valpo and vina!

So, when people in Santiago want to get away for the weekend, they go to Vina Del Mar and/or Valparaiso. About two hours away by bus, and for the ridiculously cheap price of about $8 US, one can leave Santiago's smoggy mountains and breathe in the salty air of the Pacific Ocean. I have been having major ocean cravings, and even though the weekend turned out to be sort of cold and foggy, it was still beautiful.

While I had heard that Valpo, the oldest city in Chile, was a large, industrial port city and Vina was supposed to be its tinier, artsy, bohemian sister city, we found it totally the opposite. Our hostel, which was safe, clean and super cheap at $12 US a night, was located in Vina and so we wandered around the coast, and I gulped down as much sea air as I could. Then we went out for dinner, and met really nice Chileans who advised us not to go to Valpo for our nightlife, since our group of TEN, would be really expensive to taxi all the way there and back. During the day, however, there's a wonderful metro system that connects the two cities for like $4 US.
So, we party-ed it up in our huge room, on our adorable bunkbeds.

Also, we presented Jessie with the cupcakes we had made the night before and she was super pleased. She thankfully ignored the fact that they were icing-less, since we had made icing but due to chilean cooking restrictions(ie powdered sugar that wasn't really) decided against feeding it to anyone.

(Carrie, Jessie the birthday girl, and me)

The next day we went to Valpo, and since we needed to get back to Santiago that afternoon, had a too-short jaunt around. Jaunt really meaning hike, since Valpo is almost as hilly as San Fransisco, and we couldn't find the ascensores that take you up the hills for like 30cents. Instead, we wandered around and gawked at the amazing graffiitti and artwork that covers the city.


On one of the organic hippie Chile blogs that I follow had mentioned that there was a new farmers market in Valpo on Saturdays, and although we were going on Sunday, I figured I'd write down the corner as well as the restaurant they said they were sitting in. Turns out, the restaurant was amazing, with mouth-watering homeade pastries and monster vegetable quiches. Plus, the farmers market turned out to be a big table full of produce in the back of the restaurant! I made friends with the women selling fruit(I may have name-dropped the organic garden I'll be taking classes with in Santiago...) and so they let me taste all the crazy Andean fruits they had, including "tuna", a green cactus fruit that has a million crunchy seeds but tastes a bit like honeydew, and these little orange cherry-like fruits that were sweet and peppery called fisalis.

Overall, a wonderful trip that was too short and left me wanting more. As our Gov would say, I'll be back!