On Chilean Food

Perhaps it's a bit obvious to say that the food and drink from Chile is pretty different from the States or Europe. Today's entry I dedicate to the most notable differences, with comparisons.

Ice Cream (helado) Winner: Chile
This one's a no-brainer, Chile easily has better ice cream on a commercial level than corporate America. The ice cream you get here is sweeter, uses real fruit and is fluffier. Chile 1, USA 0.

Hot Dogs (completo) Winner: No Contest
Unfortunately the hot dog and the Chilean version are so far removed from each other that there can be no comparison.Sure, Chileans use bread for a bun and have a meat product inside, but the condiments (which, unlike in America where a plain hotdog is a normal sale) are NOT negotiable, are too different. El completo has a guacamole variation, a special kind of mayo and other goodies that make this quite distinct from a Chicago or New York style wiener dog. Chile 1, USA 0.

Brownies Winner: USA
As bad as the states are whipped by ice cream, even more so do American brownies school Chilean. I've had the Chilean brownies twice, and I must say they are paltry. Not as sweet (which need not necessarily be a bad thing, but in this case is), dry and heavy, they failed to impress and went zero for two on my pallet. Good effort Chile, but take a lesson from the north. Chile 1, USA 1.

Sandwiches (Sandwiches) Winner: No Contest
Both nation states definitely put up a fight here. The Chilean sandwich is amazing in its varieties, condiments and taste. A personal favorite is the de Espana (I don't know how to do the ~ over the 'n' on this laptop), which is loaded with red peppers, probably half a cup of Chilean mayonnaise and two different preparations of pork. But, like the ice cream, the Chilean sandwiches are just too different to compare accurately and fairly. Thus I am forced to declare for a second time: no contest. Chile 1, USA 1.

Pisco (pisco or piscos _____) Extra point to Chile.
Pisco is the native liquor of Chile. It's made of egg yolk, sugar and a grape fermentation that when prepared correctly turns into a drink so thick it resembles molasses more than wine. It's really cheap and comes in a variety of flavors that shouldn't be missed. Is it better than the wines and standards like whiskey (whisky) or rum (ron)? No, not really. Anyways, I'll send a bottle home through the mail. Chile 2, USA 1.

On Religion

It´s a friday and I just completed my first exam. The professor is grading them now as I type this. Last night, I dreamt in Spanish for the first time. It´s kinda interesting to dream in two different languages. Anyways, I want to use this time to talk about Chile and religion, or at least, what I´ve noticed about Chileans and religion.

Let me start by saying that Chileans are far more culturally religious than Americans, and a thousand times more so than the Spanish. On a cultural level, it´s quite appropriate to see signs and billboards with Catholic or otherwise Christian imagery. The third question my host family asked me was if I was religious. And the tests our school uses has obviously been designed by a religious person.

Take today´s exam. Well, not the exam I took, but the exam a lower level class took. The students from that class said one of the questions on the test was to identify the persons in a picture. The correct answers were any of the following: woman, mother, child, baby. The picture, in fact, was this: the Virgin Mary holding children in her arms and in giant letters below her.I will let you take a guess as to what abortó means, I am confident you will understand the actual message of the picture. As an other example, my homework sometimes had practice sentences like, when translated, ^Do you believe in God? Because I do.¨

Then again, church attendence in Chile is about the same as in America. So I think that reinforces my thesis that Chileans are far more culturally religious. I wonder aloud, now, if this is because of Pinochet (whose government was extremely religious) and Opus Dei (which is pretty popular here) or is normal in all of South America.

Update: Here is the picture. Pero no estoy seguró que toda las.

Santiago, the first week...

The philosopher Ludwig von Wittgenstein once famously wrote

If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing important would ever get done.

Wittgenstein, heir to an Austrian fortune, wrote almost entirely in English, and because of this, had a very nuanced perspective on language. I am beginning to understand where Wittgenstein was coming from when I read his works. Nothing broadens the mind like learning something very difficult, and language is one of them. I remember reading a cognitive study whose results suggested that when we learn something new, special ¨reward¨hormones in our glands are fired off and give us a high-like effect that´s mildly addictive. I am not surprised.

Today, a Thursday afternoon, is the warmest it has ever been. Not a cloud in the sky and the smog was barely noticable. But I am not enjoying it in the least, because I have been studying for tomorrow´s exam all day. Anyways, I´m taking a break to type up a small report on what has been going on. But I believe I will go backwards...

In the first entry, I wrote that food is very expensive. I want to reassert that fact right now: I think 90% of my money is going to food. Last night I went to a bar with my ¨brothers¨ and a friend, and was surprised to find the prices very managable, the food delicious and in large quantities. The bill, for four grown men, came to only twenty thousand pesos (around forty dollars)! Then I found out one of the brothers, Corke, was childhood friends with the manager and gave a ridiculous discount. I also found out last night that Corke IS Jorge, Corke is his nickname. And there aren´t three brothers, there are only two and I mistook this friend of their family as one of them.

Uh-oh, the bell rang and students are gonna want to use the computer and I feel bad cause I have been on so long. Alright, chau pescados.

In art, it is difficult to say something as good as saying nothing.

Santiago, the first day

Well, well, well... it´s a Wednesday afternoon and I thought I´d take a break from my homework to talk a little about Santiago so far.

Flying into Chile was long, arduous and beautiful. The first 22 hours were dull, and I was extremely tired yet unable to sleep. But somewhere over Chile I awoke from one of my painful catnaps and opened the airplane window purely from boredom, expecting to see nothing. What I saw was an amazing dawn breaking over the Andes´mountains, which were probably 100 miles to the east, and seeing the sun stretch over miles and miles of bare, blue desert. I´ve never seen anything like it.

But after five minutes, the place was as dark as night again as an enormous sandstorm blew in at amazing speeds. And ten to fifteen minutes later, the sandstorm blew away to show us that we were no longer over a desert but over the mountains themselves. The Andes´are by far the tallest mountains I´ve seen. The entire range is full of peaks and crests, but somewhere along the flight, off in the distance, was a single peak, a single mountain, that towered over all the others. It was basked in cloud and red light, and it seemed to go on forever skyward as the clouds hid from us its secrets and its end. The mountain, I believe, is Cerro Tupungato, elevation 22,310 ft. The picture, I believe, captures the raw Purgatory that I saw that day. I was reminded of a story in the Biblical book of Deuteronomy when Moses approaches the mountain of judgment that ¨burns¨and that not even the animals can touch, and that even Moses cried, Í am trembling with fear!`

After the show, we soon landed in Santiago. From the plane, I could see Santiago was situated in a large valley with one access point. I have mixed feelings about the city. You don´t get a second chance to make a first impression, and most first impressions are more accurate than we might like to admit. Santiago is bathed in smog more than any other city I have ever been to. Words cannot do it justice, but believe me when I say the smog slightly obscures anything as close as a city block away. When I arrived, the smog was not as bad as per usual - but I didn´t know that - and the temperature was pretty good. The relationship between temperatures and smog is a virtuous cyle. If a warm front comes in and the temperature gets to a certain point (I´m not sure what), the smog heats up enough to rise, which allows sunlight, which in turn dissapates more smog and the place gets better and better.

The family is really nice and really funny. They told me they had a grandma named Rosa - they lied to get a tax break. I thought that was hilarious. They also have one more son than they let out, a 26 year old named Corke. Corke and I get along the best. He´s pretty dang cool. But I didn´t meet Corke the first day, so that is for another time.

In terms of describing the first day, there is only one more thing that happened. The father, Jorge, took me to a ¨Mercado de la calle¨, a street market for pirated and super-cheap stuff. We bought twenty dvds that day for two dollars. Everything here is really cheap except for two things: food is just as, if not more expensive, and the internet is about two dollars for half an hour.

After visiting the market, I crashed for the rest of the day and night in my room (a very tiny room about seven by four feet). It´s also extremely cold in their house because there is no central heating (and they´re considered upper middle class!). Suffice it to say, that is what happened on the first day. And I say it was good.

Halfway to Chile

As some of you may know, I am taking classes in Spanish in the mountain capital of Santiago. While I am there, I might as well use this space to talk about my experiences there.

However, I am not there yet (I'm in Dallas on layover for another four hours and fifteen minutes), so I might as well talk about something else.

Avid readers of Scientific American will no doubt recall to mind the surprising article on page 38, written by a certain Michael Shermer, editor-in-chief of Skeptic Magazine, and a professing atheist. Shermer devotes the full page opinion piece to what one might call the "triumph" of emergent materialism; as reductionist/limitedist cognitive psychology is being pushed further and furth back into the recesses with the results of recent studies at major universities. The studies in themselves are not what occupies Shermer's mind, instead, Shermer discusses what the studies bode for Philosophy of Mind and the religious experience.

As it is becoming apparent that though the mind is of physical components, and is influenced by phsyical treatment (e.g., giving medicine to treat various psychological problems, sending electrical pulses can give a subject quale experiences), it is equally becoming apparent that the mind cannot be reduced to physical components. These means several things, though is not limited to:

1. Hyper-religious people can rest assured that their "soul" is not challenged by taking pills. And now there is room for supernatural possibilia affecting the mental, such as demonic possession and 'God' talking to you, yet still pay respect to natural phenomena affecting the mind, such as genuine schizophrenias.
2. All mental causation is natural yet more important that just that.
3. Extreme limitivists are wrong (e.g., Dan Dennett).
4. The 19th century German Gestalt psychologists have been vindicated.

Of course, the jury is still out on the matter; Shermer simply acknowledges that emergentism is enjoying a high point in popularity. Shermer even goes on to acknowledge that under emergentism, deities are worthy of worship once again. Of course, the editor is still an atheist and there is probably little changing that. Shermer ends his article with what should be by now a trademark bit of skepticism, questioning the validity of worshiping an outdated, Bronze Age Jewish war God. Yet why stop at the skepticism of Shermer? I am reminded of what Hume once said in regards to Bishop Berkely's proof for God, that while "I [Hume] have no answer for him, [the proof] produces no conviction at all." How can we remain a skeptic and avoid solipsism? But I digress.

Two years and several thousand miles away from this airport in Dallas, in the papers of British news source The Guardian, Lord Winston wrote a short essay defending the evolutionary reasons for belief in God. Winston, himself a devoted Jew, spent the good portion of the essay discussing the parts of the mind that nearly demand divine attention. In other words, there is, Winston argues, a spiritual side to our brains that needs to be given heed.

Winston relates to us an example of a psychology test during the mid-century at the University of Minnesota. The study's aim was to see if religious zeal correlated to psychological disorders. Several groups of various religious backgrounds were assembled: Charismatics, monks, wealthy Protestants and Catholics, even snake-handlers. In fact, the test did show a direct correlation between religiosity and psychological problems. But it's the reverse of what might be expected. The less involved someone is (in other words, the less passionate [and do not read crazy] a worshipper is) the more likely they will suffer from mental disturbances. Snake-handlers had few problems, same with monastics; the wealthy were far more likely to need psychological help. Perhaps our minds do demand spiritual attention.