.....BEER or Chilean vino here!!
We feel your pain, coping with the minus stupid temps. In that vein, we commiserate with you today through photos....we hope this helps to ease your misery.
Even our waiter Jorge at lunch was anxious to join in the fun, as we gazed out over the port.
Always handy to bring our own pirate hats too....one just never knows...
All roads lead to Ottawa 2017! (As Rainer points out).
Just felt this now, very minor...guess it was bound to happen eventually.
We are in an earthquake zone...and a tsunami zone.
We're in the safe zone and on the 2nd floor of a 3 storey home.
All good.
We moved to our second spot in Valpo 2 days ago and are settling in nicely. We could easily have stayed at our first apartment in the hills but we had reserved for two weeks and it was already booked from the 3rd of January by another, so after some scouting we landed at an incredible old family house. It's closer to the "plan" or flats and less of an uphill battle to get home so another great spot for the next few weeks! Beautiful and well-maintained by Aristides, who is now the proud owner of an Ottawa ball cap.
Notwithstanding Rainer's preoccupation with tsnunami signs, dont worry Ma, we're still in the tsunami-safe zone.
I swear sometimes the angels are watching over us. As we packed our over-laden suitcases and bulging hockey bag of trinkets and Ottawa 'memorabilia', and all of our fridge food, we were saying we should take a cab, but didn't know how to call one. Just as we were mentally preparing for sloughing the cargo in a few trips back and forth, our building maintenance guy, Paolo asked if we had called a cab. We said we hadn't (it was for someone else) but would love one...so off he went, made a quick call and 20 minutes later, I kid you not, we were standing in our new abode, surrounded by all our stuff, a measly 2,000 pesos (a whopping 4 bucks) poorer.
The second best 2,000 pesos we've ever spent! Did I mention, transportation is cheap, and privatized for the most part? Paolo got some major hugs and handshakes!
Normalky I like to visit cemeteries, not as a morbid thing but to check surnames and dates, ages, sometimes to reflect or remember those who have passed before us. They're interesting places.
On January 1st, we visited the original cemetery of Valpo, in a state of disrepair and decay that indicates they don't really care once you are gone. The irony is the gate is locked, there is a security guard and some German shepherd watchdogs. But the guard will let you in if you ask, must be the loneliest job in Chile, watching over the dead in an abandoned graveyard, a relic of its former glory, no one comes to visit. Save for a few better known local names, monuments are cracked, broken, left to disintegrate.
The irony is that there are three cemeteries, the adjacent one is the one for Los Disidentos (the unholy Protestants) which is in slightly better condition, mainly made up of English, German, Dutch etc., departed.
There is a huge iron wrought fence along with electrical wire between them to keep the heathens and agnostics out, as if the Protestants will rise from their tombs to march on the Catholics. Nothing like history preserved in a graveyard, all the while the city is rotting away around you (especially on New Year's Day when the aftermath of decadence is evident in the streets and passerelles or pasejos).
You can see from the photos what we're talking about. I hesitated to take some shots as it is just so sad to think that loved ones are buried in this place that should be such a serene and pleasant spot to sit and visit and is the total opposite.
I turned around and went back to get the photo of a small decorated Christmas tree someone had recently placed at a grave and shed a few tears as we left the place.
I don't know why it's so sad...it just is. It still is.
So much to see and do here so we're taking in as much as we can. Missed a few blog days so will try to catch up quickly...
The New Year's fireworks were amazing.
Earlier in the day we bused to the port, arrived alive, always a ginger Gravol induced trip, handy to keep a few in your pocket for the jostling and hairpin turns at exhorbitant speeds. You just never know what youll see on the bus, or anywhere for that matter, that just has to make you smile. Like the guy who jumps on the bus with an old broken down Styrofoam cooler yelling "Helado, helado, helado" (icecream), is hailed by a young man at the back, who takes a bottle of water, the salesman gives him the water, gets the bus driver to make change for him, and bails to get on the next bus, all in the 20 seconds the bus is stopped (they never actually stop, they roll). He's followed by the roaming musician who strums for a bit, sings, asks for tips and bails as well...all in a day's work. Transportation is the cheapest form of entertainment. Seriously, folks, I'm here all week. Try the fish...
We wandered through the fish market, which was fun...with a freshly broken toe, the widest shoes I own(ed) was a pair of Crocs, you know, with holes, which makes it extra fun to slop through the fish runoff. The upside is, we headed to the beach where I made a beeline for the water to de-fish while Rainer slurped in some ceviche de reiñete. (Raw rayfish). Pretty good. An errant fish head landed in front of us on the beach, dropped from the skies by an overly talkative pelican...who had just lost his his snack...one nose dive he'll never get back.
We watched seals as we had a late lunch at the beach - shrimp, and seafood soup. The beaches were jam packed with families and couples enjoying the sun and running after umbrellas carried off In the breeze. A perfect day for a group of bass-like drummers pounding out rythms, which was a precursor to the all night (and I mean ALL night, or at least until 7 am) party. They were pretty good, at least for the first 5 hours, after that they lost some je ne sais quoi. We didn't sit there all that time, but you could hear them from everywhere, including our happy apartment in Cerro Alegre (Pleasant Hill), because the whole city is like a bowl sending the echoes up the hills. It's pretty awesome. Add hundreds of dogs barking, Latino music, the clutter of cutlery on plates, people singing at the top of their lungs from balconies, rooftops, and that's New Year's Eve in a nutshell, until the fireworks, and then all night. This town knows how to party! It's all about the bass, no treble. Couldn't resist.
We took the train back from the beach, made dinner at our place and headed back down the hill to join the throngs of over-exuberant, mainly young'uns, a few in kilts no less, drinking with reckless abandon, side-stepping the steady stream of urine flowing downhill, beer cans, champagne bottles, confetti and ever popular Silly String! Go figure. The tradition is to sing Un Año Mas (one more year) very hour although it may be more frequent than that, like never-ending. This, and to eat twelve grapes at midnight, one for every hour on the clock and every month.
We worked our way upstream, literally, as the pee flowed downhill from various nooks and crannies including some women relieving themselves, under the false impression that they were maintaining some sort of decorum while crouching behind another's ill-placed jacket. We arrived just before midnight, poured a glass of fine Chilean vino and took our position at our window where we could take it ALL in from our perfect vantage point. We could see the entire bay from Valparaíso to Concón and beyond as the fuegos artificielles began all along the coastline. Impressive, loud and awesome! We even found a version of Un Año Mas on YouTube for effect. Dogs barked, car alarms all went off all over the city from the impact of the fireworks, there was song and dancing in the streets until about 7 or 8 am when there was a strange semi-silence....it's never quite silent. Even the little dog on the roof was tired and flaked out on his perch. We ate our grapes.
As we dozed off we left the windows open for full effect.
As we awoke, we swear there was a maple leaf in the sky!
Un Año Mas!
Need I say more....yesterday, unbelievable beauty on a picture perfect day with friends Vicky and Fabio.
This could have been a movie set it was so fantástico!
January 1, 2015
This pretty much describes the town today...more to follow soon...hot and sunny!
