Valparaiso

So this past week and a half was highlighted by my trip to Valparaiso this past weekend. I decided to go all on a whim. I ran into a guy from Northwestern I had met at the beach who is also studying at La Catolica and we decided we needed to go to Valpo for the weekend. So Mike and I, along with 3 other friends from Northwestern set out Saturday morning on buses. On a side note, Chileans have really perfected bus travel. I paid $10 for a round-trip ticket to Valparaiso (would have been cheaper in advance) in an incredibly comfortable, punctual, and convenient bus. An extremely easy way to travel that I am sure I will take advantage of in the coming months.

We pulled in to Valparaiso and it was immediately obvious that this was not Santiago. The best word I have to describe the city is "quirky." The city is composed of a multitude of hills (Lonely Planet guide book tells me 42) surrounding a bay. The brightly colored houses are all built on these hills. It was absolutely incredible! It's a perfect city to wander aimlessly in. I also found that although I'm not a big picture taker, there was just so much in Valparaiso to capture on a camera that I took an unheard of 130 pictures. At first we were disappointed that it was not a clear and sunny weekend, but the fog and clouds really added a great aspect to the views. As you can see in the above picture, the fog just seems to engulf the houses high on the hills. We spent the day wandering around, the night at a 4-story club, and very few hours sleeping in our hostel. When you only have a weekend you might as well minimize your sleep right? All in all, Valpo is one of the coolest and most interesting cities I have ever visited...and I was only there for 30 hours!

The next morning, Mike and I hiked our way up the coast to Vina del Mar, Valparaiso's sister city, as the other three boarded their bus back to Santiago. Vina is more of your typical coastal town. Cleaner (Valpo is covered with very beautiful graffiti, but also trash), safer (a German guy in our hostel did get assaulted and mugged during the weekend), but less interesting. I've found that most Chileans prefer Vina to Valpo, but as a tourist, don't even worry about Vina. Spend all your time in Valpo. That is, there was one major exception. After our all-you-can-eat buffet (fantastic choice if I might say so), we visited the Quinta Vergara Park, which is the old estate of an aristocratic family that has been since turned into a park/museum. The grounds are absolutely beautiful, with trees from all over the world and one of the biggest homes I have ever seen. There is also a huge modern amphitheater built on the grounds for outdoor concerts. As we walked through the woods towards the modern concrete structure, Mike and I both had the illusion that we were living a scene from Jurassic Park. The way the huge concrete structure grew out of the forest made us think that we were approaching a wall built for protection from dinosaurs. Crazy? Probably, but you had to be there.

We quickly realized that 30 hours was hardly enough to really explore these two cities, but fortunately, I'll be going back in a month or so with my ND program! And this time we'll get a chance to visit Pablo Neruda's house, which I elected not to visit this trip because I'm a cheap college student.

On to the more somber. The Friday before I went to Valpo, our ND program had the great opportunity to tour Villa Grimaldi, one of the main locations for institutionalized torture during the dictatorship of Pinochet in the 70s and 80s. The actual facilities were leveled by the military dictatorship in an effort to conceal what had happened there, but certain aspects have been rebuilt to turn this area into a memorial park. We had the amazing opportunity also to be guided in our tour by a man named Pedro who had been an inmate at the facility in the mid 70s. In an effort to root out all socialism from Chile, the dictatorship under Pinochet sought out leaders of socialist groups, kidnapped them, brought them to numerous torture facilities, and tried to undermine any socialist threat or uprising. It was a chilling experience to walk these grounds, and even more so with Pedro as our guide. Later in the day, we also toured the General Cemetery of Santiago, where among others we saw the burial grounds of Orlando Letelier (a very influential Chilean socialist who was assassinated in Washington D.C. by the Chilean secret police in the mid 70s) and Salvador Allende (Chile's Socialist president from 1970-73 who was killed in the military coup of 1973). It was also interesting to see the difference in social classes based on styles of being buried. In this cemetery, it is immediately obvious of what social class someone belonged based on the size and elaborateness of their tombstone or mausoleum.

A couple more things before I leave you. Last Sunday Chile received the great news that all 33 of the miners who were trapped in a collapsed mine for over 2 weeks were found alive. The only problem is that they are about 700 meters under ground and there rescue will take 3-4 months. But right now they have a small tunnel dug to them from the surface where they can pass communication and supplies. The trapped miners had dominated the news in the previous weeks and to be completely honest, the general sentiment was that they were not going to find the miners alive. Sunday was therefore a day of great joy for the country of Chile when they found out that not even one of the miners had died.

Also, I've forgotten to keep you up to date on my beer preferences. Escudo is much better than Cristal. More on the upper end of the quality/price spectrum, Kuntsmann is also very good, and micro-brewed Cerveza del Puerto from Valparaiso is fantastic.

I'm sure this next bit will please my mom. I have made a conscious effort to try every single type of food that is offered to me here. I actually told my host mom that I eat everything in an order to broaden my sometimes picky tastes. And the results? I have grown accustomed to eating tomatoes, squash, artichoke, and sometimes even olives. Proud mom? After all these years of staying far away from these foods?

So I'm off to La Serena/Valle de Elqui this weekend. It's 7 hours to the North. I'll fill you in when I get back.