21 June 2010

Hola!

I write today from Santiago, having been asked to come down for meetings on Monday (today). This has neatly (or unfortunately, I can't decide which) coincided with Chile's second game for the world cup, against Switzerland. The local population is, as expected, completely enraptured with the prospect of the game. Local TV coverage is at near saturation levels, the streets are not quite deserted, but much quieter now the game is on than they were earlier in the morning. The hotel I am staying it has at least five large screen TV's in the foyer / bar / dining room area, all surrounded by varying numbers of hotel staff and guests. The staff are doing their best to look vaguely busy, but it is obviously a challenging exercise to polish the same three tables in front of the TV for the length of the entire game!

The centre of the city has (apparently) a large screen on which the game is being played. This has drawn a substantial crowd and what looked suspiciously like live TV footage of the area this morning featured smoke bombs, youth throwing stuff, a large police presence and all of that sort of stuff. It looks like there will be rioting if the team wine, lose or draw, so let's hope all ends well.

I appear to have three meetings this morning;

1. With my boss, who is down from the US to sign the final JV arrangements with Mariana. It will then be official.


2. With the lawyers who are handling my work visa


3. With the local Ernst & Young people, who are handling my local tax arrangements, whatever they might be. I was rather hoping to remain completely ignorant of all of their concerns and the machinations involved with international tax, but it seems I can't escape it.

The meeting with the lawyers will be interesting. I'm still waiting on one document from Australia - a transcript of my uni results. Not sure when that will arrive, having been ordered a few weeks ago, but I suppose it will get here soon enough. The original version I have is tucked up neatly in a box in my storage unit, safe and secure, and completely unable to be located without removing 80% of the stuff in the unit. Hmmm, not so smart after all...

Oops, looks like Chile have just scored a goal - only to be denied because three of their players were offside. No sound of wailing from the locals, although being on the 7th floor might mean that I'm insulated from that.

So, what else has been happening;

• Over the weekend I tried to end the drought of "dips" in my life by making hommus / hummus, whatever you like to call it. Searching the internet produced a couple of recipes that I thought I'd have a crack at, however there appeared to be two small problems. The first was that it required a blender. OK, so I can solve that one easily enough with a trip to the local Jumbo and make an addition to the "Thomas" family of appliances.



• Second appeared to be more fundamental. For those who don't know, a significant component to hommus is Tahini. Hmmm, trying to find tahini at the supermarket, looking, looking, but no good. Lizette thought that there should be some there somewhere, but it wasn't looking good. I managed to find sesame seeds and was going to make my own, but then, by sheer dumb luck, stumbled across an area of the supermarket that seems to be for miscellaneous stuff that doesn't obviously fit in any of the "normal" aisles. Lo and behold, there was tahini, along with nachos salsa, soy sauce, garlic paste, and a few other things I can't currently remember.
  
• So, ploughing ahead with the whole hommus-making thing, I was having a great old time with the blender until smoke started issuing from the base of it, which of course necessitated my frantically trying to find the off-switch. It's funny how, even when you know where things are, a little bit of panic tends to render all that knowledge a little less useful. It seems that I didn't have enough liquid in there - more of a thick paste was happening, which was all a bit too much for Thomas the Blender's little electrical heart to deal with. Live and learn... Anyway, once I'd sorted out the liquid side of things and cranked Thomas the Blender up again, we were away. The end result is OK - I think I overdid the tahini due to a lack of measuring devices, but it's probably fair enough that I didn't get it absolutely perfect first time around.
  
• So, now that I had some hommus, and still having plenty of chickpeas left over, what else could I do? While looking for the hommus recipe, I'd seen a related link to a recipe for "baba ganoush" - not currently 100% sure of the spelling of that. Basically, it is a version of hommus that contains eggplant. OK, on with the baba ganoush then. Nowhere near as much excitement with Blender smoke, and perhaps a reasonably similar outcome. A bit too much tahini again, but still pretty tasty.

Having finished with the cooking, I thought I'd venture into the outside world and go for a drive, this time heading north ('ish) of Copiapo. There is a road heading to the east of the main road that goes to Argentina, over the Paseo de San Francisco. Apparently the road is quite rough on the Chilean side, but as soon as you cross the border, it becomes a nice sealed road. I was never going to make it that far today, but thought that exploring a bit of the road might be interesting, particularly as I had recently discovered that there was snow on the mountains not too far to the east.

Heading along the road to the Pass, and it being relatively late in the day, I decided to save that adventure for another time and take one of the minor roads (definitely a road less travelled) heading to the southeast. From the dodgy map I had, it appeared that this road would ultimately take me the back way into the Nevado Tres Cruces National Park. Again, I was never going to get there on the day, but exploring part of the road on the way in looked like good entertainment, particularly if I could get bit of altitude and be amongst the snow.

As it turned out, the road continued up the ever narrowing valley, winding its way amongst the mountain spurs, me wondering whether I was on the right track, as surely the road would end shortly. I ended up chickening out when the track began to get really dodgy. No point being bogged in some remote valley at 5pm Saturday afternoon. I'll just come better prepared next time and keep going. As usual, the scenery is stunning in this part of the world, with my photo's being a relatively poor representation of what is really there. I'll keep trying though...

That will do for now. Regards to all.

A