Valparaiso y Vina del Mar

I woke up refreshed and ready for action! Rebe and I were actually the only ones eating breakfast at the hostel that morning, so we had a table set up just for us with a lovely breakfast of bread, cheese, jam, y café. Then we walked to the square to meet Church John, who was our wonderful tour guide for the day. We started off by attempting to buy tickets home for tomorrow, only to find that the pass had been closed today. The ticket lady said to come back tomorrow morning and check again. So that was a little downer, but we were hoping the pass would reopen by tomorrow.

Then we hit up the post office, the ATM, etc, and then went to the museum in Vina that has one of the Easter Island statues! Here’s the story John recounted to us: These people lived on the island, and they would make these statues for the gods. When stuff started going bad, they made more. Well, they got so obsessed with making them, they pulled farmers from their fields and forced them to construct statues, only creating more problems, until eventually the people died. The statue was interestingly just sitting outside the museum without any real security, so I touched it!

The museum was well worth the tour, as I got to see a mummy from South America, and a really great animal collection that left me quite intrigued. I was definitely thinking of Cori and Allyson when I was walking through the sea animals part. There was also a room dedicated to the practice of headhunters which explained the process of filling the scalp with something that shrunk it, draining it, and repeating the process until the trophy head was the appropriate size. There was also a superb bug collection, which reminded me of hanging out at Austin Steil’s house trying to catch bugs for Wade’s class.

Oh, on our way to the museum, this guy crossed the street illegally and a guard stopped him/pulled him over! 1, it must’ve been really embarrassing for that guy. 2, we all typically cross the street like that! So we had to watch ourselves. Then we hit up the Artesania, where I found a BEAUTIFUL green woolen scarf. I have scarves from almost every country I’ve been to, but I had never found a green one I wanted. Well, wait until you see this one, I love it. It’s a mix of olive green and a tannish color. Awesome. And less than 5 US dollars!

We had lunch at Guaton, where we watched other people eat completos, aka SUPER LOADED hotdogs, but I filled up on a pork and cheese burger. Then we headed to Valpo, and went to the docks. Since it wasn’t a great day, there weren’t many people there, so we elected to take a private boat ride. Our guide was very nice and spoke Spanish slowly so I was able to catch the majority of what he was saying. I learned a lot about the town that I really don’t remember now. Just fyi, Valpo is built with all of these brightly colored houses heading into the mountain. So it’s a vertically slanting, bright city. Cool. I also got to see how they rigged big ships to clean/fix them, and I saw a machine moving the cargo boxes that go on 18wheelers and loading them up! That was fascinating because it solved one of those “how does this happen” questions. Oh, also saw something that looked like a penguin, but according to homeboy tour guide it just parecida similar, but was in fact something different.

Continuing on our walking tour, we passed the Naval building, which was blue like Brady’s house and quite impressive. One thing about Chile was that there guards had a very visible presence throughout the country. It was actually quite comforting, and they were always really nice when we had questions.

We found the oldest church in town, the Matrice, but couldn’t go in. Also happened to be the sketchy part of town, and a van of cabineros (the guards) followed us out of that part of town, so again, comforting presence. We then hit up our first acensor, and had a lovely view of the town. After going down, we walked a ways to another acensor.

This time, we walked throughout the neighborhood, observed the houses, and observed the graffiti, which apparently the town is becoming known for as well. With the brightly colored homes, it reminded me a lot of La Boca. At this point we were dead on our feet, and we headed back to Vina. When we got off next to the beach, it was quite refreshing. We stopped for pictures at the clock of flowers, and then walked along the sidewalk next to the beach as the sun set. The Sheradon hotel is right on the beach, and that hotel looked awesome. But right down the road from it was this amazing looking REAL castle, which had a tower perched over the rocks that the water smashed into. It doesn’t look real in my pictures. Too bad the gate was locked. As we walked back into town, the view behind us was picture perfect of the ocean waves hitting the pink sunset. Gorgeous.

We walked to church John’s house, just to see the place, and it was interesting. His apartment was quite similar to mine. We then went in search of food, which was harder than one might think. Chileans don’t really eat dinner. They have a huge lunch, and then they eat “once”, which consists of bread and café. So the first restaurant didn’t have empanadas, so we left. We wanted to try empanadas because they’re fried in Chile. The next place was more in town, around an area with lots of restaurants, so all the waiters barraged you with requests to eat at their place. We sat down at one place, per their request, but they didn’t have empanadas. So this other guy is like, come to my place! So we did, and we sat, and we ordered, and then the waiter comes out and says, “we have a problem; we only have two empanadas left.” And we were like, are you kidding me? How can you run out of food? So we left, running into the waiter who was like, what happened? And when we told him, he just laughed and said, mi culpa!

So at this point we’re laughing, but outrageously hungry, so John sees a random place, says “that looks cute” {haha} and we stopped. I think it was called Big Ben’s.

Best Decision Ever!

We ended up eating once, and the waitress served it to us with total style! We each had individual plates, individual bread, individual coffee cups and pitchers, and it was just wonderful. We then hit up a store for some snacks for home, and went back to the hostel where I wrote a scholarship essay on a computer that didn’t even have Microsoft Word before finally crawling into bed.