La Serena rundown

Similar feel to Valdivia despite the completely different geography; besides what I said in yesterday's post, it's similarly clean, of both litter and dog feces. I wonder if dog crap covering the sidewalks is just a Region V problem? I'm confused.

• Hostal El Punto - Run by a lovely multilingual German couple. Beds are squishy, but everything is cute and clean. In a shocking display of un-Chilean-ness, breakfast comes with slices of salami and turkey, and you can have them bring you brewed coffee in an individual French press. I paid US$60 for 3 nights, 2 in the dorm and 1 in a private room.
• Coffee Express - The second place in Chile that makes espresso correctly without instructions.
• Cafe Colonial - Pancakes, falafel, burgers: a prime stop for different food. The caesar salad has homemade mayonnaise, cheese that is not Parmesan, and the bacon is actually ham (possibly Canadian bacon), but it's tasty and non-Chilean all the same.
• Daniela II - Sure, it's Chilean food, but it's good. I ordered Garlic Scallops with lots of garlic, and miracle of miracles, that's what I got.
• Rincon Oriental - I braved Chinese food because the Lonely Planet book listed it. It...could have been worse? I ordered Garlic Chicken with "less salt and more garlic," so I got an enormous pile of chicken with about the right amount of salt and some garlic flavor. Skip it.

Overall, it's a pleasant place to be. There are lots of cool day trips I didn't take, to Valle del Elqui and the Humboldt Penguin Reserve and so on. If I'd stayed a third day I probably would have gotten restless with downtown and gone on an excursion.

La Serena

I've been soaking up La Serena, by which I mean "wandering about drinking coffee and eating non-Chilean food while I take pictures of churches with weird aspect ratios." I find myself comparing it to Chillán and Valdivia, which reminds me of what Tyler Cowen said:

If you set off to a mid-sized city in South America -- especially in the Southern Cone -- your chance of finding an idyllic spot are high. There may be, in a way, nothing to do there, at least not in the sense that your guidebook can report. But it will feel so fresh, so undiscovered, so representative of the vitality of everyday life, that you will at times think you have stumbled upon paradise. Everyone there will seem so apart from the world you know and there is a sudden (and quite silly) shock at seeing how seriously they take the world they know.

I wouldn't say that people down here seem apart from the world I know, at least at first, but there are some things--their mental distance from World War II, the fact that Christmas is in the summer, that the school year doesn't cross the calendar year, that the sun is in the north in the winter instead of the south--that remind me that they're completely accustomed to completely different things.

At any rate, Chillán is not someplace you'd normally visit, but my brief pass through left the impression of a low-rent, industrial, un-scenic Valdivia or La Serena.

This is Fanny. I thought she was using a pedal-driven sewing machine, which she is, but it's got an electric motor retrofitted onto it. I asked if I could take a picture, and she started to get up.

"Oh, can I take the picture with you?"

"Of course! I thought you wanted a picture of the machine."

"What good is a machine without the person who uses it?"

Which she happily told her colleagues as I left. I think that modern technology does so much to change our lives so quickly, and so much of it is incomprehensible without special training, that we feel like Technology is something inhuman. But the word "technology" comes from the Greek téchnē, which means "art," "skill," or "craft." Setting aside non-human tool-using (which is significant, but not our problem), Technology is the stuff we make, as humans, and it has no meaning or purpose apart from human beings. We're in charge, and if it doesn't seem like it, it's because we're looking at things all wrong. We forget how important we are, because it's scary.

For the past two nights, I've had the World's Worst-Designed Bunk Bed:

Notice that I can neither see nor manipulate things on the bed, so in the room I have nowhere to organize my stuff. Note also that the ceiling is like 11 feet tall. Who the hell needs 5ft of clearance in the bottom bunk? Luckily, tonight I'm moving to a private single room, since that's what was available. That works better with my "Cocaine and Hookers" evening plan, anyway.

For some reason, La Serena has a Japanese garden! It's small, but in a country that could give two shits about Japan, it's pretty amazing that it's here at all. This picture just screams CHILE at me:

Yes, that's a Japanese garden pond and bridge. And someone's random dog wandering around.

The ever-increasing set of La Serena photos is here at Flickr.