getting back, more Chile recounting

It's been a rough few weeks, but hopefully I can finish up the tales of Chilean adventure soon. I'm a little afraid of wrapping it up, because then it's over.

After my nap following the trip to Tatio, we interviewed Señor Jaime and a couple of his grandkids for Allison's class. He sat and talked with us for half an hour, covering everything from the Spanish conquest to the dictatorship, and wrapping it all around his own and his family's life. He is from Antofagasta and when his and his wife's five kids grew up and went away, they renovated the family house in San Pedro to take in travellers and fill their empty nest.

Allison also got a couple of the grandkids to talk on tape. The boy was easy, the little girl, not so much. When her brother brought her to us, she was bawling. Eventually Allison was able to convince her there's no harm in talking on video and she snuffled and smiled and nodded for us.

Later we got lunch and bought some gifts. I think this was the day of the silent waitress. We walked into some place and the two women in there did not speak a word. One pointed at a table on the patio out back. It looked pretty nice. She came up and handed us menus. She stood silently. Eventually we just said what we wanted and she walked away. A German Shepherd dog came and went with a deflated soccer ball in his mouth. The woman came back with food and set it down. Later she came to clean the bathroom near us. We ate in total silence and left. This was weird. It was like we'd pissed her off by coming in her restaurant. No wonder nobody else was there. Of course, at this late date of remembering, this lunch may have happened the following day, but whatever. It was still weird and uncomfortable. It was the first and only time we felt unwelcome in San Pedro.

We were going out again, to see the stars this time, and it was going to be cold. I put on every piece of clothing I'd brought. This was a pair of cords under a pair of jeans. Two t-shirts, Two regular shirts, two sweaters, a pullover and a jacket, two pairs of socks and two hats. I was not going to be cold again.

We walked into town again to catch the bus to this guy's backyard observatory. Turned out our guide from Tatio, Eduardo the Argentinian, was also on this tour but as a tourist. A guy showed up at the office and started leading us away. He didn't say anything, we just followed him and got on another bus. I thought PLEASE let this ride not be very long. It wasn't. Just about 20 minutes later, if that, we pulled up into the yard of a house on the outskirts of San Pedro. Basically the suburbs. It was pitch black, a new moon, and we went inside the house.

This French guy and his wife host tourists and show them the sky from their several telescopes in the yard. We went inside and they asked whether we'd like hot chocolate or tea after our look at the heavens. Their house had a round common room in the middle with a dome and a hole in it. We sat around the room lit by one candle while he explained about the universe. This tour was all in Spanish, though he did switch to English occasionally for me and an Australian woman who didn't know what a "satellite" is. I followed some of it, basically the universe is big.

We went outside to the telescopes. I was happy to be wearing all of my clothes. We looked through the many telescopes. There were lots... LOTS of stars. He told us how many, but I forget. A lot. He was a real funny guy, in that funny worldly French guy way. Apparently the number one question he gets, while talking about the nature of stars and galaxies and constellations and astrononmy, is "where did you get your laser pointer?" His green laser pointer could pick out STARS. It was really awesome.

So he helped all of us take photos of Jupiter with our little digital cameras. We saw double galaxies, planets, the Milky Way, the Southern Cross, other constellations. He explained how all of it works, how the world rotates, how and why what we see here in the northern hemisphere can't be seen in the southern, and vice versa.

He showed us the Inca constellations, the llama, and I think an eyeball thing. The way you spot the Southern Cross, as opposed to all the other crosses made by stars, is that it's pointed to by the leg of the Incan llama in the Milky Way. There's also a dark spot in the Milky Way that's some kind of cloud. He talked about how we can't really describe or even conceive of the size of the universe, because conceiving of something requires us to think of it as finite. Something like that, it was really deep. He talked about how we were actually not looking at stars in space, but in time. Anyone on one of those many many planets out there looking at us would be seeing the dinosaurs because they are so far away. This trip was kind of blowing my mind.

Having seen all these stars in such a humongous universe... I really find it impossible to believe in a god who is extremely concerned that men have beards or whether gays can marry each other. I am absolutely positive that there's more complexity to everything than any fire and brimstone preacher of any faith can answer for.

We watched the stars for a while, then went inside for hot chocolate, then back home. The night was beautiful.