El Obelisco

Here in Buenos Aires, there is a giant obelisk seemingly copied straight from the Washington monument. But, unlike some cities, Buenos Aires doesn’t shy away from the phallic symbolism.

The Obelisk stands in the middle of what is, by some measures, the widest street in the world. The shot I took above is probably the most iconic photo one can take in Buenos Aires. The Obelisk is to BA what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris.

Puente de las Mujer

The Puente de la Mujer (Bridge of the Woman) is a footbridge that spans the harbor in the Puerto Madero neighborhood in Buenos Aires. It’s kind of a renovated port district, along the same lines as the Docklands in London. The Puente de la Mujer also reminded me a bit of London’s Millennium Bridge, but they don’t really have that much in common beyond both being fancy pedestrian bridges. Interestingly, the bridge also reminded me of the City of Arts and Sciences, which I visited in Valencia, and it turns out that’s because they were both designed by the same architect, Santiago Calatrava.

In the section of the audioguide where he discusses the bridge, Calatrava claims to have been inspired in the design by Argentinian tango. The left side of the bridge is supposed to represent the male dancer, standing up, while the right side is the woman dipping. I don’t really see it. To me it looks more like a harp, or perhaps an abstract interpretation of the cranes which surround the docks.

In an interesting connection closer to home, Calarava is also the architect for the yet-to-be-built Chicago Spire.

In any case, Ushuaia is a much larger city than El Calafate, and has some industries (shipping and manufacturing) unrelated to tourism. It feels slightly lower-rent than El Calafate, but is also in a beautiful setting, surrounded by mountains on a crystal-blue bay.

This is the Les Eclaireurs Lighthouse which stands watch over the Beagle Channel from a perch on the small Les Eclaireurs islands in the middle of the channel. According to the tour companies here in Ushuaia, it’s the “Lighthouse at the End of the World,” which isn’t really true. It’s not the southernmost lighthouse in the world, it doesn’t mark the end of the South American continent, it’s not even the actual lighthouse that features in the Jules Verne novel by that name.

What it is, is a symbol. Human beings are inherently symbol-seeking creatures. Our brains have evolved to pay careful attention to coincidence and causality. Loosely defined, a symbol is something that points to the presence or significance of something else. And doesn’t this lighthouse look really significant? Doesn’t it look like it should mark the uttermost edge of something?

And so, when the tour operators tell us that we’re going to see something important, we tourists play along. The lighthouse becomes important—significant—because enough people agree to pretend that it is. A similar effect occurs with currency. It becomes imbued with actual utility, as an exchange medium, as a biproduct of our collective acceptance that a scrap of paper with symbols printed on it is itself a symbol of value. The lighthouse becomes a symbol for geographic extremes, for endings, for people’s desire to stand on a precipice and peer over.

Or, in my case, it becomes a symbol of humankind’s easy acceptance of; our reliance on, a complex system of symbols that are essentially totally arbitrary. But that’s because I have tendency to overthink these things. It’s a pretty red lighthouse and makes a nice dramatic photo.

Um...what?

So, here in the hostel book exchange, I found not one, but TWO copies of a book in an Asian language featuring a photo of Adolf Hitler, and his loopy, rightward-leaning signature.

A little bit of internet searching (Thank you, Gordon Foster/Arabic numerals/the Internet, for adding detail to my confusion) reveals that the book (both of them!) is indeed the Japanese translation of Mein Kampf.

Honestly, every scenario I construct in my head to explain the presence of multiple copies of Hitler’s book, in Japanese, in a hostel in Chile, winds up seeming implausible. I know a lot of Nazis fled to South America after WWII. Perhaps some of the aging Nazis are engaged in efforts to leave Mein Kampf in hotels and hostels, like evil, fascist Gideons? But why Japanese? Why not Spanish, or English, or, hell, German? Perhaps a visiting Japanese tourist was reading a copy, for whatever reason, and just exchanged it for another book here? But then why the hell are there two copies? Who carries two copies of Mein Kampf as their travel reading?

Perhaps the only explanation that comes even close to being reasonable—”reasonable”—is this: Japan is insane. On some level, it makes perfect sense that there are two copies of Mein Kampf in Japanese here. I mean, why not? In the grand scheme of Japanese weirdness, this probably doesn’t even crack the top 10,000.

Other peripheral questions to consider: why is the title in red on one copy of the book, and black on the other? Their ISBN’s differ by the final digit (4-04-322402-8 for the black, 4-04-322402-X for the red). And, have I Godwin’s Law-ed myself by even writing this post?

You might think that 4 years in the LA area would have conditioned me to accept a little bit of grit with my oxygen, but you’d be mistaken. Los Angeles, the United States’ smoggiest city, clocks in with with a measly 34 μg of particulates per m³ of air. Santiago boasts a robust 60 μg/m³, but still doesn’t come anywhere close to the big leagues of “developing” [lung cancer] cities. Cairo puts them all (or, really, itself) to shame with a whopping 169 μg/m³, nearly 5 times the level in Los Angeles.

Breathe deep, son!

I’ve been nursing an irritating cough and intermittent headache for two or three days now, and really would not be surprised if the air here were at least partially to blame. To be fair to Santiago, they have taken steps to implement pollution controls. Apparently, the situation has improved significantly since the 1990s (although not much in the last 9 years). They’re also in the process of replacing their fleet of diesel public transit buses with newer, natural gas-powered models.

Santiago, like many other smog-plagued cities, also suffers from unfortunate geography. The nearby (and usually invisible) mountains tend to trap in the smog. According to people who live here, winter is typically the worst season for smog, because thermal inversion holds it near the ground.

The photo above was taken on a recent hiking trip up Cerro Pochoco on the outskirts of the city near the affluent Las Condes neighborhood. It was a pretty steep climb, but once we reached the top, the view was almost as striking for what you couldn’t see as what you could. On the plus side, it rained a whole bunch today, so tomorrow should be clear and beautiful.

This is a photo taken inside the Baquedano metro station in Santiago. It’s a little library kiosk, where commuters can pick up books to read on their subway ride. I saw them at several of the larger metro stations in Santiago. It seemed like a really smart idea to me, putting libraries in places where people can access them easily. There’s probably many people who would never go out of their way to visit a library, but who’d be happy to pick up something to read on their way to work. Judging from the books they had on display in the window, it wasn’t all Dan Brown’s airport bookstore fare either. They stocked quite a bit of more serious literature (both Spanish-native and translations) as well.