busy times

I have been pretty busy lately, doing a bunch of things for the newspaper, or for my own entertainment.

Right now I will just make a list of what I have been up to, and maybe in the future I will add some accounts of my journeys.

Last week I went to the Tesoros Humanos Vivos event, or in English "Living Human Treasures". This was the launch of a search for more "treasures". I did a short interview with the Minister for Arts and Culture, Luciano Cruz-Coke. The week before I had gone to an event with British minister Jeremy Browne, though I think I wrote about that already.

On Friday, I went up to La Serena. Actually I left on Thursday night and got there about 1am. I was thinking of just wandering around the town until I had to head off again, but decided to stay in a hostel. There was a HI there, so I stayed there. Unfortunately my "I used to work in a HI hostel" fell upon deaf ears. Always worth a try though...

The next day I went to the "Big Bang" event at Las Campanas Observatory. They are beginning the process of building the Giant Magellan Telescope, which is going to be a huge thing. I met many astronomers, the Australian ambassador and some other important people. There was also a free lunch, which is important :)

The hill behind me is Cerro Las Campanas, which they exploded in order to begin the building. While the explosion didn't make much of a dent in the mountain, they will be making 70 more blasts.

Here is a picture of me inside the current Magellan Telescope. This was pretty cool to go and check out, though it would have been even better to go at night, when the stars are in full force. The Atacama Region (where the telescope is) and much of northern Chile is renowned as being the best place in the world for star gazing. I would like to spend much more time getting outside of Santiago, and doing things like that are a good chance.

We have also been working on the next edition of the I Love Chile print newspaper. That should be out next week, I wrote a bunch of stories in there. I reached one of the goals I set myself a while back, and have written my 200th article on the ILC website. Here you can see all of my articles. I have been writing a lot less articles lately, as I have many more administrative tasks to do, but hopefully I will get back in to the writing mode again very soon.

I am also back to my studies, I have two more subjects to go until I have apparently Mastered the Art of Writing. By midway through the year I should have myself a Master of Arts (Writing). We are currently talking about practice-led research. To be honest I don't really know what I am talking about, but I am getting some good feedback from my tutor in the weekly discussion posts.

The best news story this week though, has been the similarity of former Energy Minister Rodrigo Álvarez, who quit on Monday. The guy looks exactly like George Costanza, and Jason Alexander even agreed on Twitter.

The worst news story was the case of Daniel Zamudio. That is not a pleasant story at all, and I don't know why there are neo-nazis in Chile. That's not something I am so interested in going into in my blog, you can read any news to know more about that.

Late yesterday afternoon I got an email from the boss asking if we could cover an "exclusive event" at Concha y Toro. They are a well renowned wine company, so of course I said sure thing. We had a full degustación, then some food afterwards. I got to meet some other writers and some of the people who run the company.

They have a sponsorship deal with Manchester United, which is very interesting from a sports management perspective. It also got some wheels turning in my head about some grand ideas involving world tours, footbag, freestyle football and a match between Man U and La U.

Speaking of La U, I went to the game (Copa Libertadores) on Tuesday night. They knocked Penarol from Uruguay out of the competition, with a goal in the final minute. The other team were not so happy and there was a bit of heave-ho at the end.

So that sums up pretty well what I have been up to. The next adventure: this weekend is Lollapalooza, and I have a press pass. Foo Fighters are playing a 2.5 hour set, that should be awesome. Unfortunately there are very few other bands on the lineup I actually want to see, but it should be fun to go along.

I Love Chile - February Edition

I wrote the cover edition of the February edition of I Love Chile. It was an interview I did with Marlen Olivari, who is in a musical, which is also called "I Love Chile".

You can now read the digital version for free here

This woman, she shot to fame by hosting one of those TV shows where a woman reads the weather whilst taking her clothes off. She has also been the centre of various incidents, many of which resembled the Janet Jackson "closet malfunction" at the Superbowl a few years back.

She has a kid now so it's all about a "changed life" of something along those lines.

Here's a couple of clips from the show.

I will try to post up some more stuff about what I've been up to writing wise. Yesterday I interviewed a guy, Miguel. He is holding a comic expo, this guy has some stories. He began his writing career with the guy that started Condorito (before Condorito started) and went on to work for Pixar and Disney.

I also mentioned a while back that I was looking to do an interview with these guys that skated through the Atacama. I got my answers back from them. I'm going to write a story for the paper, but I might just put up the questions and some pictures on here, that sounded like a cool trip.

In more personal news, I went and picked up the keys to our new apartment today. We are going to start living our own lives, in a much more central area. Over the next couple of days we're getting a bed, washing machine and fridge delivered, so things are starting to come together in that regard.

I am back in action with my Masters, I just have two subjects remaining and to be honest it looks fairly daunting. That could be a good attitude to have. If you think you're going to come in barnstorming, you will probably come out the other side with your tail between your legs.

For a great example of this see: Canberra Raiders, 2011.

Speaking of Canberra, there have been floods lately.

This is at the Cotter Dam. Well I think the new part which was hoping to save things because of the drought.

That's how it works I guess...

I am about to head off and play a Pichanga (pick up soccer match). I played one on Monday as well, that was good fun. There were a bunch of guys from Singapore playing, and that day I happened to be wearing a Tiger beer shirt.

This match is going to be "Latin America vs Rest of the World". I guess when you think immediately, you would jump to the conclusion that LatAm would be winners straight away. However, fútbol is the world game after all. So it will be interesting to see how that goes.

I finally got myself a pair of boots, so hopefully I can put in a better showing than previous matches. It has been a long drought of goals for me.

Chile played against Ghana last night, and that sure was a weird game. As the commentators said at half time (which went for 35 minutes), "everything about the organisation of this game has been a disaster".

The final score was a 1-1 game, with Matías Fernández scoring the equaliser from a penalty kick. I might do some player rankings on the I Love Chile site. Then again, I also might not. You can read this article about the change of the venue from New York to Philadelphia a few weeks back.

I may have mentioned we went to see Morrissey the other day. That was the first gig I'd been to all year, and we hadn't seen anything since Parkway Drive, back in November. That's something that will have to change.

Opeth are going to be hear at the end of the month, I will definitely head along to that one. I'm not sure if they're still on their "easy listening" run of shows. Even still, they're a great band. I had an excellent time seeing them with Ben many years ago in Sydney.

Dear world

Hello to all my many readers (cough...)

I have been quite busy lately, writing a lot in the I Love Chile website, but also searching to get myself a "proper job" in order to survive. I interviewed a TV star for the cover story of the next print issue, which will, um, not be printed (digital only copy...)

Bron left us a few days ago to go to Argentina and Antarctica. I think we showed her a pretty good time. Hopefully she will return to Chile sometime again :) The next visitors we have lined up are Viv and Bret, who will come in June.

Here is a quick little video of me playing Footbag by the pool that Bron took.

Hopefully by the time our next guests come, we will have our own place, and that is looking more and more likely. I won't say too much on that one, but fingers crossed for next week.

We had a good chat on Skype with Jonathan today. It was good to catch up with him. He is in Belgium at the moment. It was funny how we would spend Raiders games about our plans to travel the world, and after all that build up, here we are, and easily able to connect with each other.

Speaking of the mighty green machine, they begin their first trial in just a couple of hours. That means around this time last year, we would have been heading down to Bega with Jonathan to watch the first trial, also against the Storm, without Slater/Smith/Cronk.

My mum described the Raiders as "playing like a pack of girls", although the Bega Roosters women's League Tag team probably put in a better effort in the pre-match. Hopefully things will be better this year. I don't think I will be staying up too often to tune in to a live stream or radio broadcast in the middle of the night, though when I get the chance it would be great to watch.

I don't think it is possible to see it on TV here in Chile - maybe things like State of Origin on DirectTV...I'm not too sure. I just hope that the Raiders are better than the rabble that turned out last year.

Not too much planned for this coming weekend, just going to take things easy. I will probably keep an eye out for jobs as well as conjuring up other money making schemes as well. Let's see how that goes...

Into December- Time To Get Real

So here we are now, December has begun. All the family are making their way back after coming over for our wedding, well the second version of our wedding. Here's a picture below.

So they're all back in their homes, or making their way back. After our trip with Mum, Dad and Alison, once we dropped them at the airport, it wasn't quite time to go home yet, there was still Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and Tahiti to come. From the emails it sounds like they had a pretty good time.

So I am still waiting for the paperwork on the residency to go through, which takes a couple of months, so I can't really work anyway, so I have started an internship with I Love Chile, who are an English language media network. They have a monthly paper, a website with daily news and also internet radio and regular news stories which I believe they film and put on Youtube, I haven't really found out about that one yet.

So anyway, I will be focusing on sports, as they don't really have too much reporting on sports, and of course I am a bit of a sports fiend. I am hoping to find lots of minor competitions, and also find excuses to write about Footbag. The South American championships are on in a couple of weeks, but with no job, it's looking unlikely that I will be able to make it, which is a bit of a disappointment. I have been trying to play every day. We have a pool in our apartment block, so I like to play in the early evening for about an hour, and finish the session with a dive into the pool.

If interested you will be able to find my articles here. My first published article was, of all things, about a strike in a mine, which is not really my main area of interest. So I look forward to getting some sports stories up there, and maybe a few mentions of my travels, and some musical ideas too. Let's see.

Speaking of music, I have been pretty lazy on the front of discovering Chilean bands. You could extend that laziness to not doing anything at all. I did see a band yesterday at the Gringoton event. In the sound check they played AC/DC and Slayer, but things got softer from there which was a little disappointing. I didn't catch their name. I had my face painted as a tiger...I will have to get some photos of that up another time!

Maybe by the new year I will have some news on that front. In the world of international touring bands, Opeth and Foo Fighters will both play within a week of each other, in March, so that should be a pretty good week. As for what I have been listening to of late, it hasn't been too much out of the ordinary- Alexisonfire, Break Even, Machine Head, Polar Bear Club, Fires of Waco, A Death in The Family, Parkway Drive, Frenzal Rhomb, that kind of thing.

Today an Australian movie appeared on the TV during their daytime programming. Joey was the name of it, a real classic, it was such a surprise I had never heard of...some incredibly thick 'strayan accents in there. It was kind of fun to watch, but after all it was a kids movie, so it was pretty stupid.

Only a few more weeks left in the year. Not sure exactly what our plans for the new year will be, I wouldn't mind heading down to the coast, where they have a big event with lots of fireworks, even though I don't care so much for fireworks.

Canberra Music Inquiry submission- 2010

Last year in Canberra, there was a commission into what should be done about music in Canberra. I'm not really so sure anything came of the inquiry, but I had my two cents on the matter- can be read- http://www.parliament.act.gov.au/downloads/submissions/52%20Daniel%20Boyle.pdf.

Inside that story, pretty much sums up my time in Canberra. Of course venues close down in other cities all the time as well, but it seems that has always been the fight in Canberra, just having a regular place to play.

In other news, I applied for a job yesterday. The first time I have ever applied for a writing job. It is as Reporter for the website This Is Chile, which is run by the Santiago Times, an English language online newspaper. It would really be GREAT if I could get that job.

Another opportunity may have come up here as well. Helping a friend of ours with a conference in the Atacama Desert. If this one comes through it will be an amazing opportunity, both for me in my "career", and also as a travel opportunity too.

Too late, tonight I'm gone

The last couple of weeks have been some kind of endless farewell. Many of the friends I have got to catch up with this week, we have been friends for a long, long time. I am writing this one from the airport, so it's the last few minutes I'll spend in Australia for quite some time.

The basic plan is that we will head over for about 2 years to begin with. We will see what happens, I am going to leave my options open (real meaning- I haven't organised anything) for work, accommodation etc. I have my lovely wife to give me some tips, and to begin with we will stay with her mum in Santiago.

It is likely we will move outside of Santiago once we get a bit more settled, but exactly where to, I'm not so sure of. So I will say adios to Australia and move on to the next phase of my life.

Earning power...

Tomorrow we head off on our journey, and of course I am not entirely "ready to rock". There is still some more work to do before they will give me a visa, we are still going through the process of getting the marriage recognised in Chile.

With my very limited amount of savings (more like none), I will have to make do, until I can begin working. A website I have been using for a long time is called Rewards Central. Unfortunately I haven't kept consistently at it, although I have decided that now is the time to do that. They give lots of rewards for online shopping etc, but also for answering surveys and clicking ads etc. Of course it's not a good earner, but I have been able to cash out my points into money a few times before, and should be able to cash out some more soon. I just did a survey this morning, about meat pies, of all topics! I would consider myself very well qualified to answer those questions :)

Anyway, hopefully that can add a little bit to my finances, which would best be described as "unstable". Of course going travelling in Asia just before moving overseas probably wasn't the best idea, but everything should work out well (hopefully). I am also going to look more into some of these writing websites, like Triond, which claim to give you money in exchange for writing. If I'm going to become a Master of Writing, that would be a good start...

As for Francisca, she is quite likely. She has been working as a research assistant at the ANU, focusing on Internet Research, and will actually be able to continue some of that work from overseas, which is a great opportunity.

Let's see how everything goes...a good challenge in life...