New York City.... roar!

In an attempt to celebrate Amanda's return from Chile and the end of Kris' seclusion, we took a trip to a place as different from the Atacama Desert as possible and in which it is practically impossible to find oneself alone: New York City. We went as part of an organized excursion through Cornell, so transportation to and from the city and tickets for The Lion King were all included in one convenient package...
decidedly convenient, since we did not have to worry about driving, parking, or staying awake on the way home. Our only tasks were not to get lost between noon and 6pm and to successfully navigate the maybe four city blocks between where the bus dropped us off and picked us up at the end of the day.

Soon after arriving at the bus at six in the morning, we quickly noticed that we were the only people not over the age of forty or under the age of ten. While I was wondering whether this was a reflection of the audience base for the show we were going to see, Kris made the probably more accurate supposition that we are probably the only students who bother to read the flyers posted in our buildings. The bus ride was relatively uneventful, excluding perhaps a pit-stop at a McDonalds, an amusing "do not pee while standing" sign in the bus bathroom, and the truly terrible film "The Astronaut Farmer."

After frantically climbing off the bus to hopefully save our driver from a mob of angry taxi drivers for stopping on a busy street, we pulled out our little map to find out where we were. Before the map was all the way out, however, Kris simply pointed in the general "up" direction and said "I think we're in Time Square." Well, no wonder the taxi drivers had been so angry. After taking the obligatory pictures (see below) we headed out in search of food in the two hours we had before the start of the show.






Trying to find a lunch option beyond the chains like the Hard Rock Cafe and ESPN Zone and numerous carts selling various types of meat impaled on small skewers we saw another icon of Time Square: the Naked Cowboy. As you can see below, he is not, in fact, naked, as full nudity would probably not only result in a somewhat forceful removal, but would also likely massively decrease the number of people (particularly young women) who stop to take pictures with him. I guess a cowboy hat, underwear, boots, and a guitar define the line between "bold and cool" and "inappropriate and creepy" on Time Square.



Eventually we came across a restaurant that had caught Kris' eye from the bus window. Though the picture below is somewhat obscured by vans, I think you can see why. Despite arriving directly in the middle of lunch rush, Kris were seated within a minute, given water and menus within two, and had an expectant waitress waiting for our orders by the third. Before seeing what anyone around us was eating, we had decided to split a meal and get a piece of the glorious-looking cheesecake we had seen in the window, but after the first towering and steaming plate passed us by, we were very grateful that we had made that decision. Four minutes after ordering our table was covered by coleslaw, pickles, a generous piece of cheesecake, and what can only be described as a Reuben of epic proportions (see below). For those of you saying "hey, Amanda, I thought you were lactose intolerant," my answer is simply, "some things are just worth eating." Even pausing to have the waitress take our photo, we were done with our meal 18 minutes after sitting down.


Maxie's Restaurant from across the street


Inside the restaurant


Gigantic reuben


Glorious triple chocolate brownie cheesecake

With happy bellies, a giant take out container stuffed in Amanda's bag, and feelings of awe at the efficiency-to-satisfaction ratio of our recent meal, we set back out to look around a few stores before heading to the theater. The highlight (and most photogenic) was the three-story Toys-R-Us ... in this case I think it is best to let the photos do the talking.


Not actually outside of Toys-R-Us, but a nice view of the street


Ferris wheel inside Toys-R-Us


Lego Empire State Building, complete with King Kong


Some more giant lego creations


Rexie


Amanda expressing her long-held feelings about this Candyland character


Kris showing his ability to match the powers of Spiderman

After indulging each or our not-so-inner-child, we headed to the theater to take our seats. As there are no photos allowed in the theater this part of the entry will be relatively brief. I know it sounds cheesy and like a bunch of people running around dressed up as animals and breaking out into song for no apparent reason, but The Lion King is a really unique and extremely enjoyable show. If you haven't seen it, you haven't seen anything like it... guaranteed. With seats in row L, our view was fantastic and the brilliance of the costume and set design was impossible not to appreciate.

Extremely content, we made our way to Bryant Park to meet the bus. Though the majority of people on our trip tried to cram as much shopping and tourist-ing as possible into this time, we had had our fill of crowds, noise, and impending-doom style traffic. Sitting at a table under the trees we enjoyed the breeze, watched a few ruthless games of Pentaque (kind of like bocce, but not), and ate the remainder of our lunch, the leftovers of which made a hefty dinner in themselves.









Eventually the bus arrived and we bent ourselves as comfortably as possible into our seats in hope of sleeping on the way home, but the under-ten crowd, another McDonalds pit-stop, and an epic-but-losing battle with the DVD player left us without much sleep. Though we were falling on our faces (and getting up at five the next morning to drive to Cleveland) we agreed that the day had been very much well spent.


This photo didn't really fit neatly anywhere into the blog, but it needed to be included. Yes, that billboard is actually advertising for "TruBlood: the Synthetic Blood Nourishment Beverage" ... I don't know how you feel about this, but they are quite clear in expressing the sentiment that "Real Blood is for Suckers"... well, the next time I get the urge to drink blood, I'll be glad to know that there is a delectable synthetic alternative....

Summer without Amanda (frown)

Hi. This is my (Kris's) summary of my experience while Amanda was in Chile.

It sucked... That's it.

Ok. See you next blog.

Well not actually. It's true that it was quite a difficult time. There is nothing more depressing than a silent and empty apartment, so I became quite familiar with my Pandora internet radio stations (http://www.pandora.com/) and took a lot of time for myself in the evenings to watch movies and even paint and draw some. In all, it was a very loooooong time, but I guess I survived pretty well.

As many people already know, after our second semester I began frantically prepare for the World Congress on Computations Mechanics 2008 (WCCM8). This was made more exciting by the fact that I was to present my research in front of a large group of experts only a month and a half after I started the project. Needless to say, after Amanda shipped out, I was a research machine. My project is on the 3D fragmentation of materials using a method called Molecular Dynamics. It is exciting because nobody has done 3D simulations of fragmentation before (basically) and that it can apply to the atomic scale, where the processes of crack growth and branching truly originate. What I do is make a big system of atoms (organized grid of dots with some mass) and pull on them really fast and watch them shatter. I then count the fragments and measure their size. It is commonly believed that fragment size distributions are scale independent, so my results could also apply to events like the expansion of the universe, to ballistic impacts. Anyway, my time quickly ran out, and I nervously boarded my first trans-atlantic flight. I went from Harrisburg to Phily to Frankfurt, Germany to London to Venice. I was quite tired by the end of it. I met my advisor, Derek Warner, in London. After arriving in Venice, we took a land taxi (how touristy) to the main island of Venice. We then tried to figure out the water bus system. After realizing what we were standing in was a water bus stop, not the bus itself, we jumped on a random bus and stared as the Venician houses and gondolas and other water buses full of tourists passed by. We eventually landed at the stop outside of the San Marco Plaza. I desperately needed to change out of my suit and get out of the 85 degree heat, but we couldn't find a way out of the strip of venders. We eventually asked someone, and later someone else, for help. I must admit I was immediately awestruck with the maze of busy alleys we traveled through. My internal navigation consisted of the list of shops that we passed. For example, "go right at first bridge, left at the underware store, left at split in alley, right in about 20 feet, left at grand canal, first bus stop" was one of they infinitely many paths we could take from the hotel to one of the nearby bust stops. Our hotel was very nice. It was painted a shade of turquoise and had the most ugly chandeliers. The view was amazing, however.



This was the view from hotel window,



and this is the view at night.

After meeting with some of the other Cornell professors staying in the same hotel, we discovered that the San Marco Plaza wasn't the strips of shops we encountered when we first got there, but the giant open area pictured below.



The San Marco Cathedral in all its glory.



The tower at San Marco.



The tower from the grand canal (from a water bus on my way to Lido Island).

Each morning, I would wander from my hotel through the San Marco Plaza to the bus stop. I would then take a water bus to Lido (a large beach-lined barrier island where my conference was located) then a land bus to the conference center. It probably took 30-60 min. per trip depending on which bus I could catch. I also did a fair bit of wandering while looking for restaurants and such.



This is another cool looking cathedral just around the corner from San Marco.



Cute little houses like these were the tops of every store, which made up 90% of the buildings in Venice. Almost all of them looked the same.



This is an interesting statue of a woman and a winged lion (winged lions were a theme of Venice) beside the bus stop. At one point, I took a wrong bus on the way back from the conference and ended up on some random island of Venice. I was a little nervous until I found the signs with arrows that would guide me to San Marco. On that trip I saw the beautiful plaza below, and an irish wolfhound (the largest breed of dog).



After I took this picture, random tourists would turn around, look at the view, and take pictures as well. I was amused.



I had to include a picture of a water bus. This is one parked at a water bus stop (the yellow thing) at Lido. I was rather busy when at the conference, but took some time one day to read a little in the tree covered area outside of the conference venue in the casino building. Other days, I would just cross the street, go through a small gate, and be on a beach. It was very strange to be in such an intense academic environment, then in some Italian "Ocean City" equivalent in 15 seconds.



The pine trees in front of conference venue where I stopped to read.

There is so much more to tell about my trip, that you'll just have to inquire about personally. Other highlights included many dinners with professors from all over (germany, france, etc.) and meeting my academic grandfather (advisor's advisor) and my academic aunt (his new student also working on fragmentation). I also had Gelato after every dinner, and snuck into the conference banquet where I enjoyed a wonderful conversation ranging from career aspirations and advice to the current theories about the birth and existence of the universe to debating if faith in another person's work constitutes knowing something (I know it's true and can use it in my work because this expert says it's true).

In my time before leaving and the week after, I got to practice my grilling technique.



This is a photo of my grilled Salmon and home fries.



Here are some potatoes in classic fry form,



and here is a zucchini in its not-so-classic fry form.



I also made some awesome cajun chicken and corn on the cob. I also got to be artsy for the first time in a long while. Below is a colored charcoal of a leaky faucet. Amanda has already laid claim to it I'm afraid.



Charcoal of leaky faucet (not ours). I also participated in the Ithaca Festival Paint off. This was a simple event where you paint something in 4 hours, the give it to the Ithaca festival for sale in an online auction. I would get half the profits and the festival committee gets the other half. Its been over a month since they were supposed to post the site. Whenever it is posted, I will put up the link. Until then... enjoy the gift of our rare but wonderfully colorful blog entries.

Life on Mars 2

Greetings, once again. I am back in Antofagasta, Chile now that my fieldwork is done and I only have a few logistical things to finish up before I head back to the Northern Hemisphere. It has been a great trip, from waking up with ice on my tent to learning that not all one-way roads are clearly labeled as such. I have included some more highlights to take you through some of my adventures here; hopefully you will enjoy the views. Here we go.

My previous entry briefly mentioned the coastal fog that dominates throughout the winter here, but it really does this wonder of weather practically no justice. Though the Atacama may be the driest place on Earth in terms of precipitation, throughout the winter the coast is haunted by the nightly ebb and flow of a fog so dense that it yanks the temperature down 15 degrees and limits visibility to just past arm's length at its most intense. Sometimes it arrives in a matter of minutes; other times you can watch it crawl over mountains and flow up valleys, like some mighty beast left over from the time of titans, coming to reclaim the land that is rightfully his.

By the time I took this picture and put my camera back in my pocket, I had to walk back to camp by following my footsteps in the sand; so quickly I had become surrounded.

Here you can see it just down the road, a white wall that almost looks like snow.

A photo snapped 15 seconds later, after passing into the fog. Obviously, this made for very slow driving conditions, and made it imperative to mark a GPS point where the truck is, should the fog come in while you were away. There were days when the fog didn't come in at all, and there were others when we were forced to stop working at 5 and not start up until 10 the next morning, because we simply couldn't see more than the distance between our tents. Maybe I'm crazy, just personifying the fog due to a complete lack of any other living things, but to me it is the kind of thing that myths and ancient gods are made of....

On a lighter note, this is where we camped for the final four days out in the field... really a beautiful location (and you can even see the fog lingering off to the right).


Here is a picture of Brad just as the sunset, taking some time after a long day of measuring orientations of cracks in the ground.... (he is my fantastically wonderful field assistant, for those of you who don't know.... and the only other living thing I've seen in the desert for the last three weeks)


A nice cheesy shot of me above the canyons behind our camp... the photo does not even approach doing justice to the view.


A camp from much earlier in the trip (you can tell by the three vehicles and many tents) but it seemed like a nice photo.


An example of the kind of roads to watch out for (look closely, see the switchbacks?)... on the map, this road is simply depicted by a straight line... oh Chileans...
href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibnm-Z3q4RkIkyi2fKCu8c-rIb3oLyXhuSBzAVzzfR-FIfDNDl4BsVFUYhRcRzq3VnxaWmrupiVEnuHn4Molf6SNcyl7wPPAKp_xcXXFiHyOr8UXNYD0h2QmK6nDsEY5xxBoV7fvMY41U/s1600-h/IMG_3075.JPG">

The view driving into Antofagasta from the north. After having spent a few days here, I've really come to love it. They really cram the city as much as possible in the little area between the coastal mountains and the ocean... which is not a very big space at all. Looking out the window of the hotel right now I can see the ocean if I look left and the mountains looming up above me if I look right. I don't have any good photos of it, but the building codes here are intense. Since they live on a subduction zone, the earthquake risk is higher than most of the US. Any new building I see, I am shocked by the amount of rebar. They know what they are doing though... when the magnitude 8.1 (that is very big) earthquake struck here in 1995, only 2 people died. In contrast, since they get less than a millimeter of rain annually, when 2 centimeters of rain fell in 1991, hundreds of people were killed in the floods and catastrophic landslides that followed. I can't even fathom being near here when it rained... I think you could just watch the entire surface ooze.


Finally some photos from the market in the center of town...here is a meat display to let everyone practice their spanish anatomy vocabulary... heart, stomach, intestines... take your pick!

Or how about some chickens' feet? We bought some chicken breasts from this stand and made them for dinner... they were wonderfully fresh and delicious.


Ok... that is it for now... time to do some actual work. Thanks again for spending some time.

Always,
Amanda

Life on Mars

No... naturally I am not actually on Mars, but it is the closest thing I have ever seen in photos to what Northern Chile looks like. There are essentially no plants, since the last rain was pretty much the less than an inch they got in 1991. Lack of plants also means a lack of animals, which is nice for camping, but makes for an extremely remote landscape. I have included a few pictures, mostly pretty/touristy ones, though I have about 600 of cracks in the ground for those who are actually interested in my research. It is a very brief tour, since we are only in town for the night and heading out for another week, but I thought I would share while I had the chance.


This was a nice sunrise... though the coastal fog that surrounds us every night had not quite gone.... it is the giant mass of white in the foreground... this is from one of our higher campsites.



This is that campsite from above, you can see it in the bottom right hand corner. This also shows a bit why it feels like mars.


A nice view from my tent in the morning.


A beach along the coast where we ate lunch one day.


A tree full of vultures at an abandoned nitrate mine where we camped.


The fog pulling back from a peak where we camped north of Iquique.


Desert lizard... just add water.


Geomorphologist and soil scientist, hard at work.


Jason standing in a crack ( I had to include a photo of at least one)


Me in front of a giant listric normal fault on the Mejillones peninsula.


Pretty sea arch near Antofagasta.


Rio Loa canyon.


Siphoning gas into our truck on a 30 degree morning.

Ok... whirlwind over. Until next time.