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.

7. Parque Nacional La Campana

Note: I wrote this before the earthquake. We're fine, it looks like everything is OK in Valparaíso.

So, I’ve been planning my first excursion from the Greater Valparaíso region for some time now. My predictions of mountains and picnics in a previous blog post were previously dashed by rain – as I’ve related here, what would be just enough to get the grass damp in Houston is enough to cause a flood on the steep inclines in this part of the world, so our expedition crew decided to play it safe.

           Chile takes its nature reserves seriously – there are 140,000 km² of protected areas in the country, totaling about a fifth of Chile’s entire territory. And, being an environmental engineer, I am always looking to get out into nature. The excursion was planned for La Campana National Park – a famous reserve depicted on the back of the 5.000 peso bill, and conveniently located just a couple hours from Valparaíso. There are many trails through the park, including one going straight to the top of its highest “hill” (it would be a mountain in any other country, except maybe Nepal). If you make it to the top, they say, you can look back West and see the Pacific Ocean, and look East to see the snow-covered Andes peaks.

            The hike there and back is about eight hours, and the park is only open from 9:00am to 5:30pm, so we got up nice and early to meet our friends in town. We gathered in one of Valparaíso’s main plazas as the last of Friday night’s parties were turning their patrons out, the streets much chillier than normal in the last few minutes before the sun rose. We took a bus from Valparaíso to Quilpué, then from Quilpué to Limache, then from Limache straight to La Campana. Well, it let us off about a half mile away from the park gates, but it’s absolutely blown my mind how well you can get around without a car here. We came for a hike anyway.

           Once we got to the gate, the ranger in charge gave us an option of trails and some details. I wanted to go straight to the top, but my companions were intimidated by the ranger’s description of the 2000-meter ascent, and his warnings that we would need to rest adequately and have brought appropriate food. I was outvoted, and besides, there was a waterfall at the trailhead of the lower path. Could be worse, surely!

            The hike was very long, and despite reaching only half the height of the park’s tallest point, was steep and hard enough. We walked about four hours in the morning, and passed almost no one on the trail – I don’t think I’ve ever been in a park that was so empty. When we did come across other hikers, our “hola”s were met with “guten Tag”s, and our “hello”s met with “bonjour”s.

            Finally, we found this spot:

and decided to stop for lunch.

Having taken the time to sit down and eat, we realized we were pretty tired.

We didn’t make it to the waterfall, this time. After our siesta, it was almost time to head back to the gate – and just as we came to this conclusion, another passing hiker was able to tell us it was actually another seven kilometers from where we were, more than double the distance.

            We also didn’t stand on the top of the mountain with one eye on the Pacific and the other on the Andes; but we did see both from a slightly more manageable but still respectable height of 1000 meters.

It was a magical day. And I slept very, very well that night.

Next time: Independence Day in Chile

Previously: Purple photosythentic bacteria

6. Purple Bacteria

Since recovering from my illness (thanks, Mr Penicillin!) I’ve been working in the lab. Growing bacteria in a bottle is a lot more fun than in the tonsils. They are beautiful.

            These are the “purple” bacteria we’re growing for hydrogen production, after six

Aren't they beautiful?

days of growth. Purple bacteria are a group of organisms that photosynthesize using an entirely different set of molecular machinery than that found in plants or algae. The proteins they use to harness light for energy absorb at different wavelengths, which is what causes them to appear purple or red instead of green. This trait has proven so useful that the genes coding for these processes seem to have been transferred horizontally into a number of unrelated organisms, creating the extremely diverse group of bacteria lumped together by this shared trait.

            These bacteria possess an extremely diverse array of characteristics. Almost all (of those studied, anyway) are able to live aerobically or anaerobically; they can also grow via any of the four major metabolic routes (chemoheterotrophy [chemicals as energy and carbon source, like animals], photoautotrophy [light for energy and CO₂ for carbon, like plants], chemoautotrophy, or photoheterotrophy [only bacteria do these]). They are found in all kinds of environments: wastewater sludges, salt- or freshwater sediments, soil, etc. And, as far as I can tell, they do not cause any diseases in humans or other animals. So I caught my bacterial sickness from another source.

            My project involves testing the efficacy of these bacteria as a secondary treatment stage in the fermentation of wastewater. The wastes are first put into a normal (“dark”) fermentation digester, where anaerobic bacteria break them down into gasses (in this case, energy-rich hydrogen and waste CO₂), water, and simple organic molecules like acetic acid and butyric acid. These organic molecules still contain lots of energy, but the bacteria in the dark fermenter cannot break them down any further.

 

Reactors, just after inoculation. Nice, fresh sludge.

           The effluent of the dark fermenter, therefore, is treated further in a photo-fermentation reactor using purple bacteria. Their diverse metabolisms can break the remaining small molecules down, leaving nothing but hydrogen, CO₂, and biomass. They do not produce hydrogen from the initial substrates as efficiently as other bacteria, so are used only to finish the conversion; but, their ability to survive under so many conditions means they can be left in the dark fermenter broth. They can live there on the sidelines while the dark fermenters produce lots of hydrogen, and then take over to convert the residues once the lights are turned on.

            We’re working here with a whole diverse group of purple bacteria instead of single-strain monocultures – this is a little trickier than working with a single species, but is expected to yield better results on real wastewater mixes. Lots of different bacteria mean they can metabolize lots of different contaminants in the waste, leading to cleaner water and hopefully more hydrogen. This is something that hasn’t been done very much yet with purple bacteria, which is also a good thing – moving the technology a little closer to practical application!

Starting to grow!

Next time: Hiking trip (for real).

Previously: MAGIC

5. MAGIC

First off, I feel I need to apologize for the interruption in my normal posting pattern. I’ve been sick.

Either Yandee or I have been sick most of the time we’ve been here – new country, close quarters with two roommates, and of course the sudden switch from hot to cold are all likely contributors to a near constant flow of the collective nose. I woke up last Sunday with a tickle in my throat, and after a small disapproving meditation, moved my mind to other things, sure I would be fine by the next day.

I wasn’t. But I went to class anyway, not about to let a virus destroy my attendance record on the second week of school. I had planned to go to the lab afterward, but my supervisor took one look at my face and sent me home. I promised I’d be back the next day.

I spent Tuesday on the phone with my dad, who is a doctor, asking for any advice or recommendations for cures I could get over the counter. And Wednesday, Yandee had to take me to the hospital, where through the magic of modern medicine I was set back on the happy, productive path to health!

It’s really hard to be sick in a foreign country. Spending hours in a waiting room is bad enough when you know what to expect (and can understand the language – combating the infection had caused a Copper Curtain to shut in my brain, partitioning away all the Spanish), but there was no way around it. We had thought that antibiotics might be available over the counter here, like they are in Mexico, but fortunately (and unfortunately) they are not. Antibiotics are great when you need them, but it’s incredibly important that they be used exactly according to doctor’s instructions – otherwise, the infecting bacteria can build up a resistance, putting the patient in much greater danger and eventually making drug-resistant strains that can get into the population and put public health back a hundred years. This sounds a little melodramatic, but it’s a serious concern we face and that I consider often as a student of microbiology, with MRSA infections becoming common in the United States and really scary bacteria developing in countries with more lax antibiotic regulations, such as reports of Totally Drug-Resistent tuberculosis coming out of India. So it would have been nice to just walk to the drug store and start zapping the alien invaders, but I would’ve been a little more nervous the rest of my year here!

In the end, the ER in Valparaíso was very much the same as in the US – I wasn’t actively bleeding or otherwise dying rapidly, so I had to wait a while, but eventually I saw the doctor and from there got a penicillin injection in about 20 minutes. Apart from being a magical, specific killer of bacterial cells among all the cells in my person, this penicillin was modified so that it could stay in my bloodstream for three weeks – meaning I didn’t need any further injections or pills to confuse with all my other painkillers and decongestants. How cool is that??

But man, what I would've given for some Blue Box mac'n'cheese.

I will forego the pictures today, because they’re all gross. Next time I plan, and hope, to have some beautiful things to show you!

Next time: Picnics, mountains, bacteria (the good kind)

Previously: Earthquake