Valpo

"For Anna and Valparaiso
In order to love it is necessary to suffer. Tragedy is the mirror of love and in its reflection, burns brighter.
Here life is beautiful for me. I do not know whether other people will experience the force of life as I do, but inside of me there is joy. A full unconscious kind of joy becoming...animal...
Here everything surprises me. Sometimes I feel as if I have just arrived on Earth, everything is flaming new, fresh, beautiful. I want to hug the people in the streets, stop them, ask them, why the long face? When life is so sweet. So sweet!
Now I do not nor can I find the words to ask for mercy, stark and ugly is my soul. I seek a poem I cannot find, a poem of a body where despair hides. Suddenly people, they flash with a thousand giant mouths, two thousand giant lips. I can hear the distant voices, brilliant like fireworks, but I am here alone, held down in my world of misery by a knot of words I cannot unravel.
Yes life...you are lovely in life...but do you know it? From now on I will love the trees, the sky. The mountains. The wind. The sea. And the stars."
-- Anonymous graffitist

 Ellie and I did a weekend trip out to the coast, since the rest of our program had gone off to Pucon to climb the volcano. We had no trouble grabbing a bus ticket to Isla Negra to start off our day on Saturday morning. There lies Pablo Neruda's favorite house, and a great collection of all of his collections he'd gathered from around the world. The tour guide was meh, but the house was nice, as was the beach that it faces, where we ate lunch after we finished the tour.

 It was a little (or a lot) trickier getting up to Valparaiso following lunch. We walked up to the bus company headquarters we'd seen when walking down, but there was a sign in the window explaining that they didn't do trips to Valpo, but another bus line did, and just to wait for them at the bus stop. We did as we were told, but after 30 minutes and no bus advertising Valparaiso, we crossed the street to inquire at the tourist booth. Where they didn't speak English. But we gathered that we needed a blue bus to El Quisco. So we got on a blue bus to El Quisco. But after attempting to get off at three different stops and being continually corrected by the bus driver and told to wait just a little longer, we got off in the center of ghost town El Quisco, wildly confused and still very unsure of what the next step was. A woman tried to ask us a question, but in exasperation Ellie waved her off, saying "No hablo inglés." But after our foolish statement, we turned to her and asked in broken Spanish how to reach Valparaiso, and she said (in CLEAR, SIMPLE Spanish - really that's all we need. Is that so hard to ask for?) we were already in the right spot, we just needed to wait for the next Pullman. And we did and it worked! The bus dropped us off at the other end of Valparaiso from our hostel and at this point our backs were aching and our feet were sore, so we trudged over to the hostel and dropped our backpacks the second she pointed to our room and got readjusted. Without our backpacks this time, we set out once again and did a bit of exploring and found a park.

 At this point it was like 6:00PM and restaurants don't really start opening for dinner in Chile before about 8:00PM, and we were getting pretty hungry. So we worked our way down the hill again and to the central plaza. We bought fruit juice and sat in the plaza for awhile watching the little kids ride little tricycles wildly and teenage boys (as well as little wannabes) break dance. Then we found dinner and wine and it was great.

Pasta Prima - pasta with cream, avocado puree, and shrimp

Day two we just did an awful lot of walking and exploring. That city is so great. It has its own style and elegance, full of color and vibrance and life. But it's also ramshackled together and the whole thing looks like it could all just slip and fall apart and fall into the ocean. I kind of secretly wish I were studying there instead, but I know that ultimately there's a lot less to do there, and it's less centrally located. But of the little I've seen, this is definitely the place I'd recommend people go if they are in Chile. It's something I don't think you can find anywhere else.