A few weeks ago, my work took me to Santiago, Chile. The trip was for an EPA project – EPA partners with environmental agencies in developing countries around the world to build their institutional capacity to improve regional air quality (yes, even still under this current administration), since air pollution tends not to mind country boundaries. We’ve been working collaboratively with staff from the Ministry of the Environment in Santiago to assess the economic benefits of their air quality management efforts, including a bunch of different regulations and an “air quality emergency” forecasting system that triggers additional transportation and industrial restrictions on days with particularly poor air quality.
Anyway, four of us IEc-ers went down to meet with the Ministry of the Environment, present our preliminary results, and see about filling in some data gaps. The trip was stressful because: (1) I know very little about air quality since I was pulled on just to work on the economics component, but things stalled and I ended up as project manager when my colleague Stef went on maternity leave; (2) I speak only about three words of Spanish (hola! Muchas gracias!), and our Chilean collaborators aren’t fluent in English either; (3) I’d never traveled internationally for work before; and (4) I’d also never led a multi-day working group meeting before, so I had no idea what level of involvement to expect from our collaborators or what sorts of materials I should prepare ahead of time. So while I was excited to have the opportunity to travel to a new country (and continent!), I didn’t have particularly high expectations for the fun-ness of the trip.
Luckily, the trip went better than hoped! Our 3.5 days of meetings were productive, our 1.5 days of sightseeing were fun, our EPA client and Chilean collaborators were friendly and enthusiastic about the project, I used my three Spanish words with gusto, and I ate my body weight in ceviche. After dinner the first night, I immediately decided that my primary goal for the trip (after work stuff…) was to eat ceviche every single day. I’m happy to report that I succeeded.
Without further ado, here are some trip pictures:
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| Flying into Santiago early enough to catch sunrise over the Andes. |
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| Our hotel was in an artsy, quirky area of town called Lastarria. Street art was everywhere. |
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| Here's another piece of art that I loved. "Existe un arbol. Yo soy calidad de vida." There is a tree. I am quality of life. |
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| On our first day, we walked up San Cristóbal hill, the second-highest hill in the city. This is the statue of the Immaculate Conception at the summit. |
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| We took a gondola down from the summit and got to see exactly how sprawling the city is. (At 7 million people, it's pretty massive!) Air quality was only so-so this day--note the haze. |
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| Later in the week, we also walked up Santa Lucia hill near our hotel for the views. The old castles on the hill were so ornate. |
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| Here's the view from Santa Lucia hill. |
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| Finally, on the last day, we went to the observation deck at the Sky Costanera, the tallest building in Latin America. The weather was absolutely perfect that day, so we had a crystal-clear, 360-degree view of the mountains! |
