Places to find a trail...

While riding in Santiago might not strike all as being the best thing to do with your afternoon, there are several enjoyable places to ride. A favorite of mine is to ride down Grecia avenue, which will take you through a varied urban environment. Potholes, rough curbs, lots of cement, street dogs, micros, and too many pedestrians. However, when you hit Tobalaba, make a quick turn and everything is worth it. Long stretches of uninterrupted trail lie for those who want to use it. Sure, it isn't a nice single track trail, but it hits the spot when you just need to get on the bike and do some peddling.

For the bicycle...

So I had the chance to see Chile's first film festival exclusively dedicated to the bicycle. It featured several Chilean documentaries as well as three from New York. It was a pretty good selection, from bike messengers, to hardcore tricksters who jump from rock to rock next to the crashing waves of the ocean. There were some really cool titles. Check out the sponsoring organization, Contra Pedal.

Where will the musicians go?

One of Santiago's most notable characteristics is the yellow micro. Like them or hate them, they are a fundamental thread of what makes this city. It is difficult to find a place where you can't hear one, see one, or smell one. They swarm the streets, fill the air with smog, drive to fast, but yet get you to where you want to go.

The privatized system in use currently is a disaster, and the new system, though well appreciated, doesn't appear to be much better. Sure, the buses are new, run well, the drivers receive some sort of training, they are more regulated when it comes to stops, and (I hope) safety.

What isn't clear is how they will manage the quantity of traffic once the yellow micros have been phased out. One only needs to stand at escuela militar and try to get to Vitacura during rush hour to see that it is metro that needs to be extended even more before the number of buses can be reduced. However, the biggest flaw in the new TransSantiago is the prohibition against vendors and musicians on these green buses.

The vendors and musicians that ride the yellow micros are what give Santiago a nice twist of character. They provide a bit of amusement on an otherwise uncomfortable and usually boring ride. Where will these people go? Especially the musicians, where will you be able to hear some folklorica on your way to work?

On the internet...

There is always a selection of expositions, plays, film festivals, concerts, and other entertainment throughout Santiago.

One good place to explore a bit if you have the chance is sitios.cl, it is definitely one of the better directories on the web for all things Chilean. Sometimes it takes a bit of poking around but there is a lot on there that can help.

The Peso....

I remember once upon a time when money had real meaning to me. A dollar was a dollar, it was as natural as the wind. The only meaning that the word inflation carried for me at that point was what you did to a balloon, or maybe a tire. I didn’t give foreign currencies much thought either. The fact that money had different values in different countries didn’t enter into the equation, a dollar was a dollar.

While this concept eroded over time, it was mainly intact shortly before coming to Chile. Sure I knew that money was nothing more than some concept that some how people had figured out, manipulated and managed to use to their advantage. I had taken a variety of mandatory economics classes throughout my high school and college years, but economics was a concept and had no place in my practical world. Most calculations I made were simple subtractions, and a very few additions.

Then I met the peso, and my one dollar was multiplied to 600 something. Then things got weird and the dollar dropped, it was worth less pesos, but what does that mean? I sometimes read the economic pages, maybe nod my head a bit and pretend to understand. I’m not fooling anyone however, all I can do is recite numbers and figures without really knowing what I’m talking about.

I read Bloomberg.com and come across something like this:

"The peso weakened 0.3 percent to 532.4 at 10:13 a.m. New York time. It has gained 9.7 percent in the past 12 months, the second-best performance against the dollar among 61 currencies tracked by Bloomberg."

Now at face value it is easy, but how on earth did this Peso weaken, who decided this? Please, where are you, the economics guru who reads the business pages like a novel, hit that comment button and educate the rest of us who just try to make more additions to our financial holdings then subtractions and are confounded by that.