september archives

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updates this month inland adventures 09.26.04 feliz dieciocho 09.18.04 beautiful. 09.16.04 que belleza hay aquí 09.10.04 llegados y cumpleaños 09.05.04

inland adventures 09.26.04 9:31 a.m. we're waiting right now on making our movie work, for movie night (we're watching "city of god"), so i'll use this time to post a short update. yesterday four of us hit vicuña, a town of about 20-30 thousand an hour up the elqui valley from la serena. was supposed to be a lot of us going, but everyone else was too lazy to wake up, or those that did looked outside and decided not to come (it was drizzling, and cold). bums. they missed out. it ended up being an amazing day; not only did the clouds clear up the farther inland we went, but vicuña's a really neat town. there's not really anything to do there, except a small museum about gabriela mistral. [there's a break here because we got the right codecs to make our movie work, and i'm too lazy to have finished the update...so now i rejoin the digital world on 10.03.04 at 19:47] so, yes, vicuña. nothing there really, and we didn't even visit the museum that was there (it was closed), but we did do a great deal of walking around enjoying the sunny day and looking like tourists, and sitting in the plaza de armas. after lunch we hiked up a hill called cerro virgen, just north of town, which had a dusty little trail up to the top. on the summit (a poor word, since it wasn't much of a mountain), there was a shrine to la virgen somebody of something, with a statue and flowers and lots of plaques and notes thanking her for miracles, but with all of this, there was a giant cell phone tower or two. kind of an interesting backdrop for a shrine. a much more interesting backdrop, however, was all of the elqui valley...we could see for miles and miles in every direction, and since we were standing on the mountain with all the cell phone towers and power lines, it wasn't in our view, and we just had mountains and vineyards and the town far below us. aaaahhh! such an incredible view. and looking down the mountain, we could see all these little orange flowers that were pointing upwards blowing in the breeze. it was really neat. took a bunch of pictures, but as per usual, i haven't gotten them developed yet and then i'll need to scan them and all of this requires a great deal of effort, you see, so it may be some time before any of these fine photographs appear here. however, tracy has some already up on her photo album, which is now ever so conveniently linked to at right. top

feliz dieciocho 09.18.04 5:42 a.m. i'd like to seize this moment of insomnia to wish everyone a very happy chilean independence day--i know that the first five and a half hours of mine have been quite nice. we went to what seems to have been basically the town's celebration, it was pretty much a family affair with lots of dancing, fairly traditional live music, local food and drink, and of course, lots of chileans. undoubtedly there are still a lot of people there. i left around...maybe 3:30? maybe closer to 4? anyhow, when i left the place was still packed, and people showed no signs of slowing down. the schedule chileans keep never ceases to amaze me. they wake up, have breakfast and all, go to work or school, break for siesta around lunch or early afternoon, and then everything's shut down for several hours. then shops start to open up around 6 or 6:30, and things come back to life a bit. but restaraunts don't even open until 9 usually, and then people start going out dancing and suchlike around midnight, staying out til dawn. and then they get up and go to work the next day. ay, yo no puedo hacerlo. maybe i'll learn in the course of the semester. until then...i'll just suffer. and by suffer i mean have a blast, but an exhausted one. hm, in the way of news, i should start spending time on the mountain soon, working to get the prompt array up and operational in some fashion prior to the launch of nasa's swift satellite sometime in october, and also helping to iron the wrinkles out of soar's optics. *happy telescope dance* *happier andes dance* man i can't get enough of this place. also, i shuffled my links around if you didn't notice. by popular demand, i'm now linked to the soar, ctio, prompt, and swift sites, so that those of you foreign to the unc physics and astronomy department might have some idea what i'm talking about. there are more pictures up, too, though not those of my own taking--cecil has some new ones, pretty sure bryon does too, and i've been informed that the photo album on the main chile kids page now works in mozilla, not to mention the new spiffy flash entrance that's been added to the index page. and there was much rejoicing! top

beautiful. 09.16.04 2:33 a.m. so the long-awaited pictures are now posted, the links are at right. about half are of the town and people, and the other half are of our trip to cerro pachon and cerro tololo. the latter are so incredible that i still have a hard time believing i actually took them. hopefully you'll understand when you see them. and also hopefully, i'll get the chance to go back there soon. in the meantime, class is getting cranked up. i've got four hours (FOUR HOURS!) of spanish class three times a week, another hour and a half on the two off days. and when i say off days, i mean the days i have almost five hours of physics class on. *sigh* but i'm still loving it. i've started to meet some chileans, and they're such friendly people. none of them speak any english, for the most part, but it's good for me to have to learn spanish good and proper. or, actually, learn chilean. it makes me feel a lot better about my aural comprehension abilities to hear from a chilean that chilean spanish is the hardest kind to understand. anyhow. tomorrow's one of those busy off days, so i should stop messing around here and put myself to bed. top

que belleza hay aquí 09.10.04 9:20 p.m. so yesterday. AAAHHH! ok, got that out of my system. we visted the observatory sites, cerro tololo (which has the 4m blanco telescope, and is the future site of carolina's PROMPT project) and cerro pachon (home to the 8m gemini south, and our telescope, the 4.3m soar). so first of all, the telescopes themselves are a marvel...so BIG! i had no idea of the scale of these things until yesterday, there's a few pictures on cecil's page and the general gallery with people in them, to give you an idea. so that was the point of our trip. but...the mountains. ohhh the mountains. we were in a low part of the andes, but that was enough. i took nearly my entire roll of film, got it developed today, i'll scan them this weekend and get them up here soon. but anyhow, the views from cerro pachon and cerro tololo, and the views out the window pretty much the entire 2 hour drive up there, they were some of the most beautiful things i think i've ever seen in my life. all of it was topped, though, around 6:30...the sun set. wow. just wow. words fail. now THAT is without a doubt the most beautiful thing i have ever seen in my life. reading these posts, it probably seems like i'm a bit obsessed with the sunset, but believe me, if you were here you would be too. watching the sunset from cerro pachon last night was nothing short of incredible. we were at 8700 ft and had an unobstructed view of the andean foothills, clear out to the pacific ocean, and there was a fog starting to roll in on the coast. the sky turned amazing colors, and as soon as the sun was below the horizon, it looked like the ocean was bleeding. there are of course a number of pictures, mine turned out pretty well, but they're not up yet. thanks to handy dandy digital cameras, there is a decent amount of photographic evidence of our trip on the web, and it's linked to at right. check out the master site hosted on tim's webspace, there's a photo gallery there (though it tends to not work well in mozilla), and i'll link to the pictures dr. cecil took yesterday. too lazy to post them on a single page, so you'll just have to tolerate the organization cecil gave to them. enjoy. it still seems weird looking at them, and doesn't entirely register that i was there, seeing it all. surreal somehow. anyways, it's our first friday night in chile as a complete group, so we're headed out to celebrate and i'll conclude this here. top

llegados y cumpleaños 09.05.04 8:36 p.m. so here i am, in la serena, chile. which is amazing. i sat on the eastern side of the plane flying into santiago this morning, and i saw the most beautiful sunrise i think i've ever seen. wish i had a picture--it looked like the andes were on fire, which was an amazing effect with the snow still capping them. no snow here in la serena, though, thankfully. it's quite pleasant late winter weather, soon to be spring. going out to the beach tomorrow. i watched an amazing sunset over the water tonight, from the top of the hill i'm living on. how incredible is that? i see the sun rise over the mountains and set over the ocean all in the same day. i do have pictures of the sunset, but they're on real film, so it'll be a while before i get them printed and scanned and put up here. speaking of pictures, i've stolen some from adam and his lovely digital camera. check it out at right. there should be some of the town, and the house that 8 of us are sharing. not many, yet, but i promise they're coming soon! i'll hurry up and start having my mad chilean adventures--actually, tonight we're going out to celebrate my birthday--and as soon as i can get them developed and scanned, they'll be up here for your viewing pleasure. for now, signing off from la serena. top

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