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Once I hit the mine, however, I had more economic freedom to flitter about; I visited el Lago Chungará, Humberstown, Pica, and various points and pueblos throughout the interior. Upon deciding to return to the US, I quickly planned a week-long jaunt to the south of Chile and a two-week visit to Peru. The photos below are largely the (tangible) results of said trips. Chile has breathtaking geography -- beautiful deserts, an extraordinary coast, and amazing mountains. Plus, there's nothing like a good bottle of Carmenere, or the Montes blend that Lenka so fortunately introduced me to. At the same time, I find Peruvian Spanish cantadito and lovely. I also missed the "s" in Chile. Peruvian food is also a lot tastier (i.e., spicier), and I prefer the pisco sour north of the border. Unfortunately, I had some trout that didn't agree with me (despite my huge American accent, the cab driver thought we were both Chilean and he sent us to a really good restaurant not designed for tourists. We both paid for it on the train the next morning.) In the end, I found good things and not-so-good things in both countries ... most likely a product of my very different lengths of stays and experiences there. And in a very different capacity, as a 5th year PhD student plugging away at a dissertation project, I spend nearly 3 weeks at the Archivo Nacional in Sucre, Bolivia, in July 2010. There the incredibly helpful cataloguers gave me access to a range of fascinating legal cases and government documents from the 16th and 17th century mining regions of Alto Perú and encouraged me to share my work with them once my ideas begin to, as the 17th c. priest and metallurgist Álvaro Alonso Barba writes of the pella stage of amalgamation, become "unida en cuerpo." |
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