Chile vs Uruguay Smackdown!

Well, let’s try this: Focusing the Uruguay vs Chile comparison, through my last day in Chile, during which Don took me through Santiago, to see some of the highlights of Chile’s massive capital.

Our first stop, I think, was la Moneda, the Presidential palace, which was bombarded by warplanes in the 1973 coup that toppled Salvador Allende, he of the pinewood bust in the last installment, and installed Agusto Pinochet in power. The Palace itself is a somewhat lowish (maybe three stories) building, not especially impressive – perhaps in large part because it has had to be rebuilt post-1973, and you just can’t re-created something that was made in another century with modern construction methods. It looks very much the concrete replica of a presidential palace. 

The plaza that it sits in, too, is a real contrast – all the buildings around it are much larger and more modern, which contributes even more to its museum piece-like status there. And the plaza is adorned with statues of every one of Chile’s past presidents. Apparently, as soon as they die, the statue is commissioned and built. What I don’t know, is when Allende’s statue went up.

Up it did go, in the end – and it’s the most modern-looking, with Allende striding out of what seems to be bronze ether. And I find it fascinating that the quote they’ve chosen comes from Sept. 11, 1973, from his last radio address, which he gave from within the presidential palace as the armed forces closed in on him and shot his supporters through the windows. So, I’m thinking, it must have gone in post-1989, which was the end of the Dictatorship. Because it’s hard to imagine Pinochet OK-ing that quote.

Here we do some Uruguay-Chile breakdown: Uruguay’s dictatorship was much smaller-scale in its repression and its bloodshed. I don’t think they killed the sitting president, and the numbes of people they tortured or made disappear of course don’t compare – just as Chile’s numbers don’t compare to Argentina’s, a far larger country. But the memory of that time is just as raw in the minds of those who lived through it in Uruguay as in Chile. And in Uruguay, I got the sense that it is utterly, completely over – that those who perpetrated it are in jail, that the most popular politicians and parties in the country are now the very ones who were persecuted back in the 70’s. Chile, on the other hand, still feels like it’s on the brink of something. Maybe I was projecting, there in Santiago; maybe it wasn’t this way in truth, and I was just seeing things. But there were a loooooot of carabineros, Chile’s national police, walking the beat in the Capital, a lot of them on horseback. Their uniforms are smart and intimidating, and they carry bayonets on their belts. It just felt not quite over.

From there, Don and I moved along to the plaza de armas, Santiago’s main plaza, where the cathedral is (we didn’t go in), and where university students were staging some sort of protest / demonstration to raise awareness: several were dressed in brides’ dresses, and were soliciting help from the crowd. I didn’t stick around to see just what the point was; such things make me nervous. But it was actually here that we saw the carabineros on horseback.

To compare them again: Santiago just feels bigger. Which, of course, it is. But you can tell that over the centuries, more money has gone through there, more heavy-duty movers and shakes have made their mark on the place than in Montevideo. Is this better? No – I don’t think so. If you’re looking for sheer grandeur, the smaller city is never going to outdo the bigger one. And what Montevideo lacks in firepower, it makes up for in intimacy. The presidential offices are also on one of its main squares, and apparently it’s common to see José Mujica, the former rebel leader and current President, strolling out for lunch, with annoyed security guards trying to keep up with him. He hates having them around, and really, in Ururuay, they’re almost doubtlessly not necessary.

In Chile, oh yeah.

We walked the old city, walked to the top of the cerro Santa Lucía, and took in the sights. But it was hard to see them: The city was enveloped in smog, or fog, or whichever. It wasn’t unpleasant to smell, but I did find myself coughing a lot. Santiago is sprawling, and Don says that every time he comes through, he’s take aback by how far out it’s growing. Not in a slum kind of way at all – just more low cinderblock buildings, housing light industry or storage or something Santiago’s churning economy now needs.

Montevideo doesn’t sprawl like that, or doesn’t seem to. And its roads are less perfect, the people and businesses lining them seem a bit more shabby than the portions I saw of Santiago. But again: I didn’t see all of Santiago. And I saw a very large portion of Montevideo.

Don and I then went to the Museo de la Memoria, dedicated to the dictatorship: its beginning, its fall, and its legacy – the main  reason I thought to make this entry largely about comparing Uruguay and Chile. Because I talked a few spots back about visiting Uruguay’s museum of the same name, and how it held artifacts from the struggles  including Mujica’s prison uniform, which I physically touched – there was no barrier, no sign asking me not to. It’s almost as if Uruguay is a big family, and they expect everyone to feel that connected to their common bonds of history. The place was small – a converted elegant country estate – and the rooms were on the scale of one or two people looking at them at a time – in fact, Natalia and I were, I think, the only ones there during our visit. A very close encounter with the past.

Santiago’s museum tries to do the same sort of thing: put the visitor in close touch with victims, with torture methods and memories, with the scale of it all. Just as Uruguay’s had preserved the steel door of the communist party headquarters, Chile’s had preserved a steel door from a prison where political prisoners were kept, and a watch tower from the surrounding walls. The architecture of the place astonished me – I have rarely been as impressed, as moved, by the form of a building. You go deep underneath the apparent structure to gain entry, and as you go down, you pass all 30 articles of the UN’s international declaration of human rights, going from your right to your left as you descend (probably not a coincidence), leading you into the beginning, as if you’d gone back in time in an archaeological dig – doubly meaningful, given the number of exhibitions inside about exhuming people from mass graves. It’s a brand-new, multi-million-dollar stab at reconciliation / redemption, and it’s hard to say they didn’t hit the mark in a lot of ways.

That was our day in Santiago. We walked a good, long walk from there to the bus station where we’d stowed our (my) bags, then another quick walk to where the airport shuttle takes off. And then a half-hour ride to the airport, where Don and I said goodbye, and I boarded a flight at the appointed time, made a connection, took two trains, and now sit on the third, stopped in a suburb of NYC, waiting to get going again for Albany.

And I’m back to thinking about the comparisons. One that’s been on my mind a lot:

The treatment of animals: Chileans love their dogs – but they love them differently than the Uruguayans. In Uruguay, there are very, very few street dogs that truly live there. The vast majority are behind the walls and the gates of the houses they guard, and for the most part they stay there. Some are gallavanters, but you don’t see many. Chile, on the other hand, while it has no marauding packs of clearly wild dogs, does have a fair number in the street in any large-ish town, including Santiago.

But they are fat! Some, like the big German Shepard-like dog at the bus station in Los Andes, appear to have a regular beat and a lot of people who toss them food here and there, because they’re fat, and because they appear to be utterly at their ease lying stretched out on the sidewalk, asleep, as dozens and dozens of people clomp past them on their way to important daily business. But what’s so amazing to me is that no onei bothers the dogs. It’s almost as if it’s a sacred trust – the dog has shown its faith in our better nature, so we respond, while not with what I might call kindness, at least a complete lack of cruelty. Nobody, it seems, would get a kick out of waking those dogs up, scaring them. Because nobody appears ever to do it.

Four, total, is the number of dogs I ever saw in Chile being walked on a leash. And they were all dogs of a particular breed – not well-loved mutts, like was often the case in Uruguay. (Although, in contrast to the "breed-dogs-are-treated-differently" narrative, on my last day there I saw a 100% purebred Shar Pei – trotting down the sidewalk with its friends, no collar, having a grand old time. And as Don put it, "Sometimes you'll be way out in the middle of the campo and randomly see a dog trot by wearing a sweater.") So on that level, Uruguayans love their dogs more like Americans love them. But they’re less free. And it’s not like Chileans don’t love them. It’s a different, somewhat more remote relationship.

And speaking of remote relationships – In Chile, people absolutely teem together. They seem to really dislike being alone. It’s maybe a little skewed, given that I was there and Don and Bridget were showing me around to their various friends, so of course I went to lots of dinners in lots of houses where there was conversation and card-playing and jocularity. And just about everything I saw in Chile was in the countryside, too – mostly, in Uruguay, I was in Montevideo, where folks tend to lead more urban lives, as they probably do in Santiago. But there just seemed to be a need to be together among Chileans, that I didn’t’ sense neary as strongly among the Uruguayans. Lots of people talk about how Uruguay and Argentina seem more Europe-oriented, and maybe this is what they mean: that their sense of space and intimacy seems more at place in Germany or Holland than in Mexico. But honestly, I think there’s something deeper in there that lurks behind those observations. I think this communal nature of the Chilean’s being has come down through the generations along with their black, black hair, their square torsos, and their darker skin. I think it’s from the Indian side of the family, which in Uruguay is far, far less prominent.

I noticed it in the hand gestures, for example. It’s difficult to describe in words, but when a Chilean is talking about something that isn’t significant, but which one would expect to be so, he or she will often hold up one hand – usually the right – about chest-high, close in to the body, with the fingers curled back toward the chest, and tending to rotate slowly up toward the chin. And then suddenly they’ll flick their hand outward and upward, as if swatting away a fly with their fingertips, leaving the hand, at the end of the gesture, palm-out and flexed backward toward the face, held now a little higher, maybe neck-high. It struck me as such an Ecuadorian gesture – and something I do not think I saw once in Uruguay. 

Uruguayans, meanwhile, will pinch the tips of their index finger and their thumb together and raise them slowly while making a precise point, up to eye level, and when the very most crucial syllable is uttered, bounce that little imaginary needle downward to make emphasis on the precision and exactitude of the location of their most important sound, while popping the index and thumb apart from each other as the downward stab happens. I never saw a Chilean do this. The first seems very, very Indian to me, and the second, very Italian.

In Chile, a strong point is made by holding the right index finger high in the air, about ear level, off to the side of the head, and holding it there, still, for just a moment. No wagging, no waving. It's just there, stolidly alone. And then it simply falls. Evo Morales does this; Ecuadorians do this. I never saw a Uruguayan do this.

I’ll never be able to prove it. But the Chileans have an appreciation for dour, sad Andean music; houses where the quality of the construction is just about last on the priority list - where wood is still used to make the bread because a house doesn’t smell like a home unless it’s smoky. And Uruguayans like to pile into long, narrow cafes and eat slice after slice of pizza as it’s brought out to them. They are not alike, these folks, in many ways. And I think it’s reflected in which side of the mestizo family, Mom’s (the Indigenous) or Dad’s (the European), holds sway, both in their blood, and in their cultural heritage, which have come down to them in roughly equal doses.

I make no judgment as to which is better, please keep in mind. Both Chile and Uruguay are fascinating, and filled with warm, wonderful people whom I hope to know for years to come, and I would be happy to bring my family to either for an extended stay. Which one we would pick, would depend on what we wanted to get out of the experience. If I wanted to live in a city, I'd choose Montevideo, for its safety, predictability, and clean air. Countryside? It would be very hard to say no to being within striking range of Flaco's house, Nacho's house, Gladys' house, and of course Lucy and Wenceslao's house. 

"But you didn't spend time in a Chilean city! How can you choose Montevideo?"

"And you didn't spend time in the Uruguayan campo! We're just as great out here!"

Well, then. I'll have to get back and compare them more closely, won't I?

I will leave off there for now. It’s 2:37 PM, and I’m scheduled to see my little ‘uns (all three of them) at the train station in Albany in under an hour. I’m off to freshen up – and see one more time if I can’t locate that damned camera, which I think, I shudder to admit, I left on a plane today. It’s a terrible way to end the trip, but at least I do it on time, and at home. 

Last Days in Chile

Whoah! Whirlwind couple of days there. Here are the tourism highlights:

Don and I accompanied Bridget and the kids into town on the micro – they were going to school, and he and I were going to the bus station, to purchase tickets and head off to Viña del Mar and Valparaíso. These are the two cities in Chile that people talk about if they aren’t talking about Santiago, and they thought (and I agreed) that I should really see them, since they’re close by and we had the time.

By the way, the day prior, I had spent an utterly pleasant and relaxed day with Don, shadowing his movements, between doing some errands, picking up the kids and taking them home, meeting some of the local folks, kicking a soccer ball back and forth with his son, preparing lunch with Bridget and him, etc. Just pleasant, no-pressure existing in the way they have come to exist in Chile. It was a wonderful day.

But on this day, we were going on a bus ride. It’s kind of amazing when you ride the bus from Los Andes, Chile, out toward the sea – at one point, I remarked to Don that the mountains of yellow earth and stone were much less sparsely covered in brush; it seemed occasionally that you couldn’t even quite see the earth between the bushes, which is saying something around here. “Yeah,” said Don, “as you get closer to the sea, you get a lot more of the mist and fog, which carries a lot of moistu—“ At almost this precise instant, we drove into a wall of mist and fog, which carried a lot of moisture. It was an amazing bit of timing. I also noticed, with the help of Don, who might have pointed it out, not sure, that there were trees planted high up the steep, steep sides of these conical mini-mountains – much too high to have been watered with the canals and acequias. Don was curious about them, too – How could they water them? Did they pump it up that high? Seems like an enormous amount of energy to have to burn. But as we thought about it and talked about it, we noticed concrete structures ascending the slopes in straight lines in some places, and then suddenly a giant pipe that just shot straight up the mountain to one side of a planted slope. So, yes: They pump it up there.

I’ve said it before, but the fertility and production of this country are just mind-boggling. Every flat piece of ground is under cultivation, it seems – and not in the desperate sort of way you see in a starving country or in a country where people have no land rights. It’s incredibly orderly. Planned structures everywhere you look – Don told me the other day that you’ll see flat, irrigated, broad pieces of agricultural land, with a “For Sale” sign on them, and when you look up the asking price online, you’ll find that owning that parcela, as they’re called here, will set you back $250,000, or $500,000, or $1,000,000, depending on the size.

Them ain’t pesos, folks.

It’s just ridiculous, the amount of production they can get out of these fields. Think about it: No deep freezes ever, and irrigation. They’ll get triple, quite literally, the amount of any given crop as you will in the US, simply because they can plant, and harvest, and plant, and harvest, and plant, all in one year.

The towns are all dependent on the work that comes from agriculture. You see gangs of workers, often in uniforms!, pruning grape vines, putting metal strips around the bases of peach trees, tying back branches on apple trees, harvesting avocados, etc. Not to mention all the tractors you see pulling implements, and implement dealers…In this region, nothing stirs the economic pot like agriculture.

Except mining. But I don’t see that, because there’s only one local mine (I still don’t know what they mine there), and it’s a busride away. Most of the workers at that mine take the company bus to and from work, and many apparently used to live in company-built housing. One of Don and Bridget’s friends, Guatón (Chileans often go more by nicknames than their regular names; “la guata is “belly” in Chilean, and Guatón’s got a good one going), lives in a house he bought in one of the old mining neighborhoods in Los Andes, the big town we were in to catch the bus. Many other houses depend on mining, as their husbands or sons are of in “el norte” doing something in the mining industry. Wenceslao and Lucy’s son Rodrigo is a surveyor at a mine in the North, and Don says that he makes as much in a year as Don does back in the US. It’s good money, even if it’s bad for Chile’s environment.

But it would be difficult to know that from what one sees on a daily basis around here. And it is easy to see the economic effects on this society. Order, order, order, everywhere you look – pristine sidewalks, road construction, low crime, thriving businesses open everywhere there’s a window to be rented out.

So we hurtled down the mountain into Viña del Mar, which comes upon you somewhat suddenly, just like in “Motorcycle Diaries” – one minute, you’re on the edges of a city, and another, you’re descending into the port, with the sea glistening at you on the horizon.

Viña, our first stop, is the playground of Chile’s wealthy. There are expensive apartment houses everywhere, towering ever higher to get a decent view of the sea. Swanky shops on every street, fashionable ladies and gents wearing expensive watches and sunglasses – Viña is one of those places that make me nervous even to be in. We de-bussed and walked to the beach, where we paid $300 (them’s pesos, folks – about 75 cents) to use the bathroom, and then walked over to a working clock, twenty feet across, set at an angle in a hillside, made of flowers. (It was difficult to resist the temptation to ask the two men working on the flower beds there if they knew what time it was.) Don nodded at the clock. “The guidebook says Viña has the beach, and this clock,” he said. “We’ve done Viña.” So we hopped a bus, and zoomed down the coast into Valparaíso.

We got off at a fairly central-looking plaza, and walked away from the sea, looking to ascend Calle Bella Vista (“Pretty View Street”), at the top of which we would find Pablo Neruda’s house. We marched upward, and I started firing the camera in all directions.

The hills ascend so quickly form the seaside in Valparaíso that you don’t know how they stay up there. Houses are stair-stepped up the sides of them in precarious, gorgeous fashion, and the streets wind and wind along making for pleasant, if cardiac-ally challenging, walking. Partway up the hill, we passed an open workshop door, where a carpenter stood working on a chair.

I just had to stop and look in. It was like a little cave in there, with a few lightbulbs poking out of the wooden ceiling, and it was clear that decade after decade of semi-disorderly work had been going on there. The carpenter himself was probably 70 years old, scraping away at the dog-chewed leg of a chair. (Don greeted him and asked what he was working on, which is how we knew that this had been the problem.) 

I then noticed some hand-carved items on the side – portraits in relief of Salvador Allende, of idealized and general Indians, of an indigenous folk hero who had resisted the Spanish in the south of Chile. Another was a reproduction of the Chilean coat of arms – There were a number of them, all on shelves, all dusty. I asked if he’d made them, and he said he had – whenever he had a free few minutes during his day, he’d grab one and work on it. He couldn’t say, therefore, how long any of them had taken.

Don picked one up and handed it to me. It was a tiny bust, carved in pine, about 5” high, of Salvador Allende.

“Would you sell something like this?”, I asked.

“Of course,” he said.

“How much would you want”

He shrugged. “Ocho lucas”, he said. Eight thousand pesos – about $15.

“Trato hecho,” I said. Done deal. I wasn’t haggling over art.

He let me take his picture with it, and I walked away with my favorite keepsake from this trip. Once we were at the top of the hill, Don said he wanted to take a picture of me with him; I generally hate appearing in photos, but I admitted that I probably should have done that. And that I should have asked his name & written it down in my notebook. We resolved to do both on the way back down.

At the top, we quickly found the house, and it’s utterly gorgeous inside. Mostly because of the views – there are five floors, and every one of them has at least one large window that overlooks the harbor. We got some of those phone-like museum guides, which talked us through the whole place. I won’t go into too much detail – You should go. It’s worth it.

Here it is:

Down the hill again, after purchasing some lunchables, where we found the carpenter’s workshop was closed up for lunch. Dang. We walked to a park and sat and had lunch, and were so doing when a political protest marched past, with a big banner and a police escort. (The street dogs don’t like cops, I’ll tell you that much. They harassed the motorcycle carabineros from the beginning of that march to the end.) Apparently, Chile is going to grant more fishing - licenses…? Rights…? – to the large-scale fishermen, and the small operators are upset about it. Snapped some pictures, and then Don and I walked along trying to find a “fanicular” – the diagonal uphill train / elevators Valparaíso is famous for.

Found one. Rode it. Kind of neat. That’s about it.

They are an interesting artifact, I’ll give them that – a big ski-lift-style wheel that rolls one up as it rolls another one down, an ancient-looking entryway on the downhill end that sneaks in between two old buildings. Cool. But hardly earth-shattering.

We walked to the harbor, and then headed to the bus station. I’m very glad to have seen it, but as you can tell, there’s not all that much to tell. We were back in town again by about 5:30.

The more memorable stuff, for me, happened back there at Don and Bridget’s – well Wenceslao and Lucy’s. We (D and B, the kids, and I) went to their friend Flaco’s house for dinner the night before, and talked about everything around his big outdoor picnic table, and then, when it got dark, their indoor kitchen table. The supper, by the way, was fantastic – it was really “las onces”, with things to pick at as much as one wanted, and no big-ticket items. I had what they called “kuchen”, sweet fruit-covered pastries; empanadas de queso (cheese empanadas), which are what Chileans really point to as their typical finger food; and pan amasado, the local brad that comes in six-or-seven-inch disks, about three-quarters of an inch thick. It is fantastic stuff, and Flaco’s wife Miriam had made it in her wood-fired oven. They have access to electricity and gas, but prefer to keep making bread with wood. It comes out fantastic, let me say, particularly when spread over with pebre. It’s a sometimes gooey mix of tomatoes, onions, and chilis, and it is just delicious. They also love peach juice here, and there are two bottles of it on the table in the various pictures.

This is pan amasado, up close:

(Flaco, by the way, should be Rowan Atkinson's stunt double.)

Flaco's son Rodrigo shares some yuks with Don.

It was a very fun conversation that ranged all over the place, from homophobia to racism in Europe (Flaco and Miriam’s son, Gerard, and his wife, Luz, had lived in Spain, and were regularly the objects of nasty comments and looks from people in the street), and Chile vs Uruguay.

 Which will be the subject of my next post...

Chile Gets Warmer

I am having such a nice time.

Don and Bridget have really built themselves a joyful, wonderful nest of warmth and kindness all around them here. It’s hard to remember all the specifics of the people and the places I’ve been with them in this little comarca since I arrived, so I’ll try to talk in generalities:

Don and Bridget and the kids take me to the home of one of their friends in the area for a meal, and invariably I wind up having a smile on my face the entire time, a drink in my hand most of the time, warm food in front of me, laughter bubbling out of me, and conversation churning around me while we play cards or learn to make pizza in an old steel barrel. They have so many friends here who remember them from their days as volunteers, and who clearly adore and appreciate them – and it’s absolutely mutual: D & B know these folks inside and out, and can tell you all their many exceptional qualities in detail and from very specific memory. I have to say, I am very envious of the depth and sincerity of the relationships they’ve forged with these folks over the years. They have second homes all over this little valley – it seems they could fall with eyes close through just about any doorway in any direction and have a decent chance of  being caught in the embrace of an old friend.

Today: Up at the crack of 7:45 and out to a breakfast of oatmeal, prepared by Don (why don’t I eat oatmeal more?), a quick hello to Bridget when she returned from taking the kids to school, and then Don and I were out the door to go hiking in the hills.

We walked to the top of a local hill and took in the gorgeousness. The best way to describe this place is as a desert of crumbly hills that miraculously never fall down on the broad, flat valley beneath. Brilliant white peaks all around send endless rivers of snowmelt toward the sea – but the clever residents have guided them instead to the desert soil and made it blossom into an almost obscenely productive series of orchards and fields, embarrassing in their bounty. Tree-lined canals rush through between the fields with water that’s too clean to be brown, but too busy to be clear. Quietly prosperous but humble homes dot the sides of well-maintained roads, where every bus driver grins at Don and waves as they whip past us. It’s brilliantly sunny and warm in the daytime, and downright bone-chilling once the sunshine slips past you and you’re in the shadows.

Back to the house, where we lunched with Bridget and the kids; then Don took me on a short walk down the lane where Wenceslao and Lucy live, to meet Lucy’s parents, the original grantees of this land-reform parcel that’s now been subdivided into four or five neat little homes replete with avocado, walnut, and apple orchards. We didn’t have much luck meeting people, as only the matriarch, Doña Olivia, was home (watching a very racy telenovela, which she was quick to turn off when we came in). And then we were off for a 4:30 meet-up at the home of Gladys, another of their friends whose husband, like many in the area, is off working in the north, where the mines are. She had us over to make us pisko sours and feed us “las onces”.

“Las onces” are what you have in the late afternoon before the VERY late supper that a lot of people eat around these parts (Uruguay was the same) – though I think often las onces are enough, and people never get around to eating supper. Gladys lives in a lovely ramshackle house overlooking the valley from a slight rise, and her door is always open, figuratively – at least 15 people came in and stayed for some length of time while we were there – and literally: she can never seem to keep her new puppy, or the cold night air, outside. People stream into her house because she’s constantly laying plates of eg-and-potato tortas and freshly fired cheese empanadas in front of them, and re-filling your glass of pisko sour. A drink, by the way, that I find divine. Which is why I should probably not drink it any more.

The plan for the evening was to teach Don and me how to play “brisca”, a Chilean card game which is remarkably similar to euchre. There’s trump (called “triunfo”, or “triumph”, which is, of COURSE!, I say, smacking myself in the head, where “trump” comes from); odd, counterintuitive cards are the most powerful in a suit; aces are high, and you play tricks (“jugadas”) – nine in a series, as you start off with nine cards. Final scoring is done by adding the incidental ten-spots one wins over the course of the game into your final total, arrived at by assigning ten points to all the aces (ases) and threes you have in your pile of won tricks at the end. If the score is close, you then also count your monos (face cards): a 10 is worth 2, an 11 is worth 3, and a 12 is worth 4. And I think you also count the aces and threes in there, each worth a point.

We played many a round, with several men, among them Gladys' son - a man of about 24 who's married and has a child, both of whom live there in the house with him and his mother. He has a rock-and-roll haircut, a slow and confident demeanor, and a deep, subtly commanding voice that seems to come out of the hollow of an oak tree that he apparently keeps hidden in his chest. Another player was a big, round fellow who couldn't stop telling Don and me the most basic elements of the game over and over. God bless him, he was trying to help us, but after a while we had to reassure him that we knew it was our turn, that we knew we had to distribute nine cards to each, etc. Friendliest guy around. The third main player - there are four, but people switched in and out as bathroom requirements dictated - was a big, powerful fellow with some missing teeth that you just knew had a fantastic story behind them. He was there with his wife and kids, and kept answering his phone during the game, which nobody minded at all. He was the cleverest player, and insisted on getting me to adopt his way of holding his cards, which involves the standard fan arrangement up top, but then a column of cards that descends the length of one's palm and is held in place with the thumb.

I adopted it, somewhat grudgingly, and was then convinced that this is a far better way to do it.

I hope to have all these rules much more perfectly in my head before I go back, because brisca has taken over for la conga as my favorite Latin American card game.

Sorry, Natalia. Sidewalks and cards: Now there are two areas where Chile distinctly has Uruguay beat.

Happy Landings

So. Chile!

The flight left when they said it would – actually, a little before! – and I got to snooze a bit, which was good, and woke up just in time to see the slow approach and appreciate the view of the crossing of the mighty Andes. Aconcagua, as I think it’s called, the highest mountain in the Andes, was to the right of the plane; my view was out the left side. But I am not complaining. It was really fun to watch the landscape roll past – snow-swept, jagged peaks (not, I think importantly, snow-covered), barren valleys between…It was amazing how the towns just, plain, stopped at the feet of the Andes. A clear, easy-to-read line. “Above here, there’s just no way.”

About three minutes of unpleasantness in the middle of the range – as the pilot assured us in a perfectly calm voice when it was all over, “Just a bit of turbulence; quite normal over the Andes in the winter. Happens every time, almost – sorry about that.” But before that? Those were some harrowing moments. First time I’ve been on an airplane, I think, and heard people out-and-out scream. Rough, rough going there. Nobody hit the ceiling, which I understand does occasionally happen on trips that people survive. But I will have no more of that, thank you very much.

Landed in Chile and made it through customs, and found Don and his friend Juan Pablo on the other side. Juan Pablo is the 22-year-old grandson of a man who received his land in the land reform that was initiated by Salvador Allende, and then continued, surprisingly, by Pinochet after the coup. He’s split the land now among his sons, and they all live along the same road, each working a slice of the land, which is irrigated by an acequia, an eighteen-inch-wide, almost-perfectly maintained channel that burbles along happily behind the row of houses.

But before we got there, we drove a bit over an hour, out of Santiago (the portion I saw rivals Montevideo in quality of roads and cleanliness of aspect), through a two-kilometer-long tunnel, and into the valley where Don and Bridget have been living with Juan Pablo and his family.

The countryside, I should say, is lush and green compared to Uruguay this time of year. They pretty much don’t get rain except for the winter, which is now; when there’s so little, and the rivers, fed by the snow in the Andes, are so dependable, you learn to irrigate, and once you’ve done that, you can plant and harvest year-round. I passed so many acres of grape plantations – and learned that table grapes are planted in a roof-like pattern, with the stems running up posts and then along lattices that overhang the whole field. Wine grapes, whose form and flesh are less important to their final state, grow along horizontal, fence-like wires.

There was no doubt that I was back in the Andes. Just something about everything, practically – the steep, crumbly mountains all around that manage somehow not to come sliding down, despite their sparse vegetation; the frequency and stony quality of the little rivers one crosses…Any number of things – the smell in the air, somehow.

Our first stop was a town – I forget its name – where they were doing a procesión with their local church’s statue of Mary. She left the church and went to the top of a hill, where I think there’s a cross (we didn’t go up; Don, who lived in this town as a volunteer years ago, was being all but mobbed by people he’d not seen in a while, and our mobility was limited). 

Mary was being carried on a litter by about eight local men, dressed to the nines, all venerable gray-haired sorts, and accompanied by “bailes chinos” – Chinese dances. These were two columns of men (and women, which surprised me) dressed in red satin shirts with cris-crossing ribbons of different colors across their chests, and crown-like head dresses; some of them beat drums, and some of them played on wheezing, strangely-pitched wooden flutes. They would alternate: those whose pipes were of one particular note would blow first, and then those carrying pipes whose pitch was just different enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck and make you feel instant angst. 

Don had never heard such a thing before (these dances had fallen out of common practice when he’d lived here), and remarked on how disquieting the combination of notes was; I was reminded of a lot of old, old Andean music I’d heard, with a much more pentatonic scale to it than Western music, and with occasional arrangements where it seemed the music was meant to send shivers down your spine and nothing else. It fits with the aesthetic I’ve seen in Ecuador in person, and from Peru and Bolivia second-hand: A joyful, even euphoric sadness. Happy, happy tunes about suicide and disappeared lovers, or wailing dirges like this one, meant to accompany the Virgin Mary on her happy rounds.

And speaking of Indigenous folks: This is my first time in Chile, and I didn’t spend any time in the airport. But I did notice, even on the plane, that your average Chilean seemed to have a different facial make-up from your average Uruguayan. More broad in the cheekbones, darker of hair, finer, if broader and perhaps shorter, in build. And when I arrived at Don’s town and got out of the car, and started to move in a large crowd of locals, it was confirmed for me: If your “average” Uruguayan (there’s really no such thing, but as an academic exercise, you know what I mean) is likely to have 8 or 9% Indian features reflected in their face, then the average Chilean, among those living out where we are, at least, has about 50% Indian features. Some more, some less, but almost none have no Indian features to them – whereas I could have snapped a photo of the crowded streets of Montevideo and had a good chance of being able to convince you it was taken in Italy.

Bridget found me in the crowd and gave me a hug, and I greeted their daughter, who’s 8, and their son, who’s 6 – and who, in contrast to when I last saw them, addressed me in confident, fluid Spanish. It was wonderful to see. She was kind of on her own, moving in and out of the crowd, watching the proceedings, but their son was all but handcuffed to a buddy from the school he goes to. He’d found a piece of bamboo or sugarcane and was aiming it at everything he could see, sprinting from one stop of the Virgin to the next, while his pal waved a thorn-covered stick. They looked like they were having a great time.

We had cake and hot chocolate at the church after the procession ended, and then hitched a ride back to where Don and Bridget are staying with a local, who took pity on them because their son was complaining of a stomach ache. And here I met up with Juan Pablo again, who’d given up his room for me for the length of my stay, and his mother, Lucy, and father, Wenceslao, my real hosts. We had very nice conversation and a dinner of soup and pork, and then watched the Olympics and the news while chatting until bed time.

It’s cold here at night. I can’t say “colder than Uruguay”, because I never spent a night in Uruguay in an unheated building, unlike many of my colleagues. But looking at my bed, next to me here, I count a down comforter, a sheet, and five, count ‘em, FIVE woolen blankets. So I was fine.

And now Don is out talking on Skype to the apprentice farmer who’s watching the place for him while he’s here, and the day of relaxed visiting awaits. I am ready for it.

AND: I had thought, for about 24 hours, that I’d lost my camera. Then, I found it, packed away in my checked suitcase. I still can’t think why I would have put it there, but apparently, I did. Menos mal – Going home without it, head hanging, and walking into the kitchen to face Janneke and her rolling pin…? Not something I was looking forward to.

A side note: All the engineers involved in constructing sidewalks in Uruguay need to take in some workshops in Chile. These are some damn fine sidewalks: Thick, burly, impervious, and yet still covered over in that attractive and kind-to-the-foot tiling. Larger, red, more attractive tiling. But good, solid, flat sidewalks. If sidewalks are a measure of human development, then Chile is kicking Uruguay's heinie.

(All photos, by the way, complements of Bridgett, who was kind enough to give me copies of her pics from the procession!)

"Sorry, master. I forgot that you don't like flying."

So, when I came to Uruguay, I looked at my itinerary in the email I'd gotten from American Councils, went to the airport, found the correct flight on the monitors, walked to the counter, presented my ID, and was checked in. This is the way it's usually worked for me.

I did the same yesterday. The rest of the program participants and I took a bus provided by the Fulbright commission - their flight was at 9:00, mine at 9:55. The went straight to American; I looked at the monitors.

There was no flight leaving for Chile at 9:55.

I let the first cold flash of panic go past, collected myself and walked to LanChile's counter, figuring it must have been with them, since none of the flights to Santiago out of Montevideo were with any other airline. But there was no one at the counter there. So I picked up the information phone, as an airport worker suggested.

"Carrasco international airport, buenas tardes?", said a deep voice.

I asked him what I needed to do to talk to someone, anyone, with LAN Chile, or anybody else who would know on which non-mythical flight I had been booked, and was told (a) that only LAN Chile would know that, and (b) that there was no way to talk to anyone at Lan Chile because they were all off boarding people onto the flight to Santiago.

I said that since I was booked to go to Santiago today, there must have been SOME kind of re-schedule or change, and it was quite likely that they were wondering where I was for the flight that was going to leave in 20 minutes. Ergo, it was also in their interest to talk to me, as they might be looking for me. Wasn't there anyone I could talk to?

No, they said; we can't communicate with the gates.

This seems very difficult to believe.

At any rate, I asked if they could connect me to LAN's corporate office or "800" number (I didn't use those numbers, as I doubt they're the same in Spanish). The deep-voiced man spent a few minutes trying to find one. Finally, he gave me a number - but it looked just like the phone numbers of the Uruguayans I had had the chance to call while in the country. "This sounds like a Uruguayan number," I said. "It is," he told me. "It's the LAN desk at the airport." I looked at the LAN desk at the airport, which was fifty feet away. "That's where I am right now, and there's nobody there. Besides which, you just TOLD me there was nobody there. Why would you want me to call them there?"

He also seemed vexed by this question. "You should go to the information desk, then," he said. "They will know the number for LAN's offices in Chile. I don't have access to it."

I thanked him, for some reason, and hung up, then dragged my bags down the escalator to the white "Informaciones" kiosk. Walked up, explained that I needed to talk to someone at LAN Chile, at their main offices, not here at the airport, and that it was kind of urgent. They nodded knowingly, punched a number, and said "Good evening, a passenger has a question for you." Then they handed me the phone.

"Carrasco international airport, buenas tardes?", said a deep voice.

Much to my credit, I did not at that point whip out my light saber and lop off every head within reach. Rather, I marched upstairs to the American desk, waited in line, and then asked them my question. After all, the original flight had been the same one all my 11 co-program folks (who had not left the country already for various reasons and by various means) were about to get on. They must have a record of my changes.

They did. They said that LAN Chile had not changed anything. Rather, Pluna, the Uruguayan airline, had been the original carrier.

And some time between when the reservation was made, and the present moment, it seems, Pluna had gone bankrupt. My flight did not exist because the airline did not exist.

Luckily, security cameras caught my reaction.

Shockingly, no one gave a quick start and then fell into two smoking, vertically split halves. Rather, they looked embarrassed and sympathetic (but not too sympathetic), while their minds whirled around the question of how this could be my fault and not theirs.

The best theory they could come up with was that the itinerary I referred to for my "flight" from Montevideo to Santiago had never been changed, by some sort of clearly crucial alchemy, from an itinerary, into a ticket. "What about the other flights? On August 10th, from Santiago to Miami, and from Miami to New York?"

"Oh, I see those. Those are fine," she said. "Those were changed to tickets. But this one wasn't."

"Who should have done that, and when?", I asked.

"The person who made the reservation," she said.

"Who changed the other two flights?"

"I assume it was that same person."

"Why on Earth would that person do that for the other two, and not for the first one?"

"You would have to ask them."

I smiled, and waved my extended index and middle figures languidly before her eyes. "Doesn't it seem more likely," I said, in a hypnotic tone, "since Pluna has disappeared, that no one informed anyone that that crucial first flight had gone extinct? Because clearly, had I, or the people who set up the flight for me, heard anything, we would have changed it. Doesn't that seem a little more plausible?"

No effect.

"But, sir," she said, "that would mean that this whole catastrophe would be our fault. Therefore, it cannot be so."

No, no: She did not say that. She shrugged, and began the process, at my request, of booking me on a LAN Chile flight for 11:50 the next morning.

I assisted in this process by not cutting off her air supply with my mind.

$535 later, Gabi Prieto, one of the hosts associated with us motley Americans, who had hung around specifically in order to do just this thing for me, drove me in her car back to the Cala di Volpe. The other Gabi, another Uruguayan host, had called Patricia, from the Fulbright commission, to tell her what had happened, and Patricia had booked me back at the hotel, which suddenly seemed a lot less heavenly.

So THEN, the next morning, Natalia Ximeno, my own host, and her wonderful mom and dad, picked me up at the Cala di Volpe in their beloved old Volkswagen and drove me to the airport. Hugs and well wishes, and I checked in and made my way to the gate.

Where it became fully, horribly clear that the entire airport was - get this - fogged in.

So here I sit. My flight should have taken off an hour and a half ago, but the plane it was supposed to have taken place in hasn't even arrived from Chile. They announced a while ago that it had left Santiago, and was scheduled to arrive here at 1:00 PM; following off-loading of passengers, cleaning, re-fueling, and luggage loading, we are going to take off at 1:55 PM.

The optimism of the above scenario is utterly adorable. Because I know what's going to happen: The flight from Santiago is going to get about halfway here, and they're going to get a message on their radio saying, "Fellas, we're still fogged in." And they're going to land in Asunción to wait out the fog in Montevideo.

I half-close my eyes, and I see...A chihuahua there is, in a pink overcoat. And a scarcity of electric outlets. But sure, I cannot be. Always in motion, the future is...

Gems and Chuckles on the Final Thursday

So, Thursday, the paro, for Natalia, actually happened. It was called for by the national union of teachers to protest the conditions in which they work, and the entire body of high school teachers was supposed to take part.

Or so they told Natalia. Other sources have told me that it was supposed to be elementary school teachers, and that they had suspended the paro because the forecast called for rain in Montevideo, meaning they wouldn't get a good turnout for their protest, and they would rather do it the following Thursday.

In any event, Natalia went with what was said to her, and didn't go to work on Thursday. Meaning she and I had the day to wander Montevideo in a leisurely fashion. I've decided that paros are the Uruguayan equivalent of snow days - they come on sometimes, unexpectedly, and allow you to miss a day of work. Only you get docked a day's pay. But Natalia played along and was a good soldier, and around 10:30 AM she came by the lobby of the Hotel Oxford and picked me up.

While waiting there, I snapped a picture of this painting that hangs in the lobby:

It reminded me of the art you would see in Ecuador for sale at the park, at El ejido. It seems to be in tremendously bad taste, and is poorly executed, and generally has this creepy air about it that you can't quite put your finger on. I wanted to remember it always.

We then went to the old town, where I went into a bookstore called "Más puro verso". It's a new outlet for the bookstore "Puro verso", which is near where our hotel was, and is a fascinating architectural space. This one didn't disappoint, either:

We wandered on, and passed in front of the register of deeds or some such in Montevideo, where people get legally married, and are pelted with rice as they emerge:

Couple after couple, with a shifting crowd of well-dressed (or, in the case of one young couple, absolutely not well-dressed) well-wishers. I was struck because of the non-religious nature of it. I don't know if these people then go on to have a church wedding somewhere else, but they were stopping for photographers, kissing long and hard for the cameras, grinning ear to ear...It seemed like this was the main event. Natalia didn't have much to say on the subject - but from what she's told me, and her family, this is not nearly as devoutly religious a country as others I've been to in Latin America.

I took this picture to show the idea of turnos. This schedule shows the classes at an art institute on the same street as the register of deeds, where there are two shifts of students. I mean, this is at the post-secondary level, and they still have turnos! The advantage, I suppose, is that you can have double the number of students go through the same facility, using the space and the equipment twice. The disadvantage is that it's an awful way to treat your faculty, making them do everything twice, at widely spaced hours of the day. Saves money, but makes for a lot of wear and tear on the people you rely on to make the whole place work.

On we wandered, to our eventual lunch spot - the same place we had ñoquis the other day. Here's the front door:

Just as we were pondering whether to go in, a man came up, started to reach for the door, and stopped. He looked puzzled, then looked at us. "Isn't it open?", he asked (in Spanish). "No, it is," we said. "Why do you think it isn't?" He pointed at the sign, quoting it: "'No aceptamos visitas'," he said. "We don't accept visits."

We pointed out his mistake. He leaned in for a closer look, and then broke into a hearty belly laugh. I thought that was pretty hilarious.

The back entrance to the Punta Carretas mall, which stands on the grounds of the prison where President Mujica was held as a political prisoner back in the day. Just can't get enough of that particular fact. And here's a fusca, just to complete the last post I'll make involving Mujica:

I took this photo to show the usual placement of mannequins in shop doors in malls in Uruguay:

And this one to show the typical color palette in the styles worn by Uruguayan women. They are a tasteful, subdued bunch:

Tours, Teaching, Tripping Down the Sidewalk

So I had a good, solid 8 hours of sleep last night, and I’ve still been yawning all day long. Its been a somewhat furious whirlwind of experience here in Uruguay, and it seems I’ll need more than a good night’s seep to recover. And today was more of the same – a snappy pace, and lots to see. Beginning with the morning, where I breakfasted with Pam, one of the other Fulbrighters who are in the hotel with me. I hadn’t seen her in days, though – typically we start early and end late, and if we see each other, it’s a bit of a miracle. But it was nice to chat and compare impressions and share thoughts on how it’s been so far.

Off at 8:00 to get to the liceo by 9:00 for Natalia’s 9:05 class, one which had aready seen the presentation. On the way out, I noticed this sign, where they take advantage of the "@" to write both "-o" and "-a" on the end of "compañero/a":

I observed her class and took a lot of notes. A good, focused group, they worked quite hard for the 45 minutes they were there. And then Natalia turned me over to a colleague of hers, so I could go and talk to her two groups as well.

Both these first groups had questions for me, so the 45-minute period was pretty much just question-and-answer. I never did my Power Point “This…is Massachusetts!” show-and-tell. The first group, a small class, were essentially what we would call juniors: they were in the 5^th year of the liceo (there are six) and had chosen the “Artistic” career path for their last couple of years. If I can recall correctly now, there’s an “engineering” career path, a “medicine” one, a “humanistic / philosophy” one, and the artistic one. If you want to be doctor, clearly, you opt for the medicine one;, which focuses on biology and anatomy; an engineer, obviously, engineering, which is heavy with math and physics. Humanistic is for future teachers and lawyers. And “artistic”? As the teacher told me, these are kids who didn’t like math. Or science. Or reading. And they were all pretty P.O.’d that this hadn’t turned out to be a cake walk.

See, that's the PowerPoint I never showed them.

They were good, but the quality of their questions wasn’t the best. Still, they tried. And one of them had made some traditional treats for me to try, and to share with the whole class. They were called trufas – little balls of chocolate, sugar, dulce de leche, and crushed up cookie, and salchichón, similar, but in the form of a rolled-out log that looked for all the world like a sausage. I took photos and thanked them, and then was off to the second of her groups.

Trufas

Salchichón

This one, she warned me, was unfocused and badly behaved. I breathed deeply and walked in, ready for anything.

They were the best group I’ve seen so far. All they did was ask me questions – Question after question after question, most of them excellent and probing. We got into a discussion about why I don’t like Luis Suárez, and they do; about the legalization of marijuana, a topic of great discussion here lately, as the government has proposed doing it; the merits of soccer and American football, what I like about Uruguayan schools (respectful students, the separation of sports from school completely, dedicated teachers, equality across the entire country), what I thought of the Uruguayan people (confident, proud, organized, honest, up-standing) – It was just a great talk. Their English level was fine, but their level of interest and enthusiasm were through the roof. They applauded me fiercely, and I them, and then the all piled up to the front to take a picture with me, which I had not invited them to do (I haven’t with any group; I probably should, but I just hate photos of me). And then they wouldn’t let me go – they peppered me with more questions once I said I’d answer them in Spanish.

They also told me I had a Cuban accent, which a lot of people here have told me. They guess either Central American or Cuban. I guess “Fresa y chocolate”, “El brigadista”, any number of Silvio Rodríguez interviews and songs I’ve listened to, and “Balseros” are rubbing off on me. Not to mention “Che”, which I just re-watched.

From there, to the very last group of Natalia’s students to see me present. And I have to say, these guys were kind of the polar opposite. Two in particular sat right up front, and had a running commentary in Spanish that they kept up over the top of my English. I got a bit peeved and told them that I couldn’t hear myself talk, let alone everyone else, if they kept up like this, but it got no reaction. And the rest of the group was a bit surly, too. It’s so funny how the effect of one or two strong personalities can turn the whole chemistry of a class for the good, or for ill; how that can then become the permanent ethos of a group of students, without anyone ever voting on it or deciding that it should be that way. It’s a funny sort of alchemy that we do, teachers, with wildly volatile materials. Neither we nor anybody else knows how it’s all going to come out in the end.

Natalia and I then bought some quick lunchables, and hit the buses again, to the western outskirts of Montevideo, where we took a 45-minute guided tour of the plant where El país, the national daily, is printed. The tour is a mainstay of school groups – our tour group consisted of Natalia, me, about 22 fifth-or-so graders, and their teachers. It was informative and fun, and a gaggle of 10-year-olds in their túnicas is about as cute as it gets. (Baby donkeys notwithstanding.) If they had still been wearing moños (the little blue bows that very young school kids wear), I’d probably have blown a vein somewhere from all the cuteness.

Back on the buses to IECO, Natalia’s English institute, where I waited and relaxed and organized myself (and wrote much of this) until about 5:00, when I walked back over to the liceo. I was to meet up with Sandra, one of Natalia’s colleagues, and present my spiel to her groups of English students.

Random observations about Uruguay and Uruguayans:

They prefer buttons to levers on their toilets.

Women tend toward being tall; men, not so much.

Many random-breed mutts are adored, pampered, dressed in winter coats, led about on leashes, taught tricks, fed bits of hot dog. Lots of breed dogs too, but I would not say a Uruguayan is more likely to own a pampered breed dog than a pampered mutt. I like this a lot.

The breed dogs you DO see here are often golden retrievers, Rottweilers, and German shepherds. Though I saw a gorgeous English bulldog today, and I have seen a beautiful (and healthy in its breeding) Bassett hound.

They do not throw trash out their car or bus windows.

They do not cut in lines.

They do not haggle, except at open-air markets.

They are hard-working and honest. If the store says it opens at 9:00, it will open at 9:00. And if Natalia’s any indication, 12- or 14-hour workdays frighten them not at all.

If they smile at you or treat you warmly, you can be 100% sure it’s sincere. When they don’t feel like doing so, they don’t. They appear to fake nothing.

It is a very, very rare Uruguayan who does not look you in the eye for the entirety of a conversation. More, in fact, than I look them in the eye. They are a tremendously confident people. Even a woman who came up to me in the street and asked me for money, looked me straight in the eye and never seemed ashamed. Annoyed that she had to do this, sure. But there was no shame or self-debasement in her demeanor.

Vanishingly small numbers of them do such things as ask strangers for money.

The ideal of equality for all Uruguayans is something they live and breathe every day. I have yet to come across someone (and discuss it) who doesn’t feel that equality in fact, not in theory, even at the price of individual opportunity, is the #1 goal of the society.

They do not argue about whether this or that departamento is better. Soccer team? You bet. But not departamentos (their equivalent to states or provinces). They have no governments, after all, those departamentos. Very much on purpose – Uruguay’s political structure is designed to be unified, and difficult to split asunder.

Every horse you see – certainly in the country, but even in the city, the ones that belong to the hurgadores – is well cared-for. The hurgadores’ horses are lean, sure; they work all day. But they are not the drawn, often skeletal, wormy sad-sacks I’m used to seeing in Ecuador. No sores, no lameness. And they are not beaten or whipped. Well-trained, even beloved animals.

(Puerto Rican horses were also beautifully cared for.)

In many of these, Uruguayans are like Puerto Ricans. I see many similarities between the two all the time, though it might seem a bit surprising. I certainly didn’t expect to see this level of affinity. 

 Here are some other somewhat random photos from the day:

Political graffiti. Not sure what it's about.

So, this neighborhood is called "Cerro", or "hill", after the big hill it surrounds. And "cerro" has two "r"s. Now, "cero", the number (zero), has one "r". And the show, Hawaii Five-Oh, was apparently translated as "Hawaii Cinco Cero". And now this person in the neighborhood called "Cerro" has named his or her store "Hawaii Cinco Cerro", because "cerro" and "cero" are similar, making for a play on words that is humorous.

You may laugh now.

They make sidewalks here out of this stuff:

Concrete squares that are set into a bed of wet concrete. They look like this close up:

They have a nice sort of corruated look that is good for drainage and traction, and is attractive. Not to mention therapeutic to walk on. Thing is, though, those squares are only about three-quarters of an inch thick. So they crack pretty easily. Somebody drops a bowling ball...

...and then, after a few weeks, it looks like this...

...and then like this...

...and then like this...

...and then like this.

You can see the bare ground - what little wet concrete went under the tiles, came up with them, and it's just earth now. The layer of concrete could never have been more than two or three inches at its deepest. Tree roots snap this stuff like it's dry spaghetti. It looks great when it goes in, but in some places where they haven't repaired the sidewalks in a couple of years, it's as if they'd never put them in at all. And yet all the brand-new sidewalks are still being made with this stuff. I don't get it. Pour more concrete once, I would say, and be done with it. Don't bother with the lego-style Brittle Brix layer over the top.

But no one asked me.