aaaand some more protests

So after being stood up for an advising appointment, after calling about a thousand numbers to try and take advantage of doing a few more interviews and visiting a health center that apparently doesn't seem to exist, and after carting around a banana nut bread in my backpack all day for my advisor, and after turning my outline from a half page to a 5 page monster of a document, I have decided to momentarily stop working, stop trying to academically take advantage of the moment, and recount some moments.

In my last post I wrote about my day during the protests (last thursday?), and now I will explain to you all my night. During the day things were pretty crazy, but were settling down a bit. However, at night people got riled up again, going out to a new march around 6:30pm. A bunch of friends were supposed to come over to have dinner, but with all the craziness during the day we decided to change the location to someone else's house out of the center of the city. As we left to go take the metro, I wanted to take a look at what was going on in el centro. Walking to the metro I could feel the tear gas still in the air, although the bombs hadn't been thrown recently. There were tons of students milling around in the streets and sidewalks, and tons of tanks were stationed around the street in case things started to get out of hand. To get into the metro we had to ask the guards to unlock the padlock from the gates...they were letting people out one at a time and relocking the gate between groups of people. Once we entered the metro the after effects of the tear gas really hit; I had to put more money on my metro card, and I really wished that I had done it earlier, because standing to wait for the quick transaction meant more time spent with eyes burning and prickling. The people working in the metro all wore masks and blinked away tears as they quickly helped customers.

I spent a lovely evening with friends eating machas con parmesana, baked clams with cheese, and while I'm not much of a seafood fan, I'll have to admit that those guys were pretty delicious. (However be warned, to clean those suckers you have to pull squishy, gross clam muck out of its shell...let's just say I entertained everyone with my plethora of noise effects during this cleaning process.) While preparing the machas, at 9pm, we heard as everywhere in Santiago (and all across Chile) people stepped outside of their houses to protest peacefully in the form of a cacerolazo. Basically this is a form of peaceful protest where everyone goes outside and bangs on pots and pans. (The cacerolazos happened a lot during the dictatorship.) Once we were done with the machas, Pauli and Pato offered to drive us home. Instead of stopping at the apartment, we had to stop a few blocks before because about 10 firetrucks were blocking the street. As we walked down a side street we passed La Universidad de Chile, and saw students and policemen still in action around midnight. While we stood there a student appeared out of the fog of the tear gas to throw something back at the police, and then disappeared once again. Walking towards the firetrucks we saw that a huge department store building had been burned completely down. I've seen destruction before--when a tree falls in our neighborhood and crashes through a house, or a car crash in the street--but it was so incredibly powerful and disturbing to see such distruction caused intentionally out of hatered or rage or anarchy or whatever. (The company, La Polar, has been in the news a lot recently for corruption I think, although I'm not entirely sure.) It was so shocking seeing the entire building burning down, especially because it stands less than a block away from my apartment, and I pass it every time I go to the grocery store, right across the street. It has been absolutely incredible to be in Chile during such a historic time when the students are fighting for their rights for education, but before seeing this building charred and in flames, I didn't really realize the amount of hatred that existed or how quickly protests can turn violent. During the day tons of students were taken prisoner, civilians were hurt, police officers were hurt, tons of tear gas was thrown, and millions of dollars of public property was destroyed.

Here are some videos showing the fire:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwvJxT6JMB4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqgEuOHKrlQ

And here are some of the protests:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgbAJo6-8bs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AC1GsRbUQI

For that last one if you look at minutes 00:36, 00:55, and 1:14 they all take place about 4 blocks from my apartment.

Well that's this past week's excitement in protests! This past weekend I went to the beach and it was beautiful! Now I'm spending this week trying to take advantage of doing some last studying, meeting up with friends, and enjoying my time in this wonderful city! Love to all.

Protestas!

Remember all that talk about the students protesting the shitty education system here? Well today I woke up, came downstairs to use the internet, and while in the lobby heard tons of police and emergency vehicles, sirens wailing, pulling up outside my building. I was going to go meet a friend for lunch, and when I went outside there were about 15 police cars, guanacos (giant tanks that spray water hoses at roudy people), and ambulances. As I walked towards the metro, I could feel tear gas in the air as it scratched at my eyes and throat. Once Mauri and I found each other in the chaos, we walked up the street and watched as a giant cloud of smoke, from tear gas and other fires, wafted up in front of the main building of la Universidad de Chile. Today there was a march in the morning, and it ended up turning violent (like many of them do), but this one continued through the day. Protests, authorized and unauthorized, are ocurring today throughout the country: in Santiago, Valparaíso, Concepción, Copiapó. Violence has continued throughout the day, and from what I've been reading, the police have not been acting appropriately, and many people have been injured and imprisoned for their actions. One websited says that around 1pm today, a police officer dropped a tear gas bomb in the metro, making it hard for people to breathe. As my apartment is sandwiched between the la Moneda Palace (house of government) and la universidad de Chile's main campus, Mauri and I were forced to walk into the neighborhood, away from the drama. After eating, we walked back towards the main road, right across from La U de Chile. We were on the other side from where most of the drama tends to take place, but as we were walking, students started to run towards us, away from the advancing guanaco. I don't know why they started moving the guanaco towards the students (it didn't seem like they were actually doing anything) but all of a sudden we were in the middle of running students and an advancing tank. Mauri and I ran in the opposite direction, out of the reach of the hoses just before they started spraying water violently at the students. Being in the middle of this has been amazing and sort of horrifying. It's crazy that the government has been acting this way, and resorting to such extreme messures to deal with education reform. Today president Piñera's rating fell to only 26%. (Check out this website: http://www.elciudadano.cl/2011/08/04/santiago-amanecio-con-barricadas-y-el-centro-esta-sitiado/ ) It's been amazing, however, to see the students organize together and fight for their rights to a just education. Needless to say, today I did not follow my plans of going out to the university to study after lunch.