High temperature: 62, low temperature: 36
Last summer, Dan and I met a Chilean architect doing a residency in Cleveland. We contacted him before our trip, and although he now lives in Vancouver, Canada, his sister lives in Vina del Mar, the next town up the coast from Valparaiso. The architect put us in touch with her a few weeks ago, and she kindly offered to meet us for lunch while we were here.
That was happening at noon, so after breakfast, we had some time to ourselves to walk around.
And promptly got lost.
But this is a fun city to get lost in — at least up in the cerros (hills) above the harbor. (I wonder if I’d feel the same way down by the port. I’m pretty inured to tough areas, but the area by the port here feels rough even for me.) One of the first things we encountered was a puppet theater (teatro de titeres), which this weekend is doing a production of Othello. A nice young woman with dreadlocks invited us in to look around. A puppet Iago is pretty intriguing, so we may return to check it out.
We headed downhill into a tangle of streets that didn’t seem to correspond to our tourist map. But when you encounter graffiti like this, it’s easy to become pleasantly distracted.
The graffiti art is interesting because there’s a kind of unity to the style — cartoonish, colorful — but especially now that I’m viewing the photos, I see that there are clearly many different artists at work here. Apparently the tradition of graffiti in Valparaiso dates to the 1970s, the early Pinochet years, when it often was accompanied by a message of protest. Now it seems more strictly expressive, though you still sometimes see messages like capitalismo es terrorismo accompanying the art.
Walking around this place, you get the sense of a city teetering on the brink of total anarchy. There’s the graffiti art, of course, but there’s also dog poop everywhere, scattered abandoned buildings, streets that begin paved and after a few blocks disintegrate into dirt. You can go from being exhilarated by the views and strangeness of it all on one block, to utterly depressed on the next.
A rare patch of blue sky!
After huffing up a derelict road that turned out to be a dead end, we finally found an ascensor, Reina Victoria, which took us back up to our neighborhood, Cerro Alegre. Dan boarding:
Here’s the view of the station at the top. Steepness not exaggerated!
And look at the view once you arrive:
That restaurant to the right is called Fauna, and it’s where we ended up having lunch with our Chilean friends, Paulina Shmitt and her boyfriend Juan. Dan and I both had salmon, which was great, but which we learned is farmed widely in the south of Chile and has begun to cause major ecological problems. Oops.
We learned this because Paulina is a marine immunologist. She teaches and researches clam immunology at the Catholic University of Valparaiso. Juan is also a professor — of economics. They insisted on treating us to lunch, which I felt terribly guilty about.
Our conversation with them was delightful and we learned an enormous amount about Valparaiso and Chile. For example:
- Valpo has seen an influx of hotels in the last 15 years, and tourism is on the rise even though the city has also become dirtier in that time.
- Corruption is rampant; UNESCO “Heritage City” funds from 10 years ago are widely believed to have lined the pockets of politicians more widely than they helped improve the city.
- The street dogs have become so predominant in Valpo that occasionally the government performs “sweeps” of the city where they take the dogs away and kill them. We both hated knowing that.
- We really need to visit poet Pablo Neruda’s house in Isla Negra, because it is crazy and full of oddities that he brought back from his travels around the rest of the world. We’ll be doing that tomorrow (Thursday).
- People crawl on their knees to visit Santa Teresa, the teenage saint I became a little fascinated with in Los Andes, every July, and Paulina thinks this is very silly. (“I’m sorry, I’m not religious at all — are you?”)
Paulina lived in Valpo for seven years after high school, and after lunch she took us on a brief walking tour. She apparently lived in just about every other house in cerros Alegre and Concepcion at one point! Juan, Paulina and street dog:
Perhaps the city’s most famous house, crammed into a sliver of land on Avenida Miramar. That red house to the right, by the way, was built by a Croatian shipping magnate and restored in the 1980s by a former Peace Corps volunteer from California. It’s now for sale.
We also visited a good friend of Paulina’s who runs a gourmet candy store on the same street where we’re staying. That’s the store in the background.
Afterward, Dan did some sketching while I did some writing.
We ate in tonight, because we’ve been absolutely starved for vegetables. It’s nearly impossible to find them here, and the restaurants serve them only as an afterthought. After slogging around the hills for a while I managed to track down a cabbage, some carrots, some tomatoes and some prepared lentils. It felt good to eat, even if it sounds anti-romantic.
And then we had a couple of Pisco Sours and some dessert at Cafe Sabor Color before enjoying some views from our roof back at the hostal.
By the way, here’s our room, and the rooftop deck, during the day. We’ve had a few snafus here about hot water not working, and also our lock broke (!) last night, but all in all Ottavia is a comfortable place to stay.
See you tomorrow!
