Viña by week, Santiago by weekend!

This week was super busy! I spent a lot of time in Viña, getting more and more acquainted with this wonderful new city of mine. Filled with yoga, Chinese food themed potlucks at our apartment with the others in our program, swanky dinners out at La Flor de Chile, empanadas in ConCon, late night beach relaxing, getting to know my internship supervisor and my responsibilities there, and a weekend trip to Santiago. It was definitely not boring and everything I do and see makes me fall in love with Chile just a little bit more <3

I went to a yoga class at a place called Savittar, which was really great! The great thing about yoga is that it can be taken in any language, as long as the instructor uses the Sanskrit names of poses! But it was really interesting to take yoga in Spanish, and notice all of the ways to describe postures and alignment and meditation. My instructor spoke very softly and hearing her delicately walk us through postures in her eloquent Spanish was so calming. Just what I needed! I signed up for a once-a-week package and can't wait to go back next week :) 

I also discovered a few new things about Viña:

 

1) The delicious, Lonely Planet-recommended restaurant near our house, La Flor de Chile, has an amazing Spanish Potato Tortilla. Crisped to perfection.

2) They have Oreo Milka bars at Lider! (Walmart's South America brand) These are actually magic.

3) They (unfortunately) have stick family stickers on cars here too. They're everywhere. Why??

We also went to ConCon this week to go to an amazing empanada place called Las Deliciosas, which was absolutely worth the 20 minute bus ride. They have really delicious (living up to their name) seafood empanadas, and they are fried to perfection, without skimping on the cheese, the most important part. Like you all know, anything that combines carbs and cheese and seafood, and I'm in.  Plus ConCon is a sweet little beach town that's got a really relaxed vibe. There's a great surfing spot there, and a beach-side shack that rents surfboards and wetsuits. Once it gets warmer, that is definitely something that I'll have to come back and do (they had the big lame foam surf boards that I can actually handle haha). There were a few brave souls out there the day that we went though, and that water is freezing! 

On the bus ride back, we drove along the ocean and had some unbelievable views. All in all, it was a really wonderful and easy afternoon trip and something that I will keep in my back pocket on free afternoons.

Does that look real to you? Me either.

Saturday I went to Santiago as my first official act as an intern at AndesTrek, the adventure tourism company that I'm working for until the end of September. (Here's the link for the company if you're interested in seeing where I'm working! http://www.andestrekadventure.com/en). We took a group of students from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington on a city tour to Santiago, and had a blast! They were a really friendly and curious bunch, and we had a great day touring and learning about the city. My job as the intern was basically just to chat with them and answer any questions they had, and just make sure that they were having a good time and a fun experience, something that I can definitely handle :) And I got to work with my boss, Francisca, and see how she runs things and help her in any way that I could. Plus I got to go to some amazing places, like Pablo Neruda's house, the Cathedral, El Museo Precolombina, Donde Augusto for lunch, all for free! We came back that night, exhausted after a long day of exploration and discovery :)

The sunrise on my way to meet the AndesTrek group

Fish market at El Mercado Central

This is also where Donde Augusto is, where we had an amazing seafood lunch

The magnificent Cathedral

Love those vitrales! (stained glass)

Mapuche headstones made from wood, designed to resemble the deceased

Statue with a bullet hole in the cheek, a consequence of the 1973 military coup d'etat. You can also see where bullet holes hit the building behind it. It's so eerie to be in the city where so many tragic things happened relatively recently, but the Chileans are more than ready to put their dark history behind them and I admire them for their strong recovery and determination to not let their past taint their future.

Beautiful Valparaíso at night on the way home

 The next day, I went to Santiago again, but this time with the people in my internship program. There was a food truck festival (the first one in South America apparently), so of course we had to check that out! We spent the afternoon hopping from truck to truck trying delicious arepas, pizzas and chocolate covered fruits. There was so much to taste and I wish we had had time, but the lines were crazy long; I'm glad it was so popular! Then we headed on to the Cerro San Cristobol, which is a part of a giant hill/park in the middle of the city that has a giant statue of the Virgin Mary at the top, overseeing the city. It requires either about an hour walk or a funicular ride to the top. We opted for the funicular in the interest of time (and because funiculars are just really fun), and we had some great views on the way up! There's also a church and memorial sites, and there is are beautiful church hymns and songs being played over the speaker the whole time. Despite the hundreds of people at this pretty touristy spot, it is incredibly peaceful at the top. There are beautiful views of the Andes mountains in the distance and somehow just a sense of tranquility. It was a great way to end our little jaunt to Santiago, and we left just in time to make it back to the bus with 4 minutes to spare!

If you listen closely, you can hear the music in the background that was playing over the speakers that was so beautiful and peaceful

Our funicular ride down the hill!

This was my last week in Spanish classes, so tomorrow I get to go into the AndesTrek office and start working!  I got a taste of what it's like to work with them on the Santiago Tour on Saturday, but it will be nice to see how the marketing/backstage logistics side of the company works. Since it's still winter here, August will mostly be spent doing all of that office work and marking kind of work, but I'm glad to be involved in that side of the business as well; I want to learn as much about all aspects of running a small tourism company like this as I can. In September, we'll start more of the actual excursions, like horseback riding through the Andes mountains, hiking La Campana, and much more. I can tell that this is going to be a really valuable work experience and that I'm going to learn a lot. I can't wait to get more involved!

Besos! xox

Getting to know my city!

I spent this week just experiencing everything that my own city and its surrounding cities have to offer. Wednesday, we went hiking at La Campana (my last blog was all about that!), Thursday I went to the sand dunes with Cristian and met up with his friend Alan, and their two American friends Rachel and Tyler, who studied abroad here and are sadly at the end of their trip. But we had a great day/night hanging out on the beautiful sand dunes in Con Con, watching the sun set. This place was unbelievably beautiful, and so close to Viña! And at night, you can see the whole city of Viña light up in the distance. It's unreal. People even sandboard down the dunes, which I didn't try but I'll rent a board and try next time!

Me and Cristian!

Viña and Valpo!

The next day Alan and Tyler and I went on a bike ride, picked up Alan's friend Diego, who also studied abroad at Appalachian, and we all set off. All 4 of us are Mountaineers, so it was fun being able to talk about Boone and App. We rode through town and then up the beach to Reñaca, a beach just a little north of Viña and watched the sunset from some rocks where the waves were crashing. Also unreal.

Me, Alan and Tyler!

This weekend we went to Valparaiso to explore our neighbor city that is opposite of Viña in every way. It's disorderly, dirty and crumbling, but vibrant and full of life in every aspect. We took a guided tour to give us some history and background about the city, and then did some wandering around on our own. Back in the late 1800's and early 1900's, Valpo used to be a thriving port town and was the town to stop in for sailors that had to go around the bottom of south America and back north via the Pacific ocean. But after the Panama Canal opened and offered a shortcut through the middle of the continent, Valpo was forgotten, projects were abandoned and things were generally left unmaintained. So today it's really neat to see the shadow of what it used to be, and also see how it's taken on its own wildly unique identity. It is absolutely a city that is the sum of all its parts of the past. It used to cater to sailors as well as wealthy families and immigrants, so there are so many different cultural lineages that continue on here. It can be seen through the eclectic mixture of European architecture and also in the cemetery containing only immigrants, with tombstones written in dozens of distinct languages, and through the 16 different fire stations that the city has, all being founded by a different country which provided the funding to build said fire station (There's a French fire station, an American, a German, even a Saudi Arabian fire station). As we explored the city and it's different neighborhoods, which are separated by the natural hills called cerros that the city is built upon, I fell more and more in love with this misfit city. Each cerro, each street, each building, has its own vibe. There are endless winding streets to explore, with a neverending wall of colorful houses with unique architecutre, most covered in whimsical graffiti.

A would-be luxurious Italian hotel that never opened. It was scheduled to open in 1915, but the Panama Canal opened in 1914, thwarting any potential guests and forcing the project to be abandoned. Now, a decendent of the family that built it lives there, an old Italian woman who refuses to leave her her home and is kindly regarded as La Nona de Calle Serrano (The Grandmother (in Italian) of Serrano Street)

One of the many funicular that people take to get to the top of the Cerros (hills)

We found the famous piano stairs!

This city has so much history and there's a story behind everything. Like the reason that they paint the houses all different colors is because when they built their houses out of adobe (which is the best because its lightweight and flexible so its able to withstand the frequent eaerthquakes here), they needed something to protect their houses from eroding from the salty air, so they covered their houses in the most abundant and durable material they could find, which was corrugated metal in the ports. But the metal would rust, so they had to paint the metal to keep it protected from the salt air, using whatever they could find lying around leftover in the ports from painting the ships, hence the hodgepodge of different colors. I loved learning all these random little facts about the city when before,  I had not even given a second thought as to the explanation that something is a particular way.

So many colors!

Then once we were sort of oriented in the city, we went sightseeing on our own and found some beautiful places and views. We of course had to make it up to Pablo Neruda's house too, which is very high up on one of the cerros, and has an amazing view of the port and of all the surrounding neighborhoods. It was the most interesting house I had ever been in, with silly, but at the same time perfectly appropriate, architecture and furnishings and giant bay windows and stained glass windows. Definitely a place to inspire creativity. I'm so glad that we went to visit it.

And the food was so good too! I had a pastel de choclo, which is was like a bowl with corn, beef, chicken, cream and other delicious things all mixed together and baked. We also ordered a chorillana, which is a local dish of french fries piled high with beef, sauteed onions, and a fried egg. And it was all accompanied by a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon, solidifying it as the most Chilean and also the most delicious meal I've had here thus far. Perfect end to an amazing day.

It's really hard to explain how magical of a place Valparaiso really is, but I tried haha. These pictures don't exactly do it justice, but I promise it's a wonderful place. It's the most beautiful disaster of a place and I couldn't have been happier getting to know it. I can't wait to go back and do more wandering and discovering.

Of course this city would have a slide instead of stairs!

El Emporio La Rosa- one of the top 25 Ice Creameries in the world. A must-see for sure!

On Sunday we went to one of the museums here, called the Wulff Castle. It used to be a home that was built in 1906 by a wealthy businessman, but after changing hands several times and plenty of renovations, it is now owned by the city of Viña and various art exhibitions pass through it. Today it was Leonardo Sepulveda Faundez, who did a collection of paintings to show off traditional Chilean life. His style is colorful and unique, and was good timing to learn a lot of about all the topics he painted!

These seagulls and pelicans are bigger than any I've ever seen. Only kind of terrified of them...

Pretty cool house!

"La Mala Leche," a popular Chilean saying meaning a person that is rude or in a bad mood.

 

Glass floor to see the rocks and waves below

Viña itself has a pretty cool vibe. It's very relaxed beach town-y but still orderly and proper at the same time. There are vendors and restaurants that line the beach, and there are always people enjoying coffee or ice cream while overlooking the ocean. It's always fun to walk down the sidewalk by the part where the rocks protect the seawall, because people write all kinds of things on the rocks, from optimistic advice like "Sonreir es Gratis" (Smiling is free) to bible verses to asking people out on dates by writing it on the rocks. I love that this city is so personalized and there is always something to different to see. It is definitely never boring here!

"Don't be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good"

"Between the smiles, the stupid jokes and the fights, I am in love with you. Melissa Jara Borquez, Do you want to go out with me?"

Sand sculptures! How do people do this??

I can't believe how happy being here makes me. There is so much to do and see and I all of the people I've befriended are amazing. And my Spanish is definitely improving a lot as well. I speak it whenever I can, and hanging out with chilenos (and studyabroaders) has been a fun way to practice. Things just keep getting better and better here and I can't wait to see how the future unfolds :)




Besos!