Annalisa en Panamá

USACH In both Panama and also Chile, abbreviations include more than just the first letter of each word, making the abbreviation more pronounceable.  In Panama, I'd spent a week at the Universidad de Chiriquí, called UNACHI; here in Chile, I kicked off my talks at the Universidad de Santiago, Chile, called USACH. In the fortunately/unfortunately genre . . . unfortunately , the department secretary there forgot to send out an announcement about my visit: fortunately , the chair figured out (the day before I arrived, at 10 p.m.) that it needed to get sent out; unfortunately , only 6 people showed up for the talk; fortunately , that gave me a chance to fix the mistakes in Spanish in my slides before I showed it to lots more people.   One delightful thing I discovered at USACH was that their wifi is "eduroam", the same system my home college uses, and so I had zero difficulty logging in.  That was a delightful surprise, as I haven't discovered eduroam anywhere in Panama....

In some place on the beaches near me in Viña del Mar, Chile, you can see these tiny creatures about the size of a thumbnail scurrying through water and then tunneling down under the sand.  In English, they are sand fleas . In Spanish, they're pulgas del mar . Not to be confused with pulgares (thumbs) or pulgados (inches), although given the size and shape, you can see why those words are similar.   They don't chase people; they scurry down river or down into the sand. Rivers flowing through the beaches here have beautiful, tiger-like patterns formed by two colors of sand.  Why two colors of sand?  If I were going to stay here longer, I'd have to do some real geology learning because I'm fascinated by what little I can see of the geological history revealed on these beaches.   Stripes of brown stone alternating with stripes of black stone. There are stone croppings and seams of stone on the beaches here that are so black I thought they'd been painted....

I'm coming to the midpoint in my time at Chile, and it's a trip that really keeps me moving around.  After settling in with my friend in her apartment in Viña del Mar, overlooking the Pacific Ocean (with a few photos in the previous post), we started getting busy with giving talks and touring the area.  For example, I got to take this lovely double-decker bus from Viña del Mar to Santiago. It's not a tour bus; it's an intercity bus -- very comfy. Inside, the seats are plush and recline; it's the same style of bus that I took in Panama from Penonomé to Panama (city).  One difference is that in these buses, there are displays showing the speed the bus is going, and signs noting that if the driver goes too fast, you can report him. No dangerous driving is allowed! 100 km/hr is the max speed, and our driver was at this max a bunch, but didn't go over it. The reason for going to Santiago was to give a talk at USACH: the Universidad de Santiago en Chile.   Here I am! ...