Deep South

We are racing toward the end of term, and the end of the year. Our southern hemisphere school year follows the calendar year. So school life is full of exams, events and finishing things. And there is quite a bit to plan for 2010 too.

The other day I travelled to a meeting of school heads in a town in the extreme south of Chile. For more details and a few photographs, follow this link to Punta Arenas.

Tennis

This is the tennis club at the end of my street, where I receive coaching each week. An ATP event was held here in October featuring some leading professionals from Chile and Argentina including Nicolas Massu, Paul Capdevilli and Juan Ignacio Chela. So whist they played amazing tennis on centre court, I was on court 12 putting smashes into the net and volleys wide of the tram lines. But this is a great place to play with beautiful clay courts beneath views of the towering Andes. And occasionally, I get the ball in.

    

   

And here are a couple more pictures from my balcony, one spring evening late in October.

  

Rio de los Cipreses

I spent part of last weekend hiking and camping in the Reserva Nacional Rio de los Cipreses, where I met a fox. To read more and see some pictures, click on Dances with Zorros.

If it is a while since you visited my blog you may have missed photographs from my recent trip to Ecuador.

And now, a short diversion into Chilean sport. If you have no interest the World Cup qualifiers or Davis Cup tennis, stop reading and follow the links above to look at my photographs. But for the rest of us…

This week Chile qualified for the World Cup Finals in South Africa. And they did it in style, with a 4-2 victory away in Colombia in their penultimate qualifying game (which are known locally as eliminatadores). The team refused to play safe by conservatively seeking the one point they needed, but played an open attacking game throughout the 90 minutes. In doing so gave away a soft goal to trail 1-0 after an abysmal misunderstanding between goalkeeper and defender. But two goals in a minute gave the Chileans a 2-1 half-time lead. In the second half Colombia equalised amidst entertaining goalmouth mayhem following a corner and for a while they attacked strongly, needing a win to keeping alive their own hopes of qualification. But in pushing forward the Colombians left spaces at the back and Chile scored twice on the break for (in the end) a comfortable 4-2 win. That’s a decent result away from home in a World Cup qualifier, particularly when the home side also need the points. And in their final qualifier Chile beat Ecuador 1-0 in Santiago. Look out for the Chileans in South Africa.

It is relatively hard for the lower-ranking countries to qualify from the South American group. Unlike Europe where there are several groups, all the teams in South America play in one large league. Currently the top four qualify and the fifth team enters a playoff, although in the past it has been fewer. Almost always, Brazil and Argentina take two of the places, leaving only two more for countries like Colombia, Paraguay, Ecuador, Uruguay and Chile to fight over. This time the top three places went to Brazil, Paraguay and Chile. Argentina secured the fourth qualifying berth by winning their final two games. And that left Uruguay in fifth, facing a play-off against Costa Rica on 14th and 18th November.

For two tournaments, the Chilean team was actually banned from entering the qualifying tournament. In a match in Brazil in 1989, a firework was thrown from the crowd into the Chilean penalty area and the goalkeeper fell to the ground holding his face. The team left the pitch (taking their goalkeeper with them) and refused to continue. Later, video evidence showed that the firework had not touched the goalkeeper and that he had faked being injured. The match was awarded to Brazil, and Chile were suspended from the World Cup for both 1990 and 1994.

Chile is not a team I would immediately associate with the world cup finals but, perhaps surprisingly, this is the eighth finals for which they have qualified; quite a few of these, however, were during the early years of the competition. They were one of the thirteen nations represented in the very first Mundial which took place not far from here, in Uruguay in 1930. England, amongst many others, did not enter this first tournament. Chile qualified again in 1950, 1962 and 1966, achieving their best ever position of third place on home soil in 1962. They qualified in 1974 because the Soviet Union refused to face them in a play-off as the Kremlin wished to express their reservations about the political direction of the dictatorship here. Bizarrely, the Chileans kicked off the match in an empty stadium, scored a goal, and then waited for the Soviet team to restart. Which of course they didn’t, because they were back home in Moscow drinking vodka. And Chile also qualified for the finals in 1982, 1998 and now, 2010.

Which means that, until this week, Chile had only qualified for one tournament in the last twenty-seven years, and as a result there are quite a lot of young people for whom this is a rare event, and really rather exciting. So following the victory in Colombia, the good people of Santiago went slightly crazy and emptied onto the streets, cheering and waving flags. It is not long since the ‘Dieci-Ocho’ (September 18th, the national day in Chile) during which it is compulsory to display a flag outside your home, so flags are in good supply. Young men in cars paraded along the avenues approaching the city centre, some standing though the sunroof like the statue of liberty, and tooting horns merrily.

The weekend of the Dieci-Ocho happened to be the weekend of the recent round of David Cup tennis matches, when no-so-Great Britain lost to Poland and were relegated to Division Nine where they can play beginners’ games against tennis giants such as French Polynesia, the Faroes and the Vatican. That same weekend Chile also faced a relegation tie, but from the World Group. Quite a lot of Spanish-speaking countries are quite successful in tennis. Spain itself has more players in the ATP men’s top 100 than any other nation. And in general the Spanish speakers prefer playing on clay. The home side in a Davis Cup tie chooses the surface, and Spain and most of the Spanish-type countries will almost always choose clay, which makes it difficult for the non-clay-experts from, in this case, Austria.

I attended the final day of the tournament with a friend, at which point Chile were leading 2-1 with two matches remaining. The matches were held in the Medialuna in Rancagua, a city 100km to the South of Santiago. Medialuna can mean three things; it means half-moon, and it also is the name given to a croissant, but to most Chileans Medialuna means a Rodeo stadium. Rodeo is a sport in which a pair of cowboys on horseback gang up on an unsuspecting cow and push it fairly hard into a wall. There may be more to it than that, but this is what it looks like to me. Like many arts and sports it is probably more interesting and nuanced if you understand what is going on.

So the tennis match was played in this Medialuna. How do you play tennis in a semicircle? Well, once the Rodeo kit is cleared away the stadium is in fact circular, and of reasonably appropriate dimensions for a tennis court to be placed in the centre. And of course, the surface was clay. Or clay mixed with a few cowpats, anyway.

So the Austrians had the Chilean team against them, they had the clay surface against them, and they had a seriously patriotic crowd against them. As I said, these matches were being played on Chile’s national weekend and the crazy fervour of Chilean nationalism was at its annual peak. Chilean flags were everywhere, the crowd sang, clapped, cheered every point, performed an endless wave around the circular stadium, and despite the best efforts of the umpire they just would not be quiet. Again and again the umpire asked for quiet whilst the points were played; but they were not interested in being quiet, these spectators were there to party.

Other than football that I have already mentioned, Chile does not have a history of sporting success, but tennis is the exception. The only Olympic gold medals that have ever been won by Chilean competitors have been in tennis, by Fernando González and Nicolás Massú. So there was no way that this crowd was going to behave in a sedate manner for these two matches, with their arteries full of Pisco and their heroes before them in the gladiators’ ring. More than once an official spoke over the public address system, berating the crowd for their bad behaviour and imploring them not to shout out during play. But it made little difference. They cheered points won. They screamed at unforced errors. They applauded double-faults. They sounded their horns during the Austrians’ serves. It was entertaining, a little embarrassing, and loud.

And both matches were long. The tie lasted long long into the night. Play eventually finished close to three in the morning. Austria won the first match in four sets, levelling the tie at 2-2. And finally, the Chileans emerged victorious in the fifth set of the final match. Austria relegated. Team Chile survives to compete another season in the World Group. Unlike Great Britain. And the Vatican.

There was a great deal of interest here in the Uruguay v Argentina football game on Wednesday. If Uruguay had won, that would have pushed Argentina down to fifth place in the South American group, outside the automatic qualification places. And some Chileans even said to me that they hoped Chile would lose to Ecuador, because Ecuador could have overtaken Argentina too, and Argentina would then have been eliminated. In the event, neither of those things happened, but it was interesting to note the intensity of the rivalry with our Argentine neighbours. And back home in England, we have a fair amount of history with the Argentineans too. I imagine the game was shown on TV in the small hours of the night. I saw that it was covered on the BBC Website Live Text. Perhaps you have sometimes wondered who reads those Live Text match updates. The answer: I do. They are great for me, especially for evening games. For example, Champions League midweek fixtures kick off at 2:45pm Chilean time (or 3:45pm now we have put our clocks forward) so I am still at work. So whilst I sit at my desk (working very hard, of course) the computer keeps me in touch with the scores and the action. It is excellent.

There was a ludicrous red card at the end of the Colombia v Chile match. With 93 minutes played, a fed-up Colombian chopped away the ankles of the Chilean left winger. So the Chilean rolled around on the touchline for a while and two Colombians approached for a friendly chat. One of them bounced the ball on his head, and the other pulled at the back of his shirt collar. So he sat up and pushed one of them on the knee, and suddenly chaos reigned free, and a large number of red and yellow shirts squared up to each other. It was all very dramatic and exciting. The referee, who had been hopeless throughout, must have felt that action was necessary (lest he have his competency reviewed by FIFA) so he decided to send off the Chilean winger. Red card for pushing a guy on the knee; the guy who just took your ankles and then bounced a ball on your head. Then play restarted and within seconds the referee blew the whistle for full time. A sending off seconds from the end, for pushing a guy on the knee. Nice one.

Anyway, I don’t really care. There are more important things to worry about, and football is a rubbish game anyway. I don’t suppose I’ll watch much of the World Cup. There will be lots of overpaid prima donnas falling over, and regular displays of incompetent refereeing. I am glad the tournament is being held for the first time in Africa, but I can’t see why South Africa was chosen over equally deserving countries like, for example, The Gambia. The Gambia has a large number of football stadia, some of which can hold up to four hundred people (mostly standing). One pitch even has grass and is quite flat. And there are good quality hotels within easy reach of the airport, and no shortage of taxi drivers who will run you around for a few dalasi. If I was choosing a country to host a major international tournament I would pick The Gambia over South Africa every time. They held the Miss Black America contest last year, and that went pretty well. Slightly more seriously though, I suspect that both transport logistics and safety could become major issues for supporters who travel to watch their teams in South Africa next June and July. I hope I am wrong.

The Africa teams will be strong in this tournament, but none appear to be peaking at the right time. I don’t foresee an African team repeating the success of Cameroon in 1990 and Senegal in 2002. In my opinion, the strongest Africa team of the last twenty years were the Zambian squad who were tragically killed in a plane crash en route to a match in 1993. The Ghanaians are quite good (and have just won the Under-20s World Cup) and Cote d’Ivoire might cause a few surprises. The Egyptians have been very strong in recent years but to qualify they will have to beat Algeria by three goals in their final game on 14th November, and in any case they are not really African of course. And South Africa? Sorry lads, I can’t see it; not this time. No, if I was seeking an imaginative wager this time, I would be picking one of the Asian teams. How about a few Pesos on North Korea to reach the semi-finals? As for the South Americans, I predict that Paraguay will knock out one of the fancied European teams. And I have a nasty feeling that Chile will meet England somewhere along the way, and an equally uneasy feeling about the outcome.

And before I finish lets hear a big cheer for the city of Rio de Janeiro which has been awarded the honour of hosting the Summer Olympics in 2016. That’s here in this continent! Well done Rio! Hands up if you were secretly pleased when Chicago was eliminated in the first round of voting?! The Olympics were held in the USA in 1984 and 1996; why can’t they just stand aside and let someone else have a turn? Hurrah for Rio.

Don’t forget these recent stories and pictures:

Dances with Zorros

Ecuador

Two Hemispheres

Last month I travelled to Ecuador, a country that straddles the equator in the northern bit of this continent. Follow this link for a brief account and some photographs of Ecuador.

    

In the next few days, world qualification for South Africa 2010 will become a lot clearer, including in the South American group. The Chilean team (who don’t often qualify for the finals) need just a point from two tough games to make sure of their place, away in Columbia on Saturday followed by a home game with Ecuador next Wednesday. Follow this link to check the results and table on the FIFA website.

We will also see what happens to Argentina, who amusingly may fail to qualify (though in reality they will probably be fine because they finish with a couple of easy games). Top 4 qualify, and the team in fifth place faces a play-off, probably against Costa Rica or Honduras. In South America, Brazil and Paraguay have already qualified, and the remaining two-and-a-half places are still within reach for Chile, Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela and Colombia.

Photos from the Air

Yesterday I flew from Quito to Santiago (via Lima). I had a two-week break in Ecuador, which I will write a little more about soon. On my return journey I sat by the window in both planes, and enjoyed some fantastic views of the Andes and the west coast of this continent. Follow this link to see some of my flight pictures.

Now I return to work for the final trimester of the year. At the end of last trimester, the school celebrated its anniversary with two days of competitions, activities and parties. Lots of crazy fun and no lessons. In the previous week we ran a solidarity lunch, a simple rice meal in place of the regular menu, with the money saved going to support our partner school in a poor district of the city.

Spring is arriving; I am pleased to see the back of winter. Buildings here are not designed for a cold climate, and my house is very difficult to heat. Santiago’s other problem in winter is the increase of smog. It is a very visible illustration of the pollution that an industrial city produces. Santiago sits it a bowl between the Andes and the coastal range, and a cloud of fumes accumulates over the city. Visibility is much improved after rainfall, which washes the sky and deposits the grime on cars and windows below. Over the next few weeks, spring breezes will blow the smog out of the bowl, so that somebody else can breathe our pollution instead.

The Justin Quiz

Later this month I will pass an age-related milestone.

In honour of this fact, I have written a quiz on the last 40 years.

You can download it here…

The Justin Quiz

And here are the solutions…

The Justin Quiz Answers

Dentist

I am having some repairs made to my teeth. It’s Mrs Thatcher’s fault. When she introduced a charge for dental appointments I stopped going. A little short-sighted perhaps, but I had never previously required any treatment. As if I was going to pay £20 for a 90-second check-up to tell me everything was fine. I felt that I had always been pretty handy with a toothbrush, and I saw no reason that this was likely to change. That was before I started eating biltong. Stringy bits of sun-dried meat stuck between my teeth, and no dental check-ups; it was a downward spiral from there. I should have flossed more often.

When I moved to The Gambia, my organisation insisted on a dental check before departure. Oh dear. So my Slovenian dentist in Chelmsford did her best, and sent me off to Africa with amalgam in my molars (only two of them – I still have lots of beautiful healthy teeth too!). But the Slovenian handiwork fell apart in the African sun and I asked a Sierra Leonian gentleman replace my fillings, which seemed to work well until a few weeks ago when a small nagging pain kept me awake at night. At that point I called in the services of a Chilean dentist, who said lots of rude things about my African fillings and told me I had something resembling a zoo deep down in my roots. He forbade me to do anything or go anywhere, and insisted that work must start immediately. But then he caught Pig Flu and needed four weeks off, so I ignored his stern instructions and took a holiday in the Atacama Desert with a super-strength bottle of Listerine and some aspirin.

Now I have been back to Dr Araya a few times; lots of times actually. He has given the two infected teeth four sessions apiece of cleaning and swilling and drilling and we have had lots of fun together. All this is preparatory work, apparently. When it is all clean and the bacteria have packed their bags and gone away, then he will send me to another dentist who will build new tooth-bits for me and stick them on with super-glue.

Dental technology has come a long way since I was under the care of Mr Kay in Brockenhurst. At the beginning of an appointment here in Santiago, Dr Araya asks me what music I would like to listen to, and between the two of us we choose a CD. Usually we go for Café del Mar or some similar Chilled Ibiza style offering. Then he fits a kind of green elastic trampoline-type device to my mouth, isolating the one tooth he wishes to work on. He uses about six different chemicals to wash and clean and disinfect. He prods about with proddy devices, and scrapes inside the canal with a tiny file. Then he puts an electrode in the root canal, and either smiles or frowns depending on the frequency of the beeps. And best of all, I get to watch the whole thing live on a digital TV monitor. The dentist asks me questions and I make noises in response. It is hard to speak Spanish when you have a trampoline in your mouth.

My Kay never had any of these clever things, I am fairly sure. But I never had any treatment with him, so I cannot be certain. I think he was called My Kay, and I think he was Scottish. But it was a long time ago, you see, and I might be mistaken. Perhaps he was a Russian infiltrator known only as Mr K. He could have been Mr Kuznetsov or Mr Kalashnikov. Or it may be that his New Forest dental practice was a front for a much more sinister Cold War operation, fitting tracking devices to the teeth of innocent primary-school children.

So that’s my tooth story. I hope your teeth are well. Mine will be soon.

Los Queñes Trip

So the Chilean hockey team are not doing so well in Boston. Click here for the latest results and pool standings. But at least they have not lost any matches by an entire innings.

In July I spent a long weekend up in the mountains 200km South of Santiago. Follow this link for some photographs, and to read about my short break in Los Queñes.

Six months

Six months ago today I boarded a plane to Santiago de Chile. And six months ago tomorrow, I arrived. So that’s a medio-anniversario for me.

Three of our students are away in Boston, representing Chile in the Women’s Hockey Junior World Cup. We are the only school (as far as I know) with three students in the squad, which makes us very orgulloso. And two of our ex-alumnos are there too, so we make up pretty-much half the first team. This makes our school senior squad rather formidable, and they have already picked up a couple of trophies this season.

The first match for our Chilean team is on Monday, against reigning champions South Korea. They will also play France (Tuesday) and England (Thursday) in Pool A. Full match schedule (pdf). Boston is in the same time zone as Santiago, in case that was worrying you.

Roof

I recently spent three days on the roof.

My school organises a number of social action projects. One of these took place last week. A group of staff, parents and ex-alumnos accompanied 120 of our older students on a house-renovation project in one of the more deprived poblaciones of Santiago. This is a country of great contrasts between rich and poor, and some of the basic housing is very simple, and speculatively constructed. Each year we help with repairs to a number of houses in this district. This year we divided into teams and worked on 15 roofs. Working with the family, my team removed the old leaky roof from the rear half of a small wooden house, and replaced it with new beams and metal corrugate. Then we added a chipboard ceiling below, and polystyrene insulation between.

We were fortunate with the climate. It is winter here in Chile, and the day before we started, heavy rain flooded parts of Santiago. But for the three days we worked we benefited from clear skies and bright sunshine. We spent the evenings together in a neighbourhood school where we shared dinner, and students led us in activities designed to promote reflection on the work we had done, on poverty, on opportunity and privilege and on the social differences that exist in our city. And for these two nights we slept on classroom floors. Well, the word ‘slept’ is an exaggeration; think for a moment how much sleeping goes on when there are 120 teenagers spending the night in one place.

There are a number of projects like this in Chile. One of the major national charities is called Un Techo para Chile and the founder of this organisation, Jesuit priest Padre Felipe Berríos addressed our students on our second evening.