Adios Valparaiso

Just like when the clock strikes midnight, Cinderella must go home, when the calendar hits two weeks on our trip, it is time for Reed and I to move to a new location. It had been 14 days in Vina del Mar and Valparaiso, so it was time to pack our bags and say goodbye. However, I had always been ready to go to the next farm after two weeks, so I was surprised when I did not want to leave. I liked Valparaiso. I really liked Valparaiso. Valparaiso is beautiful, quirky and best of all, unique. The colorful houses that clung the hills, the art that decorated seemingly every winding street and even the way the crates were stacked in the port made me fall in love with Valparaiso.
We lived, went to school and spent most of our time in Vina del Mar. This popular vacation spot for Chileans and foreigners prides itself on its beautiful beaches (although not too beautiful when the weather warrants long sleeves and pants), a clock made out of flowers and its safe streets. Although I enjoyed my time in Vina and some of the northern beaches, my fondest memories came after the 30 minute bus ride* south into Valparaiso.
       So I think that I have mentioned my fondness Chile’s largest port city too many times without a developed explanation of why. Although I do not have Pablo Neruda’s poetic powers that describe Valparaiso so well they seem to teleport you there, I do have a camera which can kind of do the same thing.






This picture displays what I think makes Valparaiso so cool. Not only can does it show the colorful houses that cover that cover the hills and the large crates in the port, but it also shows how the port really is integrated into the city and not in a remote, uninhabited neighborhood. I think the bright colors really define this city.










As you can see in the picture above, there really is no planned layout to the city. What you cannot see in the picture above is how the streets twist and turn and they climb the hills at impossibly steep angles. The lower portion of this mural depicts a rather subdoed, steep and winding Valparaiso street.

The streets are covered with art. We have graffiti in the United States which is predominantly just colorful, bubble letter "tags". But the streets here have elaborate and detailed murals that display the artistic genius of many unknown artists. Just a walk through a Valparaiso neighborhood is like a walk through an art museum.










Valparaiso could not be the star it is without its surrounding cast. The towns along the coast near Valparaiso provide a necessary escape away from the rushed, crazy lifestyle of a larger city. In my last blog, I had a picture of Renaca, a beautiful beach to the north, that is part of the surrounding cast. But even just a bit more to the north are the Dunes - mountains of sand, from which you can see Vina and Valparaiso. It is also possible to sand board at the Dunes. The Dunes rock.

       In retrospect, maybe I liked Valparaiso so much because it embraces one quality that I hold in extremely high regard: goofyness. The utter uniqueness of the houses that on its hillsides, the way the streets twist and climb like the scribbles of a toddler's first drawings, and the way that Valparaiso has grown up completely uninhibited by if the other cities might judge it for being different screams with a goofyness as strong as we did at Field. But my clock was striking two weeks and it was time to say goodbye to this wonderfully goofy city. On the our last morning, I went to wish Valparaiso goodbye by way of a harbour tour, on which a little boat took us in the middle of the bay. Maybe it was just Valparaiso's ampitheater like shape, but I could have sworn it was hugging me goodbye.

*We would also pass this when heading in Valparaiso.