Everyone is Going to Have to Stand Up Now.

If you live in the Unites States and you're a woman, a person of color, trans-sexual, non-heterosexual, native American, a person who has suffered a sexual assault, a person with a disability or a chronic illness -
Maybe you're not a Christian.  Maybe you're not a citizen, or you are a citizen but your parents weren't citizens, or you've got a name that maybe doesn't sound like it started out in Western Europe way back when - 
Maybe you're related to or know someone like that -
This is starting to be an awfully large number of people, isn't it?

This sure is one extraordinary day.

I got nothing.  Except a song.  This is by Danette Beavers, a member of the Washoe tribe who writes and sings at The Good Elephant.

On Love

In the wake of the terrible events in Paris, many voices saying words that have become all too predictable. The responsibility - in varying degrees of more or less - is placed on Europe's refugees. The trouble comes with them. We must be vigilant, we must we must resist these threats against our way of life - 

            I am reminded of a question that was recently posed to Germany's Chancellor Merkel:
            “You’re doing a lot to help the refugees,” a woman asked. “What are you doing to protect our Christian values?” 
            Over the last few months I have found myself meditating upon an answer that was given to this question by a thoughtful and considering man: 

            "It is a strange notion that “doing a lot to help the refugees” is distinct from the business, the practice, or the essence of Christianity. Helping refugees, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, aiding widows and orphans in their distress -
            These corporal and spiritual works of mercy and justice are not a nice little additional thing that it’s generally commendable to dabble in a bit…Without them, our 'Christian values" are devoid of content and substance, an ornate treasure chest with nothing inside. 

We can imagine this same woman standing to ask this same question at the end of Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew’s Gospel:
            When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left.
            Then the king will say to those at his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”
            Then the just will answer him, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?”
            And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”
            Then he will say to those at his left hand, “You that are accursed, depart from …”
            And they will interrupt, saying, “Lord, you’re doing a lot to help the refugees, but what are you doing to protect our Christian values?”
   
These "Christian values" are not unique. In many words and many turns of phrase, they are the foundation stones of every single culture and society on this earth. Look at the people of Paris right now - bringing strangers off the streets and into their homes to keep them safe. Restaurants are closing their shutters and turning off the lights with their patrons safe and silent inside.  For those who prefer particulars - I particularly recommend Mr. Bathily, who in January hid hostages in the freezer of his shop at a very real risk to his own life.
            Alongside him, I recommend the Greek fishermen whose economy might be in ruins, but instead of looking for scapegoats, go out every night to make sure strangers safely reach shore - 
            Split those hairs if you dare!

My grandparents were refugees: Poles who fought the Germans, then fled the Russians, and at the end of the second world war, made their way to Australia. 
            Australia let my grandparents in. In due course they had children, and later, grandchildren - doctors, microbiologists, painters, writers, teachers, architects, zoo-keepers, civil servants, network administrators, surveyors, businesswomen -
            Now there are great-grandchildren as well; boys and girls who act in plays and build model engines and help fold the laundry and carry groceries and laugh and speak kindly in the streets - 
            Is Australia sorry?  Are we regretted?  Regrettable?
            Can you imagine that we are not loved as we love in our turn?

It is not a good time for the vulnerable anywhere in the world right now.  For myself, I can only speak for the Christian culture of Western Europe, but I will say this:
           Over the next few weeks, much of Western Europe will celebrate a cultural origin story - a story of the greatest love the earliest Christians could conceive. How wonderful it would be if, instead of celebrating by rote and having the parties and singing the songs and paying postage on cards promising goodwill and fellowship and reflecting warmly on a season well done, we could think seriously about the values that we are celebrating?
            We are imperfect. We stumble. We fall. But always, and often at the same time, we rise up. Black balaclavas and guns are as much of a threat that we permit to be.  We are compassionate. We are kind. We possess mercy and charity and love - love for the citizens of Paris, and love for the thousands and thousands of people just like ourselves, who are right now fleeing horrors that black balaclavas have devised and placing themselves into the hands of strangers, hoping for charity in the names of our shared values and humanity. 
            These are frightening times. Reaching beyond our fears take strength and courage that are often difficult to find. To those voices anxious for their cultural values - I ask you to let your pride in those values raise you up. If you are afraid, let those who are not carry you until your strength returns.  In honor and love, out of culture and humanity, we cannot do less. Any day of our lives.

A measure of relativity.

We were woken by a temblor at 4:45 on Saturday morning.
            Mr Tabubil shook me awake - "big one, big one, Get UP!"
            "Whuuhhh?"
            BANG! The room shuddered. BAMMOBAMMOBAMMO - 
            And we were up, half-asleep, my feet tangling in the sheets and I fell, and then we were securely next to the core and Mr Tabubil opened the front door - 
            "Mr Tabubil!  I'm not wearing pants!"
            "Does it matter?!"
            BAM!  BANGBAMBANG  - the rattling was tremendous - walls and floors and windows and drawers and cupboard doors going bang bang bang and something in the stairwell slam slam slamming against the walls -
            And it eased and i saw the coats next to the door and thought "well that's all right, I can wrap one around my legs -" and
            BAMM! 
            BAMMOBAMMOBAMMO-"
            And it stopped.

It was a 6.8, near Ovalle. A very very rattly 6.8.  It took us a long time to get back to sleep.  Mr Tabubil was woken up again at 7:00 by a nice solid shaking 6.0 and thought "it's smaller than the last one.  I don't care." And rolled over and went back to sleep.  I didn't wake up at all.
            And that was that.  We haven't heard a word about it.  From anyone.  This is the thing that i find most fascinating about living here in Chile, on the edge of the pacific rim.  In most of the rest of the world a 6.8 is a respectable quake.  Newsworthy.  Water-cooler excitement for weeks.
            Here, once people were back to sleep, no-one raised an eyebrow.  Not on facebook, not between friends or neighbors or colleagues - 
            Nothing fell over and it's business as usual.  Bothered?  Us? 

Replicas!

The best part of the 6.2 quake last night was the fellow outside yelling "YeeeHAAAA!"

If you've decided that you want to live in a city right above a major fault-line on the Ring of Fire, Chile is a good country to pick.
            There are a few things in our favor.
            First of all, the geology of Santiago is very different from places like Christchurch in New Zealand,  or Urayasu in Japan, where earthquake liquefy the ground and swallow buildings.
            Secondly, and very importantly, Chile possesses some of the most stringent earthquake building standards an anti-seismic regulations on the planet. 
            These stiff/rigid/inflexible (seriously, all of the options here are totally tasteless in this context) building standards permit us to rattle through earthquakes that would utterly level other cities.  Under normal circumstances, we laugh at anything below a 6.5. (It takes at least a 7.0 to catch our notice. Or a really shallow 6.4.  At least, that's what we pretend. In my experience, anything over a 6 has even hardened Chileans braced tightly into in their safe zones, waiting in silence for the awful shaking to stop, because is it going to stop at a 6-ish?  You just don’t know. And when it stops we walk around full of bravado saying "Pssshhhh.")
            The bravado has entirely and thoroughly worn through.  Last Wednesday's 8.3 earthquake left us strung like over-strained banjoes, and every good rattle since - 
            all of the many good rattles - 
            especially all the ones that happen in the middle of the night - 
            Have sounded to us like the soprano tones of  banjo-strings going "PLINK."
            On Monday, all of the last frayed strings went and let go for good. Monday was a rotten day.  We were woken up at 3 in the morning by a good, juicy 6.3.  A 5.0. hit around noonish, then a 6.5 at three in the afternoon, and then a 5.8 at four, and 5.7 at five in the evening - all of them on top of  the eight other sub-5s that gently rumbled us across the day - 
             A teacher friend and a young man coming home from school both reported classrooms full of panicked tears, and as for the grown-ups - 
            All of our philosophical shrugging and "good to get all the stress out in smaller ones, eh?  What else can you expect after a big earthquake?" gave way to a wide-eyed need for buttonhole everyone you vaguely know and ask "did you feel that one?  Did you feel that? Where were you?  When will it bloody-damn-all end?"
            And that question was solidly answered at four o'clock on Tuesday morning by a 6.1 that hit like an artillery blast.
            In our building, the person who has it worst in an earthquake is the concierge downstairs in the lobby.  The room is built with lots of big plate glass windows. After the 6.4 hit last year we waited it out next to the structural core, and then we remembered that we had guests coming in an hour and needed to nip out to the corner market to grab drinks.  (That's Chile for you.  A 6.4 earthquake hits and soon as it stops you snap your fingers and say "D'oh!  Soda!  You want coke or ginger ale?") 
           Down in the lobby, I  found the lady concierge sitting at her desk in a state of blank shock - when a quake hits, those windows go berserk - roaring and booming and billowing like waves - and the general effect is that of a freight train coming through the front door. 
            Last week's 8.3 was exponentially worse, and the poor man on duty was in a pretty bad way.  A resident sat with him and held his hands as the night rolled on and slowly drew him out of his shock,  but none of the night or day duty fellows have had a very nice time since.
            For all that, we're doing very well here, considering. I have a friend who lives on the 26th floor of a building in centro (the historical center of Santiago.)  She was in her apartment at the time of the 8.8 in 2010, so when last Wednesday happened, she figured that if the building had come through 2010 in one piece, she had nothing to worry about, so she dedicated herself to hanging on.
When the earthquake stopped, she and the other residents evacuated and down in the street she shared a few beers with the other 26th floor folks, and among them they found a brand new neighbor.  He had arrived in Chile from Egypt the day before.  
            Can you imagine? Your very first day in a brand new country, and an 8.3 earthquake hits while you're 26 storeys up. The poor man was certain he was going to die. 
            Every sway was one sway closer to the moment that the pendulum would stop and the building would fall and take him with it.  He didn't know how tightly Chileans build - he'd only just arrive! 
            Down on the street afterward, safe on solid ground (that wouldn't stay solid) the poor fellow was having a very bad time of it. They held his hands, and a big burly man from Ecuador wrapped him up in a bear hug and held him tight until he thought he might be alright to stand on his own once more.  
            As for my friend, the endless aftershocks at that height have entirely eroded her philosophical equanimity.  She's can't sleep at night because of 'when' and 'just in case', and her jolly memories of community solidarity down on the street have turned into phone calls at all sorts of hours about a dog. 
            "The damned dog. My neighbor's got a pug. You know how overweight those things can get, yeah? You know pugs have rotten hearts, right?  And buggered sinuses?  And basically anything, right, that makes an animal unfit for even walking?  We carried that damned dog back up 26 flights of stairs.  Do you have any idea how much an obese, under-exercised pug with a dicky heart can weight?! We traded off - every four floors we had to stop, and wait, and hand over a hairy heaving snorting snuffling ton of bricks.  And the damned building kept shaking and the damned dog kept wriggling and licking at my chin and I didn't need its bloody gratitude! I needed it to walk up those stairs on its bloody damned own!!"
            Her new next-door neighbor has decided to leave the country. 
            The concierges in our building are not only entirely out of strings, but the entire banjo has gone up in splinters.
            The rattling persists, and so do we, and I get another phone call: "Have I told you yet about the damned dog?"

8.3

A week ago Chile was hit by a very large earthquake. 
            An 8.3 on the Richter scale may be smaller than the 8.8 back in 2010 that smashed everything in sight, but it was plenty large enough - large enough to for chaos, certainly, and up in Coquimbo, destruction and afterwards a 5.5 meter wave that lifted ships right over harbor walls, flattening cars and buildings as it came.  
            Here in Santiago, with an entire mountain range from the ocean, the terror was the length of the earthquake. It built so swiftly and so steeply that we were in the middle of it before we quite knew what had happened, and for more than three minutes, the world changed - and solid and sure and certain more or less ceased to exist.
            I can't find words for it that aren't deeply purple prose  - 
            It was like being sandbagged by the worst existential crisis you could conceive -  a blow that would cripple the most iron-clad of egos and surpass the direst expectations of the terminally insecure - 
            Nothing was real, nothing was solid. Faith in the walls that had - until now - held up the world was a demonstrably iffy position - there was nothing to believe in, nothing to hold fast to, and it seemed to be going on forever.  There was no way of knowing when it would stop - or how it would stop -
            For three minutes the world shuddered and jolted and swayed as if it wanted to break our building's back. I braced myself up against our internal elevator shaft - the structural core of the apartment - and the building shook and shook and shook and the glass in the windows boomed as it billowed out like curtains in a wind, and the furniture and crockery juddered and clattered and crashed - 
            And I remembered the front door. It was closed. In an earthquake you want that door open, because structural displacement can jam a shut door so it stays shut. (this happened a lot in 2010 - with people trapped inside their apartments while aftershocks shook them silly.) Staggering the few steps from the elevator to the door, I wrenched it open, and found myself eye to eye with my neighbors. 
            They were wedged together into their own doorway, and I held on to mine and we stood there, staring at each other across the little lobby as the quake went on and on and all I could think to say was "It's okay! It's all okay! We've got the policy!" 
            They had no idea what i was talking about. They thought, I think, that the quake had knocked me silly, but it was very important, so I said it again. 
            On Tuesday, the day before the quake, I had discovered that for several amusing administrative reasons our 'fire, flood and quake' insurance for this year had not been properly processed, and I had spent Wednesday morning running around getting it sorted out - and eight hours later, here we were - 
            "We have the policy!  Everything is all right!" 
            Under that, though, was a more worrying thought - "They were here in 2010.  And they were on the coast when the tsunami hit.  And tonight they are worried.  How okay are things, really?" 
            And the shaking went on and on and we stood there with our eyes locked upon each other - and then it stopped, and we let go our eye contact and turned straight to our smart phones. 
            After a quake, the phone networks, if they haven't been knocked out, get jammed real fast. Etiquette - infrastructure permitting - is a post on facebook to say that you're standing and smiling, and after that, you start with the texting.
            Our neighbors have three children - all of whom were out of the house at the time.  Mr Tabubil wasn't at home either.  He was in the airport, getting ready for a flight. I didn't know how big it had been out there. I was filled up with visions of him trapped in the darkness in an enormous shaking building with the electricity out and ceiling tiles and walls and windows dropping all around him. The airport terminal had not come out of the 2010 quake very well - the inside wrecked and concrete car ramps collapsing - an utter mess. I knew that the building had been majorly reworked since, but still - !
            And then the replicas (aftershocks) began. I couldn't get through to him and a darling 6.4 hit like a ton of bricks and we all jumped again for the doorways -

It has been those damn aftershocks that have driven people to distraction. That first night, they went on all night long- an almost continuous rumble that peaked and dropped and peaked and dropped and peaked (the 7.0 was rather fun) - 
            An earthquake is frightening, but it eventually it ends; you're strung tight as a banjo but you're ready, even eager, to move on, and right when you're catching your breath, the earth starts to move again. And again. It won't let you go.
Because when a quake does stop, it takes a lot longer to stop for you. It's like when you've been on a boat and your legs keep feeling it after you return to solid shore; after an earthquake, the physical jangling is all mixed up with the adrenaline and nerves inside your head and every new little rumble becomes a mental dance of "is it real or is it just my nerves?" and it takes a handily located hanging lamp to make the call - 
            The windows of our apartment generally start to rattle at about 4.5-ish, and the crockery starts to clash and rattle in the cupboards at about 6.ish, and anything even around 5-ish is absolutely nothing to even think about worrying about, so I turned my back on the hanging lamp and left my nerves alone.  
            "If the windows don't rattle," I decided "I don't care." And promptly the crockery started crashing in the cupboards and everything went pear-shaped and 6-plus all over again. And again. And a-bloody-damn-gain.  All night. 
            Mr Tabubil was all right, at least. When the quake hit he'd been sliding his backpack onto the x-ray belt.  He spent the quake underneath the table, and he got the heck out of the building before the 6.4 even hit.
            The airport refit had done its job, but an earthquake as big as that, as experienced on the upper level of a very large, very tall building designed to dissipate stress thru lots and lots of lateral movement - it was an experience he would not care to repeat. 
            And yet, only four hours later, those four hours having contained a complete evacuation, a building-wide inspection, a general re-entry, the re-processing of all outgoing passengers through customs and security, and a serious inspection of all the air bridges - with aftershocks coming pretty much continuously throughout the whole process  - Mr Tabubil was in the air. It says a great deal for Chile's composure, experience and preparation that only four hours after a major earthquake, the airport was open and planes were flying.

While Mr Tabubil shivered outside an airport terminal in a frazzled crowd of hundreds, I spent the evening with our neighbors, watching the tsunami reports roll in on their TV - live video footage of water moving steadily up the streets in Coquimbo and Tongoy -
            And what a strange new world it is, that we can watch those waves in real time, with clocks counting down the minutes and the seconds to the moment that the waves will hit each city on the coast - the first wave, and then the big one. A million people evacuated, and we three of us thanking the dear sweet fuzzy lord that it was mostly only water spreading steadily up the streets in most places, not even as high as the kerbs, knee-deep at worst. How rattled our brains had become I do not know, but we didn't learn how bad it had really been until the following morning.  
            In point of fact, in a weird and superficial fashion, we were next thing to jolly. She was drinking champagne "to relax" (after the fifth glass, she was pretty damn relaxed all right) and he was "self-medicating" with a pot of espresso. In two days it would be Dieciocho (September 18th - Chile's National Day), and, high on adrenaline, half the city had started early with epic parties and extra-spicy enthusiasms, and the air (especially after the bigger replicas) was full of whoops and cheers.
            I stuck to tea. Between the three of us, I figured that one of us needed to be sober. I sipped chamomile and sucked on a bar of chocolate and wished ardently for a very large glass of what the rest of the city was having. Damn.
            And then I went to bed. Our bedroom is at the other end of the house from the core, so I curled up in a nest of blankets on the living room rug, and at about three in the morning, in a lull between big ones, I let the rumbling lull me to sleep.

Feliz Dieciocho!

Who says only humans and roosters dance the cueca?



Happy Birthday Chile!  The 18th and 19th of September are the Fiestas Patrias - a festival commemorating the formation of Chile as an independent state in 1818.  
One eats empanadas, attends asados (BBQs), and dances the cueca, Chile's national dance.

(If you're interested, metafilter has quite a comprehensive post on the cueca today!)

Game-Day Buffet in the Physiotherapy Gym!

Half a minute after I took this photograph, a nurse arrived with five hundred thousand french fries, to go with all the pretty packets of mustard and ketchup scattered between the olive bowls and potato chip plates. The fries were exceedingly tempting, but the nurses and the physiotherapists and the orderlies beat me to it and I made it out of the scrum with one solitary french-fry in my hand. I wonder what all the cardiac patients thought?  All those middle-aged men with big bellies and scars down the middle of their chests and the daily lectures on healthy eating and do you want it to happen to you again?
            With the High-Noon Chile-Netherlands game playing in the middle of my session, physio today was a gas.  None of the 12:00 patients showed up, and the place was pleasantly empty and strung with bunting, and those of us who were left - with the audibly disappointed exception of those tied to beds by ultrasound or electrical equipment - decided simultaneously that we needed to do our cardio work right NOW, thank you, whether it was in our physio regimen or not - on account of how the bikes and walkers and elliptical trainers are all situated right underneath the big TVs.  And when we ran out of cardio we simply stayed. The physio staff didn't particularly notice. The game was on!
            The fellow who does hand rehabilitation was looking pretty twitchy. His setup is a semi-circular table - he sits inside it with a TV mounted over his head so he can monitor his charges while they load spindles with wooden buttons and tie shoelaces and watch TV while they work.  Fortunately for everyone in the gym, his last patient abandoned him at 12:07, and he could stop looking like a candidate for an imminent coronary, and come around to the other side of the table and watch.
            And then I left, because I had things to do and places to be and it almost killed me to go.  But I waited, listening for the city, but 1:30 came and -
            Nope.  Well, not exactly.  Not this time, anyway.
            And the city was silent as a tomb.
            And Mr Tabubil cleaned up scandalously in the office pool.  He's got to stop betting against Chile. Just for once.

Cleats at High Noon

Today Chile plays Holland in the Copa Mundial.  At noon sharp.  High noon - soccer cleats and a leather ball on main street.  
Mr Tabubil's office is bringing in the big screen - again, and because the game runs over lunch-time, the bosses have ordered empanadas.  I wonder if the empanadas will arrive, or, if they do, if the delivery person will go away again or simply crowd into the conference room with everyone else to watch the game?
The smog is back, and the government is begging everyone to not go off and have a futbol asado (BBQ) because the city can't stand the extra smoke.  I wonder if it'll stand the extra noise?  If we do pull off a hat-trick against the Dutch Juggernaut and win?  We can't shout louder than when we won last week against Spain and made it into the group of 16. 
Fútbol is a religion, and Chile worships at her altar.  When she won against Spain on Wednesday the sound went on for hours and hour and hours.  I woke at 3 in the morning to horns, and cars parp-parp-parp!-ing along the streets.
But the moment it started - ah. Listen to a city going beserk -

Santiago at Rush Hour... during a Fútbol Game.

The streets of Santiago get extra-busy when Chile is playing in the world cup!

That Darned Copa Mundial Keeps Happening

It's been a big day for the Tabubil Household! Australia played the Netherlands, and Chile played Spain. Mr Tabubil had 5000 pesos (USD $10) riding on Spain winning that one by two goals.
            "Two goals? Spain?"
            "Why not? They're coming off a ridiculously heavy loss to the Netherlands, so they've got the motivation.  And talking motivation - Chile and Spain have a rivalry going way back. It's going to be a grudge match.  And with the fire of past recent defeat burning in their bellies - "
            "Spain's also got the oldest squad in the cup, and Chile's having a real good season-"
            "-and after the way the guys in the office were swanking around after the Chile-Australia,  there's no way I wasn't going for Spain as hard as I could."
            "That explains the two goals, then."
            "One goal's only optimistic. Two's... ambiguous."
            "You're going to lose 5000 pesos."
            "Yep."
It's certainly the first time I've seen a betting strategy that rides entirely on generating irritation in the other members of the pool. Testosterone's a real bitch.

In other news, Australia acquitted herself nobly against the team that took down Spain 5-1, and although she didn’t quite squeak out a win, she didn't exactly roll over either. 3-2, thank you. That's respectable, that is.
            And Chile clobbered Spain. I didn't watch the game. I let the city tell me, and tracked the goals and penalties by the roaring in the streets. Waves of rising sound - honking and shouting and cheering and screaming and drums and trumpets. And even now, the streets are flooded with the blue and red and cars are barping and honking their way up and down.  All over town. 
            I'm no fan of FIFA, or the economic politics of the World Cup, but dear lord, do I love Chile in soccer season.

Birthday Billions

Mr Tabubil's office is running a pool for how many points Chile is going to win by in the Chile Australia game today. The posted options run from 6 to eleventy-billion.
            Mr Tabubil has thrown in in a wild-card vote for Australia to win by one goal.  There was much derision, but, he told me smugly, his strategy is sound. 
            "If a miracle happens" he said, "and Australia wins, I don't have to share the pot, and when Australia doesn't win*,  I  gets points for being a Real Sensitive Guy who's sticking by his wife's country no matter what." He paused for me to appreciate his brilliance."It's even better than roses, Tabubilgirl. Happy Birthday."
            I squawked, and he sighed. "I was going to take you out for dinner, but if we could even find a restaurant with a functioning kitchen tonight, anyone silly enough to eat food cooked while the game's on deserves exactly what they pay for.  I figured we'd stay in, put some smooth music on the stereo, open a box of chocolates, and listen to the reverberations of a whole nation screaming Goooooooooooooooool! 
          Eleventy-billion times."



*And if Australia does pull out a hat trick and win the game, I knew they had it in them, and I knew it all the time, and no-one, but No-one, is a bigger patriot than me.  Seriously, Australia, give it your all.  Or my birthday night is going to be less romance, and all sniggering.

Six to Eleventy-Billion.

Tomorrow afternoon Chile will play her first game in the Copa Mundial - Chile versus Australia.  Chileans are rather passionate about fútbol, and I am Australian. Tomorrow afternoon I plan to hide.
Chile? Spain? The Netherlands? Australia?
            It's not exactly contentious that FIFA is as bent as a nine-bob note.  Most right-thinking Aussies around this way are presuming that the group Australia got was the result of someone at FIFA HQ being given lots and lots and lots of lovely money. 
            Mr Tabubil's office is running a pool for how many goals Chile is going to win by tomorrow. The listed options run from 6 to eleventy-billion.
            Can't they let us go down with dignity? On the basis that Australia's chances have been officially calculated at less that those of a snowball in the Sahara at mid-day in the sun, I'm not going down with the ship.

Chi. Chi. Chi. Le. Le. Le. Viva Chile.

via http://breaktime.biobiochile.cl/

Construction Happens, and Happens Some More

After all the wishing and planning and designing and ordering and purchasing was complete, the contractor and his maestros (workmen) moved in and things started happening rather precipitously.  In the past three weeks, we have had:  

1) The demolition of pretty much the whole apartment down to the concrete structural walls.  Floors, ceilings, doors, lintels, non structural walls - you name it, we dug it out.
2) Lots and lots of jackhammers. Tiles don't give up easily.
3) One very seasick apprentice who'd been manning a jackhammer in a small concrete space for two and a half days straight.
4) Electricians.  Everywhere. 
5) Ditto plumbers.
6) The original in-floor heating layer was poured funny, and there’s a seven cm slope differential in the living room floor that needs fixing.  Uh oh.
7) Concrete dust, everywhere.
8) Does anyone else smell that smell? 
9) An unexpected trip to the ER with probable ripped tendons all over my foot, and a very unexpected diagnosis of plantar fascitis.
10) Crutches.
11) Physiotherapy.
12) More Plumbers.
13) That smell can't possibly be real, right?
14) It's coming from the bedroom end of the flat?  Oh God, now we have to take up the bedroom floors, too.  You mean all of them?!?!
15) Rush shopping for new bedroom floors - on crutches.  And there's an eight centimeter differential that needs fixing in the master bedroom as well? How jolly.
16) More concrete dust.  Everywhere else.
17) Ceramicists laying tiles.
18) A seriously unhappy resident who calls the police because the ceramicists decided to use the spare key to come in on the weekend and make Very Loud Bashing Noises waaaaay outside of allowable-noise-hours, and going in person to yell at the ceramicists apparently didn't work.
19) Damage control. Much abasing. With chocolates.
20) Food poisoning. All Saturday night and all Sunday.  Did you know you can move really fast on crutches?
21) Ceramicists who, sulking about being bawled out by their general contractor, turn off their phones and refuse to come in to work on Monday. Tuesday they aren’t feeling quite up to par, so they don’t come in that day either. Burp.

Today the electrician is wiring up the bedrooms, and the ceramicists are back on the job, moving steadily through the kitchen and down the hallway. They do lovely work, but the noise really is incredible. I think the neighbor showed considerable restraint. If I'd heard them doing that above my head at 4:30 on a Saturday afternoon, I'd have skipped the local cops and called in a S.W.A.T. team. With helicopters.

Piazza San Marco in the Damp

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together after that in Italy.  Right now, we're in Venice.

Walking towards St Marks Square we saw a lady striding down the street wearing high fashion Italian Gumboots – black polished rubber, with a shiny gunmetal finish and with chains dangling gold charms strung all about the top.
Aqua Alta was coming.
            St Marks square was SLIGHTLY underwater – the water crept across the plaza, bubbling out of storm drains in the paving stones until the café tables and chairs were ankle deep, and walkers were kicking through the water or creeping slowly around the edge of the piazza on narrow catwalks.  The bands on the bandstands kept playing, and tourists sat and drank iced coffee with their shoes safely in their laps.  Along the front of St Mark’s Basilica and the Ducal Palace, the water was shin deep.  We crept along the edge of it on a narrow catwalk built of wooden planks, and watched Venetians in gumboots, stepping carelessly through the waves.

Tourists are truly alien creatures here – we creep across down flooded streets on catwalks, or splash through them playing at being children, kicking the saltwater skyward with every step.  Salt on our skin, not in our blood.
            Aqua Alta is a real problem for Venice – high tides are blown by winds into the long, narrow lagoon and stop previous high tides from exiting.  The waters overlap, and Venice is inundated.  Soil subsistence, channel-carving to allow the passage of large ships inside the lagoon, and the build-up of coastal islands that previously absorbed the water are all contributing to record levels of aqua alta in the new century – in bad weather, seasonal flood tides rise waist deep and make spectacular headlines all over the world.  A massive system of sluice gates is being constructed along the entrance of the lagoon, and dunes along the coast are being rehabilitated, but rising sea levels leave the projected efficacy of these measures somewhat dubious.
            On that afternoon, the water was low – knee deep, rather than waist deep.  Closer to the quay, the ground was higher – and dryer.  We jumped down from the catwalk and waded to dry land, only slightly damp about the toes, and we found a water bus to take us to Murano. 

Tourists in Venice

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together after that in Italy.  Right now, we're in Venice.  

On the vaporetto, we were crowded in with half a hundred other holiday-makers and all of their suitcases and packs. Venetians were a minority – pushed into corners, and looking saintly with patience, or cross and plain and simply cranky.  There was an ENORMOUS number of tourists in Venice. There have always been a very large number of tourists in Venice, but the new cruise-ship terminal has upped the ante - disgorging an additional five to eight THOUSAND gawpers every time a ship hits port.
Relations between the hordes and the local Venetians are somewhat strained.  We, of course, were model visitors, the sort any city would be proud to welcome, but some of the others –

Squashed behind us in the vaporetto from the train station were an Australian man and woman our own age. 
When they first stomped their way into our awareness, it was because of an argument going on between the two of them – SHE had seen something on the side of the canal that excited her and HE was attempting to convince her that the vaporetto was a public bus, and not a private drop-on drop-off taxi service.  It was an uphill battle – he’d get it half-way through her head, and then she’d see another pretty palazzo and shout “STOP! Arretez!” and then, when the vaporetto driver didn’t stop, “WHY?!?!  Why WON’T he?!”
            “They’re a bus, dear.  They don’t DO that.”
            “Well they OUGHT to!” She’d cry.  “Don’t they WANT us tourists to SEE things?”
And what sort of tourist board could possibly argue with that?

When they next floated into hearing, they appeared to be puzzling over the exact nature of the water in the canal beneath the bus.
            “So it IS fresh water, then, is it?” She asked.
            “I don’t rightly know.”  He said.
            “But it MUST be, mustn’t it?”
            “But – here’s the thing – there’s a SEA around this place, isn’t there?  At least some of the water in here must come out of that.”
            “Well,” She said. “It’s not impossible.  But the rest of it has to be fresh, doesn’t it?  Maybe the fresh water and the salt water sort of, you know, flow in currents around each other and don’t actually mix?”
            “Yeah.”  He said thoughtfully.  “YEAH.  That could be right.  That could be it exactly!”
I was tempted to turn around and ask what on EARTH they were going on about when they answered my question for me:
           “I mean, think about it.”  She said.  “We get fresh water from the taps in the bathroom in our hotel, and the water has to come from somewhere, so the canals have GOT be fresh, don’t they?”

The last we heard from them was as we were pulling out of a vaporetto stop.  As we pulled away into the canal, a man on shore shouted a request for directions.  A deckhand shouted back across the widening gap, but the man on shore couldn’t hear him over the engine, and the captain in the prow had his eyes on the water and opened the throttle. The deckhand shouted again, but his voice was lost and then we were away –
The Australian man behind me sighed gustily.
            “Typical.  Bloody typical.  There’s no friendliness in this town.  They can’t even bloody stop to give directions.”
The woman sighed and nodded and clucked her tongue –

Later, on solid ground, crossing a bridge in a cloud of American tourists, a pair of gondolas crossed underneath.  The gondoliers shouted to each other, a hello that echoed off the stone walls of the canal.
An American woman tittered and shouted just as loud -
            “We don’t even know what they’re saying!  They could be swearing at us and we wouldn’t even know!  How HORRIBLE they are!”
I wondered what had happened to her to make her say something so terrible.

There are depths of animosity on both sides.  The tourists come in numbers that would drown any small town, let alone one like Venice, that cannot stretch at its seams to accommodate them all, and the Venetians whole economy is based around the tourists, with the Museums and Churches and Glass and Lace and Carnivals – for what other business is there in Venice?
They’d be crazy not to resent us, and we know that, and we come anyway because it is so very beautiful here, so much MUCHNESS – muchness of history and geopolitics and extraordinary building.  We have the best of it – we come, and we look at the pretty, and we make messes, if we like, and then we go away.

An Instant Expert’s Guide to a Foreign Country: Netherlands Edition

(Insert photo of windmill HERE. For local flavor.)

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together after that in Italy. 

Holland is composed thusly: canals, windmills, polder fields, progressive urban engineering, glasshouses farms, and bicycles.

Mr. Tabubil’s parents grew up in a satellite city of den Hague named Leidschendam - one of the buckles in the Netherlands’ industrialized belt.  From Amsterdam down to Rotterdam, the country is densely farmed, densely factoried and densely populated. People live tightly, in towns built up of small houses and small gardens in the shadows of megalithic post-war housing blocks. 

It could be terribly urban, and unpleasantly citified, except that the Dutch decided that they weren’t going to Do That – and they Didn’t.

The years immediately after WW2 were a time of serious social planning for the Netherlands- the Germans had blown much of urban Holland to rubble, and in many ways, planners were left to start from scratch. 

Obliged to build a lot of housing for a lot of people in a terrible hurry, they threw up megalithic tower-blocks in every town, but once those were out of the way, they sat down and started thinking.  They looked at mid-century modernism, and decided that they didn’t like it.  Instead they planned villages centered on common-land parks and plazas;  between the rows of row-houses are strips of green land, dotted canals and copses of trees and pockets of woodland.   Each little house has a garden - be it so small as a pocket handkerchief, or the span of a patio deck behind the back door, but houses all must have their green rooms.  It is a way of existing in the pockets of your neighbors without living inner-city style, anonymous and concrete-bound. 

Modern housing has grown denser over the decades, but the same planning philosophy still governs: streets meander, housing blocks include back-gardens, or roof-decks for all, and canals take the place of front stoops or divide you from your extremely-next-door neighbors.

Which can be a blessing of an unexpected sort.  In Holland, houses are spaced only a step or two back from the street, and people live their whole lives with their curtains open. 

For a person accustomed to the large yards and grandiose personal footprints of North America and Australia, living like this could come as a terrible shock.  It’s a way of life that I don’t fathom, and don’t particularly care to fathom: the absence of privacy is so comprehensive that it appears almost invisible.  People fill their front window with plants and pretty objects to make a pleasing panorama for people passing by –

(I imagine that there is a highly competitive side to front-window keeping that visitors don’t see.  A world where ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ is honed to a very fine edge.  And a world of pressure to keep the edge polished.  For the use of the pointed purposes of a knife.)

Leidschendam is an early post-war town. Trees and bushes have had sixty years to grow up across windows and shade the edges of things.  More recent developments are less pleasant to live in.  The newest are raw and wide open, the trees are saplings - knee-high, and views are direct – right inside the houses and out through the other side.

On an enormously positive side -  the design of the urban belt of Holland has given it the most child-friendly community vibe I’ve felt or seen since I was a child growing up in a little mining town in the middle of the Papua New Guinea jungle.   Children are everywhere, and the streets are full of PEOPLE –

Public Transport is a fact of life here - not a luxury, not an afterthought, but a major and intrinsic aspect of urban planning. 

When I lived in Northern California, our local bus service made one stop an hour - once in each sprawling post-war suburban town.  Having a car was a fact of necessity, and everywhere was too far to walk.   Or ride a bike, on the car-centric roads.

In Holland, the desired baseline seems put every urban, or even semi-rural, dwelling within a ten minute walk of at least two different forms of urban transport.  Anneke and Pieter have the option of the tram, the metro (both run on rails, but the tram runs through the streets and is beholden to traffic lights and turn signals, while the metro has a dedicated line and goes several time faster.  It’s tremendous fun.) several different bus lines, and the big inter-city train lines. 

And bicycles of course.  They can ride their bicycles EVERYWHERE.

The story about how Holland grew a bicycle culture has been told other-where and better – HERE is a short, and fantastic video documentary on the subject.

I’ll wait while you watch it and catch up.

Dutch bicycles aren’t the serious sports models that we ride in American and Australia, bent over racing handlebars on our special sprung saddles and mountain shocks.  Dutch bikes are inexpensive upright models, cheerful and reliable, with enclosed chains and limited gear-shifting -  a bike that will get you (and a friend or two )From A to B and up a low hill.

Everyone rides: kids ride their bikes to school(two and three on every bike, pillion style) mums ride bikes with baby seats -fore AND aft, grandparents zip past on electric models, just enough buzz in the motor to give you the advantage of a following wind, and shoppers ride models with modified frames, with a wagon bed mounted between the handlebars and the front wheel.  You see the basket piled high with shopping bags, but more often, a small blonde head or two, a baby in a bassinet, or a pair of toddlers, belted in.

Every road has a designated bike lane – with its own designated place in the traffic cycle, and because the country is so flat and close, people RIDE.  And because public transport is so universally accessible, when they aren’t riding, they WALK.   Streets are public places, not car-clubs.  And villages are communities.

(Here’s the windmill.)