Valparaiso

3/19/07 11:46 PM
Hi everyone! So this weekend I went to Valparaíso, which I can best
describe as Chile's form of San Francisco, but… well... there's much
more to say. First of all, Valparaíso, or "Valpo" and Viña del Mar
(where we went last weekend) are the two big coastal towns in this
part of Chile. Viña is the beach resort town, and Valpo is the port
town.
Our study center here organizes a few optional trips every month for
the students to go on, Saturday was the first one to Valparaiso. We
had a tour guide who took us around the town, but it was really hard
to pay attention to him because there was just so much to see. Like
San Francisco Valparaiso is one of, if not the, largest port towns in
Chile, and like SF, perhaps the majority of the residential parts of
it are brilliantly colored houses filling incredibly steep hills
etched with narrow curving roads and soaring sets of concrete stairs.
Each house is different from the last, some are really impoverished,
and falling apart, and some are well-maintained, but they're all
incredible colors. Some houses looked like they could have been
straight off any street in Pasadena or anywhere else in the US, but
the majority were awesome works of art. I forgot my camera, but other
people remembered, and if you're really curious, I'm sure you can look
up Valparaiso on the internet for some great photographs. Also,
unlike SF, Valpo is covered in murals. Everywhere from spray painted
graffiti and stencils about love, hate, and politics, to enormous,
beautiful, vibrant murals, most blocks of the town (well, at least the
parts in the hills) are wrapped in awing artwork. Also since the town
is very hilly, there are some amazing vistas (I was really bemoaning
forgetting my camera). Valpo also has 15 ascensores, which are like
elevators that go up the hills, spread our around the city.
I learned a few things from the tourguide. I learned that Valpo was
mostly developed by foreigners, not by Chileans, and that it didn't
start developing until California's economy started booming (I think
he said that it was because when California's economy really started
going the Panama canal was built, so the west coast of Chile became
more accessible. But I'm not sure; that may be historically
inaccurate. I'm sure that as soon as California started hitting it
big Chile and California started trading). The foreign development
explains the many different styles of architecture in the town. Also,
he told us that Chile is the only nation in the world where all of the
firefighters are volunteer, which explains why every town I've been to
(except maybe Olmhué) has statues dedicated to it's firefighters.
Also, by my old house with Lucky and Ivan there's a firestation that
has an emblem of the Star of David adorned with a firehose. As it
turns out, that is an all-Jewish fire department.
I went on the tour for the day, and when it was over my friend Rossi
and I met up with Christina and Tiara who hadn't wanted to get up
early for the tour, but took a bus into town later in the day. We had
a good time wandering around and then found a nice maritime-themed
hostel run by a very, very friendly couple in which the husband is
French and the wife Chilean.
Our Valparaiso excursion was on St. Patrick's day, and none of us had
ever celebrated St Patrick's day as adults, so we asked around and
eventually found the Irish Pub "El Irlandes" (the Irishman). No one
in Chile really knows about St. Patty's day; I guess they don't have
much of an Irish population, but the crowd outside of El Irlandes was
pretty sizable (maybe 2/3 foreigners), and we ended up waiting for
about an hour and a half to get in, and then paid the equivalent of $7
USD for entrance and a green beer. Rossi ended up turning back
because she didn't want to pay $7, but we'd been waiting for so long
and could hear the Irish band inside playing, and everyone shouting,
so we waited. The bouncer was a tall, thin, middle-aged man with a
long pony tail who spoke Spanish with an Irish accent and had his
beard dyed green. I also met a guy who is from Eagle River in Alaska,
but has been living on/in Whidbey Island for the last 5 years (more or
less near where I used to live in Washington).
When we finally got in, there were two levels to the bar; when you
walk in there's a big bar on your left, and an area with small sofas
on the right, with a low ceiling, then you walk in further and it
opens up with a smaller bar on the left, and a much higher ceiling so
that up above in front of us was a smaller area where an Irish/Chilean
band was playing Irish music with flutes, a guitar, and one of those
really cool big Irish hand drums made with some kind of animal hide.
They sounded really good. Across from them, and above the area where
we walked in with the small sofas was a less crowded area with some
wooden tables, benches, and stools, and a good view of the band and
the open area below where the young kids (18 or so) that looked like
they knew how to dance irishly were dancing, and the crowds were
howling and stomping.
Everyone was really excited and shouting, and it looked like there
was a small group of people dressed all in green who may have been
hired or something to dance in an Irish way, cause they seemed to know
what they were doing, but it was shocking to see that the crowd hadn't
really succumbed to the intoxicating music. So we were finishing our
cervezas verdes, and this guy who we saw outside who was obviously
pretty drunk but very friendly (sounded like he was speaking English
with a German accent, but it turned out he was Chilean) tried to get
everyone to get up and dance, so Tiara, Christina and I got up and
went downstairs. Everyone was very energetic, but no one was really
dancing or moving except for stomping and clapping to the lively music
(the dancing kids had been on a break for a little while now). We
stood there for a second, and then Tiara started jumping up and down
to the music, Christina and I followed her, and within 3 minutes the
whole floor was jumping around in circles and kicking their legs out,
trying to do some sort of drunken, uneducated imitation of an Irish
jig. It was great.
After awhile we went back upstairs and all three of us ended up in a
different conversation, me with 3 chileans who were in their first
week of school at the catholic university in Valpo, Christina with a
guy from Arcata, CA who had been living in Valpo for 4 months, and
Tiara with these 2 English guys who had been traveling in South
America for 6 months. The Chileans I was talking to had heard about
the holiday in the newspaper, but other than that had never ever heard
of Saint Patrick's day, nor el Día de San Patricio. We stayed there
until 4 and then went back to the hostel. Strangely, except for maybe
some of the waiters and the bouncer, I don't think there were any
Irish people there. Right before we started dancing I heard one guy
shouting about how no one was Irish. He was like "I look Irish, I
think Irish, I'm fucking Irish!" I couldn't really hear his accent,
so I asked "Where are you from?" and he responded "New Zealand."

Sunday we got up and after some complications getting Rossi to meet up
with the girl she was going to Viña with (we had already gone to Viña
and didn't care to go again), headed off to Horcón, a small beach town
about an hour and a half north of Valparaíso. On the busride to
Horcón we passed Quintero, which Christina's guidebook described as "A
scruffy, forbidding town with filthy beaches; to be avoided at all
costs." I'm writing that from memory, because we read the description
and laughed at least a dozen times. Despite our curiosity, we didn't
get off the bus, but from the windows the town really didn't look so
bad. I was expecting to see the same look of hopeless and ennui in
the people as I see in parts of Fresno, but people looked contented,
and the town was made up of acres and acres of unique, colorful
(though faded and dusty) houses in rows lining a long hill overlooking
a great wooded valley and a small busy port. That was way more than I
was expecting to write about Quintero.

Horcón was a beautiful little town with really cool beach-side houses,
and tidepools filled with garbage and masses of various colorful
seacreatures. The road along the beach smelled like boiled dog skins
and rotting crabs, but the shore itself only smelled lightly of urine,
which is pretty typical of most of what I know of Chile. The beach
even had an awesome arch from the cliffs above into the water, like
what used to exist at Natural Bridges in Santa Cruz, but bigger, and
made of some sort of yellowy, sandy stone. We had lunch, explored the
tidepools, sat on the beach, and then left after about 5 hours. It
was fun. Christina and I had talked about staying later because
neither of us had class on Monday, and I don't have class on Tuesday,
but we felt like there wasn't much else to do, and I have to do some
homework.