Transantiago: before and after

My first experience with Transantiago was on the first day of its implementation. I remember it was a strange day of February: it was raining copiously, but I had to go some place I don´t remember, so I couldn’t skip the novelty of the trip. It was a very ugly experience: much longer waits at the bus stops than it used to be: after spending at least one hour in a very crowded bus stop I finally ended up taking a cab. I think that situation remained the same during the first period of its implementation, but it is also true that from the very beginning, it showed what for me was its bigger advantage with regards to the old system: it was much cheaper (because paying once you can take as much buses as you need in a period of two hours), cleaner and less loudly.

But right now the situation has changed in what respects to it's main disadvantage: the frecuence of the buses has progessively become bigger, that is to say, you don´t have to wait for the bus as much as at the beginning of it's implementation, even though it remains being a bigger waiting time than with the old system, and thats what freaks people out. But I think you can't have a bus every five minutes for every route without that having an impact in terms of pollution (visual, acoustic and of the air), stress for drivers, damage of the streets, poor maintained buses, more expensive tickets, etc. So it's one thing for the other and I think waiting ten minutes (as I think it’s the usual) it's not that much and that’s the situation in every civilized country of the world.

But you might say: what about the very humble people who have to wake up at 5 am. in order to get to work because their way there is taking them a longer time? I think it was already too long before!, so it’s not a problem about means of transport, but about the distribution of the population in the urban space (as is known, the poor ones are marginalizaed also in terms of space) and the distribution in it of the laboral opportunities to which the less privileged ones have acces. I think no one should be forced to travel more than one hour to work, life does not have to be that hard, especially when hardness of life is also, as we all know, unequally distributed in our society.

My first term of 2009

During the first semester of 2009 I had a couple of very interesting subjects at University in which I focused my mental efforts: they were both about psychoanalysis and marxism and its teachers were very informed people or so they seemed to me. So I learned some things about subjectivity and power relations, as they are seen from those currents of thougth.

So that was the good part of it, however, besides that, I also had a trio of uninteresting -but very promising in terms of future laboral opportunities- subjects. So it was a real challenge to study for them (I didn't). I did get anyhow, good marks overall, at least good enough to pass them (maybe I will regret this when I look for a job or a decent salary, or when I be ashamed of my current ideals and consider them to be one of the last standing expressions of adolescence??).

That's it with regards to academical matters, but I had a lot of fun too. Indeed I spent a lot of time with good friends of mine and I did even reencounter a group of friends from highschool who are very funny people, very talented for witty jokes when they are drunk and very smart when sober (I say this because I love them not because they are really like that).

So it was a very lazy (plus focused and selective mental effort) but interesting and funny semester.