to European conquest) that makes even the US east coast seem young.

Argentina has free health care and free higher education.

US citizens have a way of feeling superior to the rest of the world, but there’s more to culture than military superiority.  Of course, this is what I’ve discovered every time I’ve been to a new (for me) part of the world.  People are people.  And everywhere you go there are very smart, sophisticated people.  People with great common sense and wisdom.  And there are jerks.  When we were surveyed at the airport by someone from a tourism agency, we were asked to rate a number of things.  I asked if we were going to be asked about the people.  No, we weren’t.  Well, I said, you should ask us.  The people were absolutely the best part of our trip.  Tolerant of my terrible Spanish and always wanting to know “De desde son?”  Where are you from?  And Alaska always elicits a smile and ‘frio.’

That said, here are the pictures.  These are two days old.  We walked up to Plaza San Martin, the center of Córdoba, Argentina’s second largest city.  While we were at the Museum of Memories, a group came in with a guide speaking in English and when we listened in we got invited to join.  It’s a company that puts on free tours - it’s up to you to decide what to pay the guide.  The group was mostly Spanish speakers and the English speakers got a much shorter version.  And two dropped out during the two hour plus tour, leaving just us.

But first here’s a picture from our 8th floor balcony.  Airbnb had a two bedroom apartment  for under $50 a night.  It’s by far the most spacious place we’ve stayed.  Well, the Buenos Aires homestay was bigger, but we didn’t have it to ourselves.            

  

I couldn’t pass up the shadows - also from the balcony.

 

This is the inside of the main Cathedral on Plaza San Martin.  If you’ve been reading the blog lately, you’ve  heard this name before.  San Martin, someone said, was the George Washington of Argentina.  But he was more than that.  Besides getting Argentina free from Spain, he did the same in Chile.  Then passed the torch to Simon Bolivar in Peru.

Here’s a view of the plaza. It’s much warmer here in central Argentina.  Up to about 70˚F in the afternoon.

    

Here’s the cathedral from the plaza.

Construction of the Cathedral began in 1582 according to Wikipedia and it was finished in 1709.  For the historically challenged, the Mayflower got to North America in 1620 and George Washington was born in 1732.

If you look closely below, you can see a long line of people at the bank.  We’ve seen shorter lines before and asked.  Someone suggested about a Friday lineup that people were getting money out for the weekend and wanted to get their money in case the ATMs ran out of money over the weekend.  In this case, it was Tuesday after a holiday weekend.  (This is here because it was on the way to Plaza San Martin.)

 

The Museum of the Memories is in a former detention and torture center from the 1970s when the government rounded up suspected opponents.


The Free Tour guide (in the red in the center) said about 30,000 people disappeared.  Tortured to death, shot, and others were  thrown out of airplanes over the ocean.  Children were kidnapped and given to other families.  I knew some of this.  Netflix has The Official Story up - well it’s here in Spanish without English subtitles.  It’s about this period.

 I was going to save this museum for a post all its own, but I have so many backed up photos I should just put it up.  It’s a chilling account.  30,000 people is a tiny fraction of the population.  But if it’s your son or daughter or husband, it’s everything.  And all the relatives and friends and acquaintances of 30,000 people is enough to spread terror among millions of others that they will be next.  Sort of like undocumented Americans waiting for ICE to knock on their doors.
 
Buzzfeed reported in May that over 52,000 people were being held in ICE detention centers.  The vast majority of these are decent, innocent people fleeing violence in their own countries.  But the Trump administration is full of heartless people who easily rationalize the evil they are doing.  Here is a picture of some of their Argentinian colleagues from the 70s and 80s.

.  The guide mentioned that the detention center that houses the museum is right next to the cathedral and part of the cabildo - the main government building of the province.  Both were complicit.  

Here are a few more memories.

This giant (5 or 6 feet high) fingerprint is made up of names of the disappeared. There were several more such fingerprints on the wall.    

A courtyard in the detention center.

A poster about one of the young women who disappeared.

Another victim.

And interrogation room, I think.

The difference between what happened in Chile and what’s happening today is great.  We still have enough accountability that people aren’t being actively and intentionally  tortured or thrown out of airplanes into the ocean.  But it’s not because some of the people in charge wouldn’t do those things if they could.  They did it at Guantanamo.  We still have some safeguards.  But being locked up indefinitely without adequate food and, bad sanitary conditions, having your kids separated from you, is all pretty terrifying by itself.  We’re watching the cold-bloodedness of Mike Dunleavy in action.  He would have gone along with the men in the picture above.  And I’m guessing the 22 legislators who went to Wasilla and refused to vote to override the vetoes  have moral compasses that don’t recognize evil either.         

      

Will Dunleavy’s Budget Lower Alaska’s Carbon Footprint?

Alaskans use more energy per capita than residents of any other US state.*  Much of the total energy use comes from the development of oil and gas, which is part of the total divided by the population to get average/person.  However, Alaskans are also dependent on most food and goods being shipped in from Outside.  So the transportation costs for those goods mean we use more energy than others in the US.

So, with Dunleavy’s massive cuts, there is surely going to be an equally massive out-migration from the state.  For people losing their jobs, an extra $1000 in PFD isn’t going to pay the mortgage, rent, or other expenses.  Most will not find equivalent jobs in Alaska and will find much better opportunities Outside.

So Alaska’s carbon footprint is likely to go down.  

That’s the silver lining, thin as it might be.

While the blog has focused on Argentina lately, I have been paying attention to Alaska’s summer of heat, fire, and dire budgetary actions.

I watch with dismay [unlike a number of politicians and social media agitators, I tend to understate things] as Alaskans throw logic on the Dunleavy fire, thinking that will make a difference to him.  Logic has already turned those Republicans in the legislature who are not immune to it, and the same for everyday Alaskans.


But it’s my sense of all this that logic has no effect on Dunleavy.  Well, not the logic that starts with assumptions that Alaska matters.   He’s solely listening to his Outside financiers whose agenda is to exploit the resources of Alaska (and anywhere else with exploitable resources) with no concern for the impacts on the state, the climate, or people.  Their Ayn Randian beliefs are that their personal self-interest is all that matters.  They assume their wealth can shield them from the worst of the remnants of a once civilized society.

So, destroying the university is a good thing for them.  It means that there is no independent intellectual, scientific base in Alaska that is capable of raising questions about resource extraction policies, or to question industry reports saying that ‘no harm will be done.’

Cutting government watchdog agencies is good too.  The fewer government employees watching over corporate compliance, the more corporations can get away with.  The cruise ship on-board inspector program, which cost the state nothing, was vetoed out of existence.  So cruise lines can illegally pollute all they want without anyone watching.

Today’s Anchorage Daily News says the department that oversees the  development of the natural gas pipeline is cutting half its staff.  Let’s see how well they’ll be able to spot problems down the line.  Remember when Shell included stuff on manatees in their Chukchi Sea environmental impact statements?  They’d just lifted the language from EIS from Florida.  And it got through the first round of regulators as I recall.

The Koch brothers are making a hostile takeover of Alaska.  This is about power.  The ability to get done what they want.  Logic plays no role.  Well, that’s not quite true.  Their logic is about what they can get away with.  It has completely different assumptions than the logic of most Alaskans.  Their logic is about making as much money as they can, with no concerns about Alaska.  The appeals of all the Alaskans hurt by the cuts are irrelevant to them.  They’re reveling in their power a)  to destroy Alaska as we know it and b) to then exploit it freely.  

And as for Alaska’s carbon footprint?  With increased oil, gas, and other mineral extraction, there may well be an increase despite the people who leave the state.


*The assertion that Alaskans have a larger carbon footprint first came to me in an article by a close relative that looked at the alliance of some environmental groups with anti-immigration groups based on the logic that when poor immigrants come from Central American use more carbon in the US than they did at home, and thus they shouldn’t be let into the country.  That, of course, begs the question about US residents’ moral entitlement to use more carbon than their southern neighbors.  The article also raised the issue of Alaskans using even more carbon  than average US residents.   The link unfortunately only goes to an abstract - I haven’t found free access to the whole article.  People with UAA or Loussac library cards should be able to get access to the article.

Santiago Murals And Other Street Art

We flew to Mendoza last night and then to Cordoba this morning.  Airbnb got us a two bedroom apartment (condo?) on the 8th floor with a balcony that’s been in the warm (about 70˚F) (I know, Anchorage that’s cool to you this week, but it’s winter here and after Santiago and Mendoza, this is warm) sun.

We also learned today that I misled you.  The SUBE card which I thought was good all over Argentina for public buses (collectivos) is NOT good in Cordova.  We had to buy a REDBUS card here.  The SUBE was good in Buenos Aires and San Juan.  A Dazzler posts mentions a SUBE is good in 12 other provinces (besides Buenos Aires.)

But this post is about street art - particularly murals in Santiago.  We were only in a small part of the city so this is just a sample by someone who doesn’t know all that much about the topic.  
 

       
   

 
OK, the one above isn’t ‘street’ art.  We went to a Turner exhibit on loan from the Tate at t he Moneda Cultural Center.  It slipped in so I’ll just leave it here.

 

These next photos are on Bandera Street, one of a number of downtown steets that are pedestrian only.  You can read this report on how it became a street of public art.

And then there are these other forms of art.

I’m guessing that this last one is a memorial of some sort, though it looks like it’s been a while.

Crossing The Andes Again, This Time As The Sun Sets. Aconcagua?

Here are some pictures as we leave Santiago and fly back to Mendoza.  We were greeted like old friends by Alberto as we return once again to the Hotel Bohemia.  And we have a morning flight to Córdoba tomorrow.  So just a few pictures.



             

And then, presumably, we were in the Argentina side of the mountains.  When we did the ‘mountain tour’ a week or so ago (don’t think I got around to posting it) we got up into the snow.  In fact it was snowing.  If it had been clear, we would have seen Mt. Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Western Hemisphere.  But we didn’t.  So I’m guessing the peak in the next picture could be Aconcagua.  Alberto thinks it could be (and he’s climbed to the top twice over five attempts.). Or maybe he just wants me to feel good.

I also looked on line for pictures to see if there were similarities.  Here’s a picture of Aconcagua from  Unico.

I’m not sure you can enlarge my picture  enough to see the dip on top that’s similar to the picture below it.

I’d also note, that flying over the Andes is a bit like flying over the Chugach as you leave Anchorage, but the mountains look a lot different.  I’m trying to figure out why.  There’s not as much snow.  They seem more jagged.

From Allende And Horse Statues, To Great Sunset Over Mapocho River

Some pictures from our walking history tour in central Santiago.  Airbnb gives local guides the opportunity to offer their tours on the Airbnb website.  They’re reasonably priced and you get a small group - in our case yesterday, three - and a guide.  We were scheduled for 3 hours, but we went longer.

There was a lot of information packed in and I didn’t catch - let alone remember it all.  Our guide was definitely an Allende fan and echoed economic concerns that we heard in Argentina.  He said Argentines think Chile is doing much better than Argentina.  But Argentina has free health care and higher education.  Chile has neither.  And while I thought the prices in Argentina were high (except for local products, like wine, and locally grown food, prices in Chile are higher.  And people, Pablo told us aren’t getting raises to keep up with the prices.

Here’s the entrance to our Airbnb.  It’s the red door in the middle.  It leads to a hallway.   

 

We have a tiny studio.  Entry, kitchen and bath downstairs and a loft upstairs with the bed.  It’s $ 34 a night, which is reasonable.  But for some reason, my iPad isn’t keeping cookies for sites I vis  i t  frequently so  I am constantly logging in.  But Airbnb wanted me to v erify who I was by getting a code from my cell phone.  But I’ve replaced my US sim card with an Argen tine sim card for t he trip so I can’t retrieve the code.  Once they gave me the option of sending it to my email.  But no l onger.  So I was cut off for a day.  Can’t contact my host, can’t make new reservations, can’t book a tour.  I  finally got their attention (leaving notes in the help? Box when I couldn’t use the code  and tweeting them.  And I got back on.  But less than 24 hours later I’m in the same fix.  We have a reservation in  Cordoba, but I don’t know the address and can’t contact the host.  And I can’t contact my host now to see if we can leave our suitcases here after checkout tomorrow so we don’t have to drag them  around town.

Turns out we’re in a district that’s sort of like Venice Beach - lots of murals, free spirits, bars, late night clubs.  But we’re also close to things in central Santiago.  But finding a grocery to get eggs fto make  breakfast yesterday, or even eat breakfast was hard.  We ended up at Fuente Aleman.  German Fountain.  It turned out later on the tour it was just across the street from a large fountain that the  Germans who were given land  in Southern Chile in the mid 19th Century  gave to Santiago (or Chile) at the 100th Anniversary of Chile’s independence.  (I think that’s right.)




It turned out that basically this was a grilled beef sandwich restaurant.  J was game, but the BBQ we had in San Juan was well beyond my annual meat quota.  I got a meat sandwich without the meet, but with avocado and tomato.  It was ok, but cost the same.  It was about $15 for the two sandwiches.  But what was unique was the waitresses who took orders, cooked the orders in the middle - that’s number 11, our waitress, next to the pile of meet for J’s sandwich.  (It could all have been for one sandwich, I don’t imagine.). And then they serve us.  They don’t take the money though, that’s for the cashier whose head you can see in back between the two at the grill.  But our waitress, who seemed a bit dour, did eventually ask where we were from.  Alaska is a great place to be from.  Most people haven’t met anyone from Alaska, but they know it’s cold.  I have to tell them this week that it was about 30˚C in Alaska.  That messes with their stereotypes.

We took the subway a couple of stops, because we were having trouble keeping to the path to where we were supposed to meet the guide.  It was only a little over a mile, but we were making a lot of wrong turns and backtracking, and I didn’t want to be late.    Early on the tour we got to this square in front of the (former?) presidential palace. Allende shot himself near one of the second story windows as the army was closing in.  The guide said to avoid torture and death by the army.  These two young women were out protesting the lack of progress against climate change.   The Trump sign said something about not believing in climate change.

To put these two women in perspective, here’s another view of the plaza.

The two women are on one side and four police are on the other.

The next photo is from where I took the picture above - the statue of President Allende.
And that’s our guide Pablo.  I can’t get into Airbnb to say what a great job he did.

[I don’t want to complain again, but the wifi is slow and cuts out regularly, my iPad problems with blogger continue,  and now I keep getting messages that blogger can’t save this post.  That means if that doesn’t clear up, I can’t post it either in the end.  And everything I’m typing could disappear.  So I’m going to stop now and see if I can fix this and post at least this much.  Each post takes me three or four times as long as it should to get up.].  [I guess it was just an internet interruption]

Here’s our guide Pablo in front of the statue of President Allende.

 Anchorage has three to five thousand foot mountains as a constant backdrop.  Santiago has four thousand meter mountains as a back drop.  That’s about 12,000 feet.  And they’re just as close as the Chugach.  But in Anchorage to get dramatic mountains in the background shots, you need to use a telephoto lens.  Not in Santiago.  Though normally the air is clearer in Anchorage - but from what I hear about forest fires, that’s not the case now.

This photo is of a rather cryptic mural of Gabriela Mistral  who is according to Wikipedia the first Latin American author to win a Nobel Prize. 

Only two more pictures (I’m leaving some out) and this torturous post will be done.  Next is a cultural center and these are some teenagers playing with light sabres.

And finally the sunset over the river Mapocho.

If there are odd spaces here and there, it’s because I need to hit the space key to be able to navigate blogger on my iPad.  Sorry.

Argentina’s Bad-Ass Keys And Other Leftovers

We’re back in Mendoza to get a flight this evening to Santiago.  I was showing Alberto the post I did about his hotel, when I noticed that another post talked about all the missing posts.  So I’ll try to share some pics that haven’t made it up here because of time.


Argentina has some serious keys.  These are the ones we had in San Juan for the eclipse, but we had similar ones in Buenos Aires and Mendoza.  Only the hotel in Port Iquazú had a magnetic card to open the door.
 

 

Eclipse Light - One thing I learned from the eclipse is that the sun is really, really bright.  I thought I’d take pictures of the landscape at different points during the eclipse.  But it wasn’t until the moon was almost completely blocking the sun that there was much difference.

There were se veral pics that looked like the one above.

Eventually it got a little darker.

Then much darker.  The next ones were dark enough that the exposure was so long that they are blurred.  Just take my word for it, the pictures aren’t worth seeing.  Plus, the camera tries to adjust and make it look lighter than it really was.  At times like this I yearn for my old film Pentax camera.

Then the new brightness as the sun came back out.

It was extremely rocky where we watched the eclipse.  Everywhere was like this pic below.

Finally, mate.  Here’s Carlos, our host in San Juan, drinking his mate while we waited for the eclipse.
I showed some mate cups and talked about this Argentine obsession in an earlier post.

SUBE - Argentina’s Universal Bus Card

One of the first things we were told to get when we arrived in Buenos Aires was a SUBE.  This is the card you use for riding a bus and the subway.  Nothing too remarkable - they have these cards in cities across the US and elsewhere in the world.

But there are a couple of things that are special about the SUBE which took us a while to find out.

1.  You can spend more than you have on the card.
When I added 200 pesos the first time, the receipt showed I now had only about 165 on my card.  I asked and he said that I had a 35 peso debit.  So, you don’t get kicked off  the bus if you don’t have enough money on your card.  Someone later pointed out that the card costs 90 pesos, so in a sense, you have that investment still in the card.

2.  You can use card all over Argentina!
We didn’t ride the bus in Mendoza because we knew we needed cards and it never occurred to us that the one we bought in Buenos Aires would be good in Mendoza.  But in San Juan I asked again.  And showed my Buenos Aires card as an example.  Oh yes, that’s the card you need, I was told.  And, indeed, the SUBE card from Buenos Aires worked in San Juan.

For anyone who travels in the US, having to get a card for Seattle, San Francisco, LA, etc.  is a pain.  Those places still take money, but for how long?  It would be nice if there was a universal card you could use in all those places, and everywhere else.


 

3.  You can top off your SUBE card at any shop with a SUBE sign and they are all over.  Here’s one of at least two shops at the bus station in San Juan this morning where you can put more money in your SUBE.

I’m sure you can do it online as well, but I haven’t advanced that far.


I’d note that San Juan, on the second day after the eclipse, was almost completely covered with clouds.