17 July 2008
11 July 2008
la raja!
shit. we are leaving for peru in 8 days!!!
i have a new roommate: amanda from texas. the poor girl has been going pretty much nonstop since she got here because i think now brett and i are in exploring mode. it's almost time to leave the country. and really, it doesn't seem like i've been here for six weeks.
last night a few of us chilled at cafe con letras, a cute cafe that is also a book store--with reasonable prices! imagine that. i had coffee, juice, a ham sandwich, panqueque con manjar, another coffee, apple pie. oh dearie me. then to la piedra feliz for the usual thursday night blues assignment, then to an irish pub where we had dark beer (barba negra, made in valpo) with some kind of chocolaty goodness in it. divine. i never thought i'd like something like that. hah!
today brett, amanda and i woke up and were out of the house before noon, after going to sleep at 5 or 5:30 in the morning. so proud. explored valpo a bit, ate the best empanadas ever, and now i am back in vina. fixin' to go to sleep before we head to the ex-carcel tonight for some kind of theatre somethingorother. awesome.
sorry for the boring narrative post, but this is about the extent to which my sleepy mind can think right now.
i have a new roommate: amanda from texas. the poor girl has been going pretty much nonstop since she got here because i think now brett and i are in exploring mode. it's almost time to leave the country. and really, it doesn't seem like i've been here for six weeks.
last night a few of us chilled at cafe con letras, a cute cafe that is also a book store--with reasonable prices! imagine that. i had coffee, juice, a ham sandwich, panqueque con manjar, another coffee, apple pie. oh dearie me. then to la piedra feliz for the usual thursday night blues assignment, then to an irish pub where we had dark beer (barba negra, made in valpo) with some kind of chocolaty goodness in it. divine. i never thought i'd like something like that. hah!
today brett, amanda and i woke up and were out of the house before noon, after going to sleep at 5 or 5:30 in the morning. so proud. explored valpo a bit, ate the best empanadas ever, and now i am back in vina. fixin' to go to sleep before we head to the ex-carcel tonight for some kind of theatre somethingorother. awesome.
sorry for the boring narrative post, but this is about the extent to which my sleepy mind can think right now.
07 July 2008
observation
funny story:
brett and i have decided to go to peru! that's not the funny part though. this afternoon i took the micro to lider mall to buy the lonely planet guide to peru. an easy enough goal. i find the book store, make a beeline for the travel section and fish past a row of spanish books to the lonely planet. check for prices... the only one listed is the one in USD that's printed on the back. $22.95 or something. so i figure... i know books in chile are expensive. so maybe it will cost about 15 mil, which is equivalent to about 30 USD. fine. go to the register, the girl says my total is a little more than 24 mil. FIFTY DOLLARS?!?! for a lonely planet book??
so I'm wondering what the deal is. why are books so expensive?
for starters, chile has a 19% value-added tax on books. what other items have this tax, i don't know. but not food and not clothes. i looked up VAT, but i still don't really understand the economics of it all... but according to wikipedia this pretty much is equivalent to a 19% sales tax. ok. so that accounts for about $4.50 of the extra cost.
in addition, it's expensive to import books into the country and publishing prices are high, too. big deal.
i just don't understand. why on earth would a country make books so incredibly expensive? isn't it prudent to give discounts on books instead of raising prices in order to have a more learned and intelligent society? also, a people that knows more about the rest of the world than populations who don't have relatively easy access to books? seems to me that taxing books so heavily is reminiscent of the communist government that chile had 20 years ago, only because dictators never want their people to know about other places. but of course, i am no historian and certainly no economist.
an interesting blog:
http://c.hileno.com/2007/05/in-defense-of-chiles-exorbitant-book.html
on a happier note, here is the itinerary brett and I came up with today...
maybe if you click on it you'll be able to read it...
also, there is another protest tomorrow! i'm going. i think.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_LjRs2AJdgnI/SGxTtkUrGJI/AAAAAAAAAIo/
wBoOBVdJQXw/s1600-h/muralpar8julio2008.jpg
brett and i have decided to go to peru! that's not the funny part though. this afternoon i took the micro to lider mall to buy the lonely planet guide to peru. an easy enough goal. i find the book store, make a beeline for the travel section and fish past a row of spanish books to the lonely planet. check for prices... the only one listed is the one in USD that's printed on the back. $22.95 or something. so i figure... i know books in chile are expensive. so maybe it will cost about 15 mil, which is equivalent to about 30 USD. fine. go to the register, the girl says my total is a little more than 24 mil. FIFTY DOLLARS?!?! for a lonely planet book??
so I'm wondering what the deal is. why are books so expensive?
for starters, chile has a 19% value-added tax on books. what other items have this tax, i don't know. but not food and not clothes. i looked up VAT, but i still don't really understand the economics of it all... but according to wikipedia this pretty much is equivalent to a 19% sales tax. ok. so that accounts for about $4.50 of the extra cost.
in addition, it's expensive to import books into the country and publishing prices are high, too. big deal.
i just don't understand. why on earth would a country make books so incredibly expensive? isn't it prudent to give discounts on books instead of raising prices in order to have a more learned and intelligent society? also, a people that knows more about the rest of the world than populations who don't have relatively easy access to books? seems to me that taxing books so heavily is reminiscent of the communist government that chile had 20 years ago, only because dictators never want their people to know about other places. but of course, i am no historian and certainly no economist.
an interesting blog:
http://c.hileno.com/2007/05/in-defense-of-chiles-exorbitant-book.html
on a happier note, here is the itinerary brett and I came up with today...
maybe if you click on it you'll be able to read it...
also, there is another protest tomorrow! i'm going. i think.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_LjRs2AJdgnI/SGxTtkUrGJI/AAAAAAAAAIo/
wBoOBVdJQXw/s1600-h/muralpar8julio2008.jpg
03 July 2008
sr. alvaro reyes
so i am super super cold! my poor toes.
just want to recount a couple things...
one night last week a couple neighbor kids came over to the house. my roommate answered the door and called me downstairs, saying that they wanted to ask us some questions for a school project. there was one, sebastian, and another who was a couple years younger. sebastian did all the talking and the little kid whispered comments to him every so often. so once they laughed and anette and i are like 'what?' and sebastian tells us our house is 'desordenado.' we said no... no it's really not. we're students. one day he will understand. then they tried to tell us that they were 14 and 16 years old. definitely not, they were maybe like 10 and 12. but sebastian said 'yeah, all us chileans are small, you never can tell how old we are.'
then we got ding dong ditched for the rest of the night!
tonight i worked my second show. jorge gonzalez, who is supposedly the father of chilean rock. he even sang a song about how his rock is different than the gringos' rock. 'we are... sudamerican rockers.' then why are you speaking spanglish? ok so really i understand the spanglish thing, but this guy was not good at all. so much for father of rock and roll! he's certainly got nothing on elvis.
but one good thing did come of this incredibly boring show.
while i was packing my stuff and most people had left, an old man who was sitting near me said something to me about 'taking a lot of photos.' so we talk... he tells me he's an artist and shows me this silver ring he wears on his pinky finger. the top part is a circle with a llama's silhouette protruding out. this man, alvaro, tells me some story about how this ring was his mother's and maybe that his mother wore this on her middle finger but he has to wear it on the little finger... maybe about how he's grown up so now he can't wear it on any finger but the pinky. i don't know, i was just caught up in how darn cute he was.
so we exchanged direcciones and now a random cute old man has my address. maybe not such the best idea but... what was i going to do? seriously? he was so cute.
just want to recount a couple things...
one night last week a couple neighbor kids came over to the house. my roommate answered the door and called me downstairs, saying that they wanted to ask us some questions for a school project. there was one, sebastian, and another who was a couple years younger. sebastian did all the talking and the little kid whispered comments to him every so often. so once they laughed and anette and i are like 'what?' and sebastian tells us our house is 'desordenado.' we said no... no it's really not. we're students. one day he will understand. then they tried to tell us that they were 14 and 16 years old. definitely not, they were maybe like 10 and 12. but sebastian said 'yeah, all us chileans are small, you never can tell how old we are.'
then we got ding dong ditched for the rest of the night!
tonight i worked my second show. jorge gonzalez, who is supposedly the father of chilean rock. he even sang a song about how his rock is different than the gringos' rock. 'we are... sudamerican rockers.' then why are you speaking spanglish? ok so really i understand the spanglish thing, but this guy was not good at all. so much for father of rock and roll! he's certainly got nothing on elvis.
but one good thing did come of this incredibly boring show.
while i was packing my stuff and most people had left, an old man who was sitting near me said something to me about 'taking a lot of photos.' so we talk... he tells me he's an artist and shows me this silver ring he wears on his pinky finger. the top part is a circle with a llama's silhouette protruding out. this man, alvaro, tells me some story about how this ring was his mother's and maybe that his mother wore this on her middle finger but he has to wear it on the little finger... maybe about how he's grown up so now he can't wear it on any finger but the pinky. i don't know, i was just caught up in how darn cute he was.so we exchanged direcciones and now a random cute old man has my address. maybe not such the best idea but... what was i going to do? seriously? he was so cute.
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