9. Back from the Lab

Good Morning, South America!

Sorry for the long radio silence. It’s been a stressful couple of months – some bad, lots good. Now that it’s summer here in the Deep South, class is over and my experiments in the lab are not quite as intensive as they were, I’m getting back to some more regular updates. This week, I’ll try to sum up some of key events of the intervening period.

Lab Progress

Lab work is not for the faint of heart.

Last semester, I did the same experiment three times – each with slight variations – and each failed to work. That’s not to say I didn’t get some answers – now we know that pretreatment of the sludge with oxygen is not particularly useful! – but it’s not at all an easy thing to put down a month’s worth of experiments as flawed and try to do it again.

Of course, if it were easy, it would be boring, because it would’ve already been done and published. In science, if we want an answer to the question, we have to go out and get it – and bacteria like to talk to researchers even less than children like to talk to pediatricians. Which is kind of funny when you think about it, because researchers actually feed the bacteria, and some of us have been known to sing to them in effort to make them happy.

It’s frustrating at times. But I do have some results in hand that I would like to publish (even if I need to wait for more results to make a nice article), and I’ve learned some new techniques, which are likely to be more valuable down the line than even the article itself. Not to mention lots about an extremely interesting group of bacteria. They will absolutely change the world of waste treatment soon, even if I can’t manage it by July!

Felipe Visit

Just before Thanksgiving, a good friend from Houston came to visit us in Valparaíso. Felipe was a post-doc from Brazil at my lab in Houston, and we worked on algae together, as well as going to the coolest concerts Houston had to offer, etc. I got a little antsy as his arrival approached, as every time he’d talked about visiting, something terrible would happen to Chile – wildfires near Valpo, an earthquake, or flooding in the Atacama Desert (!). But when he actually got here, we had a weekend of beautiful weather, and I got to show him around all the cool touristy things in town.

Since I’d expected a lot of visitors over the year, I had actually avoided going to some of the biggest tourist draws, particularly Pablo Neruda’s house, figuring I would probably see it three or four times over the year. A few months of delayed gratification, like allowing a wine to breathe before tasting it (;-)), really paid off – I knew a lot more about Neruda’s work, having even read some of it in Spanish. He was a very strange guy, it turns out – Neruda would take two-hour naps in the afternoon, even if visiting a friend’s house; he had rules about who couldn’t go behind the bar; all the bathrooms had glass doors (though I’m not entirely sure those weren’t post-mortem modifications). The tour guides were coy about whether this was part of Neruda’s poet image, or whether these were character traits that had made him consider a career as a poet in the first place. In the end, however, you can say whatever you want about the guy but it’s hard to argue with this kind of view:

We had a full weekend trying to give Felipe and his Brazilian compatriots a full tour of the Valparaíso region: we ran all around the historic sites in town, the beaches and empanada shops in Viña. After nearly four months, Felipe’s was the first face I’d seen from my life “before,” and it was as strange to see him in the context of Chile as it was welcome. But it also came with a very amusing kind of difficulty – what language do we speak together? Felipe grew up speaking Spanish as well as Portuguese, but in Texas we’d spoken exclusively English, in part because his English was better than my Spanish, and in part, of course, because everyone speaks English in the US. Here, however, Spanish is a little more common, and I didn’t want to lose my progress just when I was getting good! We never actually talked about it, but whenever I would say something in Spanish, he would stubbornly respond in English, and I would occasionally try to do the same. It got even more complicated later, as one of his entourage actually didn’t speak Spanish, but one of my good friends from the PUCV lab is from Portugal, and she was super excited to speak some Portuguese after so many months. We had a six-way, three-language conversation at her kitchen table that I’m pretty was less than one third intelligible to anyone present. I had a terrible headache by the end but what a funny congregation!

Conference

In November, the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso co-hosted the 14^th World Congress on Anaerobic Digestion, held this year in Viña del Mar. This being an international conference, all the talks and most other communication was going to be in English – and as the guy with the best English in the school, I was volunteered as a docent translator. Which was totally great, because then I was able to attend the rest of the conference for free.

I got to the conference hotel bright and early Sunday morning for registration. The organizers were concerned that, despite the English abilities of the other volunteers, they might have trouble communicating with some of the attendees from East Asia or the Middle East. They made sure to put me in the place where the most difficulty was expected, and let everyone else know where I was so they could send people if there were problems.

My partner at the registration booth was a guy from Galicia, Spain who also spoke good English. We got the basics on what information was necessary and how to upload it to the database, and then the floodgates were opened. But we were ready! We were a communicating team! The first guy through the door walked straight up to me with a concerned look on his face, and tried some very strange sounding Spanish as his expression changed from trepidation to pain.

“English better?” I asked.

“Não,” he responded. Whelp. My Spanish is pretty good these days, but my Portuguese is just about where it was when I left Texas.

“Sir, you can speak Portuguese with me,” said my colleague. After all this worry about his English, Portuguese turned out to be what was needed.

As the morning wore on, it turned out that Hispanophonic volunteer crew were quite capable of communicating with the Vietnamese and Japanese contingents – the people they sent to me due to the language barrier were all from Australia and northern England. Which I (privately) thought was very funny, though they didn’t in the moment. They were very grateful to get to me though, because in a few minutes we had the problem sorted out, as well as any additional questions, and everyone was feeling very much better. I was enjoying chatting a little bit with them, because I’d basically not had any English conversations for three months at this point apart from phone calls home. And during our talks, two or three of them interrupted me at some point and said “But you know… you speak very good English!”

To which I naturally replied, “Oh, thank you! I spent a couple of weeks’ vacation in the States a couple of years ago.” It’s awesome, because everyone here can tell I’m not just foreign but American just from looking at me, so I enjoyed at least the second hand illusion that I could pass for something else.

The rest of the conference was quite enjoyable as well – I met a lot of other scientists working on similar problems, and had a long brainstorm with a professor from Mexico growing the same bacteria that I am here, as well as seeing lots of cool new tools and ideas for research. I’d been a little discouraged at some of my results the week beforehand, but a conference is just the thing to bring back some of the excitement of science and lab work.

Thanksgiving (Día de Acción de Gracias)

Yandee left for the US on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving to spend it with her family, while she got together the papers for her work visa. Rather than spend it all alone, imagining good ol’ American tofurky and cranberry sauce, I decided I’d host a Traditional Thanksgiving Dinner for the folks in the lab.

We did it potluck style, because this being Chile and not Texas, I didn’t have the day off to cook a crazy bunch of food. Nevertheless, I committed myself to making a couple of hot plates and buying a bunch of meat to let someone else grill (being a vegetarian city boy, I didn’t think I could cook it to Chilean standards). I couldn’t decide what exactly my own dishes would be, and in the end I went to the store to see if I could gain some “walking inspiration.”

As it turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, cranberry sauce isn’t sold in Chilean supermarkets. Not the Ocean Spray kind, not any fancy kind either. But neither are cranberries. It turns out there isn’t even a word for cranberry in Spanish (and don’t tell me “arandano rojo” counts – calling it a “red blueberry” just demonstrates you’ve never tasted a cranberry!). This led to a short period of existential holiday angst, which as my American readership will understand, at least alleviated my homesickness. But then I went to the next aisle. Check this out.

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, Kraft Blue Box is available right here in Chile. I threw a couple of boxes in the cart, with a tomato and onion to dress it up a little bit.

For the second dish, I settled on enfrijoladas, which I had never heard of until a couple weeks before when Yandee made them. They’re basically enchiladas but covered in a bean sauce instead of a tomato salsa. I made most of them non-spicy, and a few extra spicy for the foreigners who could handle it.

I was still cooking when people started to arrive, but pretty soon we were all down in the “quincho,” where there’s a big barbeque grill and long wooden picnic tables. About a dozen people showed up, with all kinds of cool food – pebre, a kind of Chilean salsa; a huge bowl of yucca, which tasted kind of like lemony potatoes; a desert sausage, which was definitely the biggest novelty of the night – it was made of different kinds of chocolate mixed together and baked in a tinfoil roll, like a brownie but… sausage-like; and of course, a copious amount of excellent Chilean wine.

It was one of my favorite Thanksgivings, in the end. The mac’n’cheese was surprisingly popular – I figured everyone would have a bite out of curiosity and pass, but most people had a full helping and seconds. I explained that the Blue Box in particular is what Mom makes if she’s really tired, and learned that the Chilean equivalent is spaghetti noodles with an avocado chopped in (which I have since tried myself on a “too-tired” type of day – highly recommended!). They asked a lot about what happens at Thanksgiving in the US, and I explained some of the legends, the history, and the modern celebration of family, food, and football. A consensus was reached that this was a pretty cool idea, maybe a better one than Halloween, which has already been imported into Chile – so if you hear some stories about Thanksgiving celebrations taking hold in Valparaíso, that was the Rotary Club through me ;-).

The Beach in December

Switching hemispheres is no mean feat of mental gymnastics, and I find myself suffering from the strangest dissonance all the time. As I write this, it is summer here in Chile, as all of my readers will be well aware; but remembering that word is far easier than remembering everything that goes with it. While I never had any trouble remembering when in a Texas winter of 60 degrees that it was probably colder in Missouri or Germany, in Chile I have a terrible time remembering that it is NOT summer right now in Texas. I spent the past six months warming up here, and it is always surprisingly jarring to remember that it’s not actually much warmer back home. It’s summer! It should be hot as Hades in San Antonio or Houston!

Apart from the strange feeling of being out of place and time whenever I think about the weather, there are some other upsides and downsides of being reversed. While the thought of a warm Christmas was impossible to stomach (even though, as it turned out, the Texas Christmas was a degree or two warmer than the Chilean one), going to the beach in mid-December was pretty freaking cool.

These are a few pictures of the beach in Reñaca, which is about half an hour up the coast from Valparaíso. It’s very popular with tourists, and you can see why – I’ve never seen bigger waves anywhere in person, the sand is soft and flecked with shiny gold grains of pyrite. The Pacific waters are coooooold, but clean and clear. After I came out of the water and my hair dried, it felt more like I’d come out of the shower than the ocean – which was a big surprise for someone who’s beach vacations are normally in Galveston!

The beach was full of towels and tents hosting other swimmers. Our Chilean chaperone mentioned that they were mostly Argentines, and the ones closest to us were all Argentines. How could he tell? The mate. I looked around and it was true: next to almost every towel I could see was a hand-grenade sized metal goblet full of green tea. Argentina is crazy about yerba mate, to the point where you’re not sure which would be more quickly fatal, quitting mate or quitting breathing. To the point where the buses from Mendoza, Argentina to Valparaíso, Chile, have hot water taps installed so that they can continue sipping. It’s makes me wonder what people would see and assume was incredibly important to us when they come to Texas, even while we barely give it a second thought.

Visit to the School

I’ve been working with the Rotarians at RC Quilpué for some time now to develop a service project. They do a lot of work with primary schools out in the rural part of the Valparaíso Region. At the end of the school year in early December, the club sponsored a set of contests for art, dance, and scholastics to encourage interest in schoolwork and to award school supplies and uniforms for the coming year as prizes. I was invited to go with them, which I was only too happy to do – this was my first visit to rural Chile.

The schools are very small, with 20-40 students apiece from first up to eighth grade, and suffer from a lack of resources. The buildings are old and not well constructed, and I am told it is very difficult to retain the teachers, as salaries are low as are amenities. The children, however, were perfectly happy and energetic, and the walls and fences were all covered in classroom murals.

To be clear, this is super rural – an hour outside Quilpué, not out in tiny towns with populations of 1-5,000, but in the valleys with little ranches and mountaintops. For me, it was kind of like an 1800s historical reconstruction, and funny enough, one of the schools had a museum attached that had lots of little pieces on the history of the region’s settlement by Spain. It was a very, very empty, except for the school, the road, a few fences, and a church.

After 8^th grade, students must travel into Quilpué for high school. I have been unable to dig up any concrete statistics, but my host club believes that only about half of students from rural schools like these do so. The travel and the expense are too great a strain on family budgets, and of course, any job requiring secondary or higher education would mean moving far away from the farm. Secondary education is free and compulsory in Chile through high school, but ancillary fees for uniforms and materials, as well as the travel, can be difficult to meet for some families, and in the rural areas, truancy laws may be difficult to enforce. Additionally, the public education system below the university level is viewed by many as substandard, and private schools are far more expensive.

Learning all of this certainly set my wheels spinning. As someone who has devoted his entire life to higher education and the pursuit and expansion of knowledge, it’s really difficult to imagine people being okay without high school, and living on the farm. I’ve thought a lot since then about the purpose of an education, and how much and in what degree it is really necessary to be happy or be a good citizen. And for all the years I spent in high school I must admit I’ve been unable to come up with any solid answers. But while it’s been an interesting problem to think about, it’s not the one that my scholarship is meant to alleviate – my area of focus is water and sanitation, and that’s what I came to the school to look at.

RC Quilpué has installed a set of passive solar water heaters in the schools. This are really stellar pieces of equipment: a series of pipes are built at an angle toward the sun, and an electric pump pumps water over them, allowing the sunlight to directly heat the water. It’s a perfect, sustainable solution for viniculture climates. It gives the kids access to hot water throughout the day, and after school hours, the school allows the families to come in and take a hot shower as well. Unfortunately, the school being very small, the water heaters can’t be placed too far away from the soccer grounds, and the glass pipes have been broken by one or two enthusiastically lobbed soccer balls. My service project will involve repairing the water heaters, and installing a fence to keep them working for the foreseeable future. Updates on this as they become available.

New Years

I had a terrible time wrapping my head around this, or getting solid answers from my informants, but it turns out New Years Eve is really the most celebrated summer holiday in Chile. And it may be because it’s summer – all the lights and cold-weather paraphernalia that come down from the markets of the northern hemisphere may not really inspire too much sentiment when everyone’s at the beach until 9pm. Or it may be that Christmas, celebrated as it is in the US in the home with family, just doesn’t have quite the sense of occasion as commands an entire city pouring out to the waterfront to watch the fireworks, then staying in the streets until past dawn in the biggest block party you’ve ever seen.

Because that’s what New Years is in Valparaíso.

I went to a friend’s apartment, happily located on the 14^th floor, for New Years grapes (one for every wish for the new year!) and to see the fireworks show. Valparaíso is famous for its New Years fireworks displays, and I wasn’t disappointed.

I’ve lived on the water or in large cities in the US for most of my life, and I’ve seen some pretty cool fireworks shows. But I’ve never seen synchronized shows from four different towns at once.

It went on like this for 40 minutes. It was glorious. And the Chileans were totally complaining at the end that it wasn’t as good as last year’s. You guys.

After the show, and after a few texts to friends in Texas that I’d safely made it to 2016 and that it was OK, we went down to the street with the rest of the city. There was little other option, since there was certainly no way to sleep with all the noise being made. It was a really great atmosphere – everyone was just happy for effectively no reason, and it really was the whole city out in the street – I ran into just about everyone I’ve met in the last few months here that doesn’t live in Viña or Quilpué. Initially, I had no intention of staying out until the sun rose, but there was this terrible trouble: when the streets are full of people, there’s no where for the cars to go that will take you back up the hill. And when there’s no way to get home, people just keep the party going in the street. It’s quite a vicious cycle.

So I brought in the new year awfully exhausted, but exhilarated. I think next year I’ll just set off a couple of rockets at home and go to bed around 1 or 2. That one was definitely a big enough party to count for two.

Gonzalo

On Tuesday, my academic advisor here in Valparaíso, Professor Gonzalo Ruiz, passed away.

I didn’t know him well, and I don’t feel much like I have any business writing about him, but I want to leave something here that I can remember later on. This is not an attempt at a eulogy, just a personal note, I suppose.

I had exchanged just a few emails with Gonzalo before I came to Chile, asking if he was interested in hosting me in his lab if I were to be awarded the Rotary scholarship. He was very enthusiastic and supportive, and continued to be so even after I did not receive the scholarship the first time I applied and had to wait another year. When I got here, I learned very quickly that that was his attitude toward everything, even during his illness.

He welcomed me, and Yandee too, into his research group and into his home. He introduced me to some incredibly driven and innovative academics, and helped me out in countless ways at school.

Gonzalo, I learned so much from you about how to be a researcher, and how to stay upbeat in the face of adversity. I wish I’d had a chance to know you better. Que en paz descances, Profe. My thoughts are all with his wife Lore and son Santi.

8. El Dieciocho

Chilean Independence Day is marked on the 18^th of September. I say marked instead of celebrated because “El Dieciocho” is actually a week-long party in the entire country. Everything was covered in red, white, and blue bits of paper and plastic, and Chilean flags were EVERYWHERE (and of course it looks to me very much like there were Texas flags everywhere, hell yeah).

            I haven’t spent a Christmas here of course, but they say that el Dieciocho is the bigger holiday. Normally the 18^th and 19^th are holidays; the University here planned a half-day on the 17^th, and while the 14^th, 15^th, and 16^th were supposedly normal workdays, there was an Independence Day lunch on the 15^th that turned into a whole afternoon of eating, drinking, and dancing for the grad students and professors. Only ALL OUT eating, drinking, and dancing.

Empanada, Anticucho

Calzon Roto

            Traditional food is abundant and delicious. Empanadas are to be found all the time, but eating one becomes an act of patriotism this time of year. Anticuchos, a kind of extra-meaty shish-kebab, are something I hadn’t seen before but were all over the place last week. Special pastries also come out this time of year – I tried one called calzones rotos, which, in my Tex-Mex Spanish, translates to torn underwear (I enjoyed this too much to ask for a translation). I was with a group of other internationals when this happened, so I’m not sure what the Chilean perception is; the verdict of the other foreign kids was it was really greasy, sat heavy in the stomach, and was way too sweet. I tried it and I’ll be damned if it didn’t taste exactly like a New Orleans beignet (Yandee agreed!). Eating is a huge part of the celebration, and I’ve heard statistics saying the average Chilean gains about seven pounds over the week. Since most of the food is meat-intense, I was able to avoid this outcome myself… until I found a restaurant making vegetarian versions of everything with seitan. I’m so glad my bathroom scale is in storage.

            There’s also a lot of drinking that goes on. Chicha is a fermented beverage made usually from grapes, but sometimes also corn. It looks kind of like Hawaiian punch and tastes kind of like Pine Sol. My curiosity quickly turned into politeness on this one. Lots of Chileans are crazy about it though, and even lots of the other international kids at school. Fortunately I’d never seen any before, so maybe our paths have parted ways for good. Also fortunately, there were other choices: at our department party (which, I will mention again, was on a Tuesday afternoon and was sure to last only an hour or two), there was at least an empty bottle of wine for every attendee. Chileans, as some readers of this blog will be aware, make very good wine and are very proud of it. There is also another Dieciocho specialty named the terremoto – the earthquake! It’s a cocktail made with wine, grenadine, and pineapple ice cream, and I’d been warned since I arrived in Chile how dangerous they can be. They’re very tasty and the alcohol is hard to taste. Thanks to all the warnings, I and all the other foreign researchers managed to keep out of trouble.

            In Chile, there is a national dance. It is called the cueca, and it is danced during the Dieciocho. Here’s a link to some pros. Not everyone dances cueca but it goes on all the time. You can hear the music and people clapping in the street, and even in the grocery store on Wednesday about a dozen people, dressed in full costume with huge skirts and giant spurs, were dancing in front of the check out line.

            After I got to Chile and started working in the lab, I started getting to know some of the other students and researchers. It turned out several of them are really good dancers, and they were teaching the internationals in the lab to dance cueca a couple of times a week in the evenings. Somehow I got talked into it. I never got very good, but it’s a lot of fun! Somehow, I got shanghaied into a dance competition at the lab party. And unfortunately, someone took pictures.

Here’s me with the prize I won! 

(for effort :-P)

So where does all this eating-drinking-dancing occur? At the fondas! There was one here for Valparaíso and one in neighboring Viña del Mar, so we had our pick. The fondas are full of little booths called ramadas (for all the rustic branches adorning them) where food is available, as well as other shops, dance areas, games, and carnival rides.

If you think this is starting to sound very much like the non-rodeo part of the Rodeo, you’re not alone. The biggest differences are that EVERYONE is at the fondas at night – the streets were eerily empty on the way there and back – and that the fondas are not so hot.

Apart from the fiestas, there was, of course, another event this past week – an 8.3 earthquake with the epicenter just off the coast, several hours to the north. While towns closer to the epicenter were heavily shaken and inundated with tsunami, Valparaíso suffered very little damage (the tsunami didn’t crest the seawall, no buildings were damaged as far as I know). It scared the hell out of everyone though. Yandee and I were at the grocery store when it started rumbling – I was trying to pick out juice and didn’t realize what was going on at first. It was like walking over a bridge while a really heavy truck crosses it, just a barely perceptible wiggling. It was a second or two before I remembered I wasn’t on a bridge and everything shouldn’t be shaking, and by then it was getting much stronger. A few things started falling off the shelves, and we, bewildered to say the least, tried to see what the hell the Chileans were doing, and pretty quickly ran after them out the door. Even with all that, we didn’t really understand how big it had been until we saw how many people were hugging their children and crying outside the store.

            Our Chilean roommate, who is just the nicest and most incredibly thoughtful person in the whole world, ran across the street from the apartment to get us. We ended up staying in the parking lot together for an hour or so, listening to the tsunami sirens at the bottom of the hills below warning everyone to literally head for the hills, and waiting for the aftershocks. Everyone’s been asking if I was scared during the earthquake or how I handled it, but the aftershocks (in this case, since nothing actually happened in town) have been worse. They’ve been several times a day, some very strong to where you can hear the building shaking, others almost imperceptible. Neither is really a worry, but now that they’ve been happening so often I’ve started to expect them - it’s like the phantom phone vibrating in one’s pocket, except it’s literally everything phantom vibrating. It is absolutely the most maddening thing to not be sure if the earth is moving under you.

            But that really is the worst thing here – everyone is fine, all the labs at school are fine, nothing even fell in the apartment, and I managed to text my parents before it hit the news. I can probably manage some minor neurosis a few days more. Maybe by the end of the year I won’t even feel these little tremors – the Chileans claim not to, and I find myself believing them when they can throw such a great party after a shock like that.