Valpo vs. Viña

So yesterday I woke up pretty late (almost 11 am) to my cellphone ringing. I'm still not sure if I should answer in Spanish or English...a silly debate, really. Anyways it was Yike and Alberto, and we decided to walk around Cerros Alegre and Concepción and then have lunch nearby. Alberto drove the car, which I can't imagine being pleasant in Valparaíso. The neighborhood was really nice, and we stopped at a little bookstore/cafe to have lunch. Books are ridiculously expensive in Chile, and a lot of people go to Argentina on weekend trips to buy books. The cafes also serve huge sandwiches that have to be cut with a knife. That made me feel a bit odd, but when in Rome...

We then decided to walk around Cerro Bellavista, the next hill over, where La Sebastiana, Pablo Neruda's house, is located. It was really nice, although we didn't go into the house. There were marble slabs on the houses of the street where La Sebastiana is located, and the slabs had poetry quotations. I have yet to figure out why 80% of the slabs contain lines from Federico García Lorca (who isn't even Chilean) and not Pablo Neruda (who IS Chilean and whose house is right there...).


I really liked this mural - the hands look really great with the colors. The quote was about opening up the hands to the toils of the earth or something along those lines.




The houses are painted in bright colors. Here is a row of them just between Cerro Bellavista and Cerro Alegre (I think...). This picture is the location of the Wikipedia article on the city! Haha now I know those photos in Wikipedia are real.


Afterwards we went to Viña to go shopping (they needed groceries, I needed hangers and other things). The 'mall' was more of a large shopping center, and there was a ton of people. I thought things were going to be cheaper in Chile, but really, it's not cheaper by much. I paid like $2 for a hairbrush, $2 for a pack of 8 rolls of toilet paper, and $1.50 for 10 hangers. That kind of puts it in perspective (I think?).

Going from Valparaíso to Viña felt really strange. As people have told me, Viña is like Spain 20 years ago (architecture, fashion, etc). It's a lot more modern, with tall, fancy high-rises and large shopping centers. Valparaíso is dirtier and more run down. Right now, I prefer Valpo. Well, the hills of Valpo anyways. El plan (the flat, center-of-town area) of Valpo is worse than Viña because it's really dirty and the people look sketchy (it's slightly dangerous), but the hills of Valpo are MUCH more interesting than Viña, because of the art galleries, boutique shops, nice cafes, fun houses, and grafitti.

We also walked around the beach in Viña - it was gorgeous! The weather was super nice yesterday, and it didn't feel like winter at all! No one really swims in the ocean here because of the harsh waves, but it was nice nontheless.

I then went over to Yike and Alberto's apartment, which is in a high-rise in a neighborhood called Recreo, in between Valpo and Viña. The neighborhood is like a suburb in the US. We talked for a bit and watched the sunset. By the end, I couldn't believed that I had been walking around from 11 am until 7 pm. Pretty exhausting.