Slingshot Science

My brother and I got some slingshots from a small booth at these waterfalls called Salto del Lajo.  When we first got the slingshots we were okay at shooting them but we’ve gotten better. We have practiced our sling shots by shooting fence posts and trees. One time a woman asked us if we were going to shoot birds and I said “yes” because I didn’t quite understand what she was asking. Then she talked to my mom and we realized that she was asking if we were going to shoot birds, when we said “no” she was glad to hear that. Today we decided to do some science by shooting our slingshots using different materials.

I like Volcanoes

Volcan Villarica

We are currently traveling in the lakes district of Chile and there are a lot of volcanoes. We stayed in a cabana in the town of Caburgua and had a great view of Volcan Villarica. Volcan Villarica is 2847 meters above sea level and is one of only four volcanoes in the world with an active lava lake. In the Region de la Araucania there are seven major volcanoes. Most of these volcanoes are still active. In 2009 Volcan Llaima erupted for three months. While Volcan Llaima was still erupting, its lava flow melted a giant glacier on its west slope. We saw evacuation routes in case Volcan Villarica erupts.

Ojos del Caburgua

the waterfall

When we were in the town Caburgua we went swimming in the lake and one time we went to some waterfalls which was fun. We were hoping to swim but you weren't allowed to and the water was too cold. The color of the water was crazy because it was so blue. There was even one pool called Laguna Azul and it was literally a blue lagoon.

I also took some pictures, thinking of texture line and pattern. My picture of the waterfall is capturing motion. Here are the photos.

Our Travels by Bus

We have traveled in buses almost everywhere we’ve gone and some were long and some were short. The longest bus ride was twenty hours and the shortest was two hours. 

We have been on some very nice buses with bed chairs and only three seats per row, and we have also been on a bad bus that smelled, was hot, really crowded, the bathroom was horrible, and when we stopped for a rest stop the “toilets” were a hole in the ground and there were no doors.

Plazas, Plazas Everywhere!!

All of the towns and cities we have visited have had a Plaza de Armas, which I looked up and found out that it means "weapons square". They are named this because it is where the Spaniards  would hold refuge in case of an attack and they would be given arms (weapons). We like relaxing in the plazas because we think that they are nice places to sit around and eat ice cream but they were actually built for protecting yourself with guns not eating ice cream. Almost every plaza has had churches and government buildings surrounding it.

Textiles in Peru and Maximo Laura

While we have been traveling in Peru we have seen a lot of textiles and weaving because its a big thing in Peru. We have seen this art in Cuzco, Pisac, and Puno. For example, a lot of women have been weaving in markets, on sidewalks, and everywhere. We also went on an island tour on Lake Titicaca and mostly men were weaving there. The boys on the island were selling hand woven bracelets. We also went to gallery in Cuzco about a Peruvian textile artist named  Maximo Laura.

Maximo Laura was born in Peru in 1959. He is one of the best textile artists in Peru, and his art is very interesting. The way he makes his art is: first he sketches what he wants to make, they use a computer to make a pattern, then his team and him go to their warehouse of yarn, and then they start weaving on a big loom. A lot of the textiles that are big take months to finish.

My Family’s Incan Jungle Trek

A few days after Christmas my family and I went on an Incan Jungle Trek for four days and three nights. We started in Cusco and ended in Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas. It was very hard to do but it was still fun. We got to meet a lot of new people on the trek.

Day 1:
The first day we had to wake up really early and head down to where we met the mini bus to take us to where we were going to the highest point of the trip (over 4,000 meters or 12,000 feet). We got out of the bus and got on bikes to ride down the mountain but the bikes weren’t in very good shape. When we started to bike it was raining. There was a lot of rain water on the road that was spraying in our eyes which was not good because the road was really windy and the cars were driving like they were in a race, so that added another scary thing to the ride. When we were going down my brother started going too fast on a turn and hit a pole and flipped over and now he has a bunch of bruises on his leg where he hit the ground and his handle bars. After he crashed we waited for the van to pick us up and take us the rest of the way down.

Reading on the Road

One of the nice things about taking trips is that you get to read a lot of books. At home I don't get as much time to read because I have to go to school, do my homework, eat dinner, do my chores, and all of a sudden it's time to go to bed. I have read five books on this trip, including: City of the Beasts by Isabel Allende, My Big Fat Zombie Gold Fish by Mo O'Hara ( which I read four times), Nikolas and Company number one by Kevin McGill, Nikolas and Company number two also by Kevin McGill, and The Last Super Hero by Stephen Altrogge.

I have really liked all of these books. I would recommend these books to all my friends. I have two favorite books. They are the Nikolas and Company books and the Last Super Hero.

Invaders of Peru

We're in Cusco, Peru, which was the capital of the Incan Empire. We have been walking around Cusco a lot, and have seen a lot of Incan ruins, including temples and a big fortress. The Incan Empire was the biggest and most powerful Empire in the new world. It included Peru, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia and Colombia, and there were millions of people who lived there. Until 1532, when a group of 160 Spanish conquistadors came and took over the Incan Empire. 

The way the Spanish defeated the Incans was that they had steel armor, swords, guns, and horses and the Incans had wooden clubs, slings, and spears and their armor wasn't strong enough against the Spanish weapons. What did the most damage were the cavalry charges, there weren't any horses in the Americas. I can imagine that the Incans were terrified by the horses if they were new to their culture. The first time the Incans and the Spaniards battled, the Spanish captured the Incan Emperor and defeated an army with 80,000 people and the Spaniards had 160 people. Not a single Spaniard died but over 5,000 Incans died that day. The Spaniards would have kept going if it didn't turn night because they couldn't see in the dark with out any lights. Even though the Incans were defeated they still held the longest stand against the Spanish.  

CHOCOLATE IS GOOD!!

The Mayans were the first to use coca beans for money, they would use four coca beans to buy a guinea pig and one hundred coca beans to buy a slave. Cacao trees are found in  South America and Africa. The cacao trees grow up to 12 to 15 meters( 36 to 45 feet tall). The fruit looks kind of like a giant avocado, the inside smells like a coconut, they grow on the trunk of there trees and monkeys like to open them up and eat the inside but not the seeds. The Mayans used to make a sacred drink with coca ground up with  human blood. Today my mom, my brother, and I went out because the night before we made reservations for a chocolate making class at the Choco Museo in Cusco.

Walking the Streets of Cusco

We are in Cusco, it's a town high up in the Andes at, over 11,000 feet high. In Cusco we've been taking really long walks around. On our walks the streets have been super skinny and the stair cases are really steep. On the steep hills, houses are built and their roofs are usually orange. Whenever you look out over the city you see an ocean of orange roofs. There are a lot of plazas and churches next to them. In the plazas there are a lot of people hanging out and talking, and some times there are couples kissing. What I think is cool about the walks around the city is that every time we take a walk it seems like we are in a new place.

Yesterday we took a walk around just for fun, but then when we were just walking we found a place where we got shish kebabs and that was our small lunch. That day, at the same place we got the shish kebabs, we found a market and got some food. Somehow they didn't have any salsa but they did have some taco sauce and weird brown salsa stuff, at least we got some food.

Keeping Clean

this is how the nuns did their laundry

Keeping clean is hard to do on this trip because when we need clean clothes it can be hard to find laundry places (lavanderias). The first time we tried to do our laundry was in La Serena. When we were out looking for a place we found one, but when we gave the ladies who worked there our laundry, they said that it would cost 30,000 pesos (60 dollars) to do our laundry. We thought it was pretty expensive! The next time we tried to do laundry was in our apartment in Iquique, because the website said that you could do your laundry but you couldn’t. After we had to haul our dirty clothes over the border we got to wash them in Arequipa. It was the most successful because it only cost 54 soles (only 18 dollars). Although even that was a bit funny because the hostel we were staying at said that if we walked our laundry it would be less money than them driving the laundry there. But, it still cost the same amount after walking across town with our big heavy dirty clothes bags, and it was kind of hard.

Monasterio de Santa Catalina

On Thanksgiving day we crossed the border into Peru. From the border town Tacna we took a long bus ride to Arequipa. When we got settled in we went to a Monasterio.

"In 1579, less than 40 years after the Spanish arrived in the city of Arequipa, the Santa Catalina de Siena Convent was founded. Since its inception, women from diverse social backgrounds have entered the convent to serve as cloistered nuns, never again to return to their homes and families."

I took some really cool pictures at the Monasterio, based on line, texture and color.

ATACAMA DESERT

My family and I have been traveling through the Atacama desert this past week. We've been taking long bus rides through the desert, and I mean really long bus rides, like last time it took thirteen hours. On that thirteen hour bus ride we had to stop because there was a traffic control but it was on strike, so that made the bus ride even longer( the picture is where the strike was). 

When we are going through the desert the only thing I see are big brown mountains and a couple of little towns here and there. It is also really dry, I haven't seen any plants or trees just rocks and dirt, it's the driest place in the world. In the town we're in right now, Iquique, it gets 0.039 inches of rain a year, in Point Arena where we live we get 30 inches of rain a year. In 2009 1/100th of a inch of rain fell in Iquique and caused an emergency. The rain knocked out the power of several neighborhoods and wrecked the roofs of 4,000 houses. The Governor had to cancel school to fix the damaged roofs.

INTI artist

Inti is a Chilean artist who has traveled all over the world to do murals that are really big. He is a street artist who was influenced by "Latin American socialist murals and graffiti art." Street art in Chile has a long history and people like it a lot. The name Inti is also the Incan sun god. The Incans ruled during the 1400's to the 1500's in western South America including parts of Chile.

Inti has done murals in Paris (France), Atlanta (USA), Puerto Rico, and Poland. Inti really got into it in Valparaiso. This is where I saw one of his murals.

I thought the mural I saw was interesting because I like Inti's style and it has really bright colors. I spent a while looking at the painting we saw and thought it was very cool. Here are some more of my thoughts about this mural.

VaLpArAiSo: A cRaZy CiTy On A HiLl

We spent five days in Valparaiso. We did a lot of things there. We would take really long walks there (one time we went to the Chilean poet Pablo Nerurda's house). His house had a pretty good veiw of the port, and it was a five story building on a steep hill.

There are a lot of steep hills, and some of them were so steep that cars couldn't go up them, so you would have to walk up on these really steep stair cases. They have these "hillside elevators", called ascensiors, that would get you up a hill if you didn't want to walk up. Once again they were in strike, so we didn't get to go in one. There was also a garbage strike, so there was a lot of trash on the streets.

A lot of stray dogs and cats were wandering around. A couple of times a dog would start following us to see if we would give it food. Most of them were mellow but some of them were a bit feisty.

Valparaiso

Yesterday we arrived in Valparaiso, YAY. First we did all the boring stuff, like unpack and go get some groceries. Then we got to go get some good looking stuff from a bakery. We got two chocolate donuts, a little chocolate cake and finally we got a chocolate pastry, but like I said it looked good but it didn't taste very good (boo hoo). After that tragic experience we had dindin and watched a movie (we've been eating desert before dindin). 

Today we went to the Museo Naval y Maritimo, a museum that my dad really wanted to go to, so we kinda had to go. Part of the museum was about Thomas Cochrane, an English admiral who helped start the Chilean navy. He was in the navy from 1793-1860 and died at age 84. He served in many different countries, like Brazil, Greece, Chile, and England. He was the real life person who inspired the movie Master and Commander.

MY TRIP TO THE MUSEUM WITH MY FAMILY

NINO EN LA VENTANA, 1951

When we were in Santiago my family and I went to an art museum, the National de Bellas Artes, and on the very bottom floor there was a big section on this guy named Carlos Faz. I wrote about him and drew a picture of one of his paintings.

Carlos Faz was born in Vina Del Mar on March 23, 1931, he died in New Orleans, United States, October 3,1953. He was really excited to be in New Orleans and jumped off the bow of the boat he was on, and drowned when he was only veintedos. If you would like to see more pictures go to the museum's website.

My art teacher Miss Meyers told me to look at a painting and write what I think about it. I picked one of Carlos Faz's paintings and here are some of my thoughts about it.

What I see in this picture is a plant in the background and a doorway, I also see a boy sitting on a stool.

COLO COLO

On Sunday my family and I went to a soccer game. We tried to get in but they sold out all the tickets, so we had to try and buy some from scalpers. The first guy we tried to buy from wanted 80,000 pesos but we only had 50,000 pesos. We found someone else and bought tickets from him. When we were in line for the game, the security checked us and threw away our expensive water bottles that we just bought for our trip. The security person said that we could hit someone in the head with the metal bottles and that is why he threw them away.

When the game started the fans for the team we were there for were getting a bit crazy, for example some of them were flicking off the other fans and calling them bad names. There were riot police with big scary dogs and the police had some crazy riot armor on. They also had horses with a bunch of crazy riot horse's armor. The fans hated each other so much that they had to be separated with big barbed wire fences and riot police. When the game was over the COLO COLO won, the score was 3 to 2.

Chilean coup

Today we went on a metro train to Barrio Brasil in Santiago. When we got there we were looking for the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, but when we were looking for it we couldn't find it, then we realized it was in the wrong place on the map. We got pretty darn hungry by the time we figured out it was wrong on the map so we looked for food, but we didn't really find anywhere to eat so we got some smoothies. They were good I got a pineapple and my brother got a strawberry. We found a restaurant that looked good but they had some kind of thing happening that you could only get these giant plates of different foods. Then we finally found a restaurant that had pizza so we got the pizza but instead of tomato sauce there was ketchup.

Graffiti Street

Today we were walking to the Funicular train to go up to the top of Cerro San Cristobal. When we got to the place that the train left from the workers were on strike (en paro). Here's a video of the trash collectors who are also on strike (we've seen piles of trash on the side of the street when we are walking through the city).

On the way to the train we walked through Barrio Bellavista and I saw some cool graffiti art on the walls and garage doors of houses. I took pictures of them and here they are. ENJOY! (:(:(: