Valparaiso

Today we took trip for the day to Valparaiso. Valparaiso is about an hour and a half bus ride west of Santiago. The city is situated in a nearly perfect semicircular bay of the Pacific Ocean. The main government buildings, naval offices, town squares, and churches are positioned close to the water on the flat land, and then the residences are built up in the hills surrounding the bay. These houses are gorgeous! They are all different shapes and sizes, and their bright colors of yellow, red, teal, and blue cover the mountain sides. The graffiti and murals on almost every inch of wall give Valparaiso a unique and artsy feel.


Valparaiso was the first port in Chile. Container ships are anchored in the harbor, and there are large container yards! Train tracks, and truck routes along the water. For this reason, there are no beaches in Valparaiso. It was not a problem though, as Bailey and I were plenty entertained with watching the container yard operate as the large cranes loaded the ships with the containers. It reminded me a lot of the huge container yard in Singapore where I was fascinated, and still am, by the logistics and algorithms behind the yards's operations.


Bailey and I spent the day wandering the streets and hillsides of Valparaiso, seeing the Naval Museum, dodging the stray dogs and cats, and hiking up to El Sebastian, the home of famous Chilean author and poet Pablo Neruda. There are cable cars (acensors) all over the hillsides, and we took one of the cable cars to get an awesome view of the bay. We then wandered the upper streets and stopped in a restaurant for lunch. We shared a chorrillana, which we were told is a popular dish in Valparaiso. Chorrillana is a bed if french fries, with a layer of onions and scrambled eggs, and a topped with beef. It was tasty, but not the healthiest thing I've ever eaten. It was really greasy, but it was my first experience with the Chilean diet of meat and starch.

Apparently there was an earthquake in Valparaiso when we were there today. It registered 5.1 on the Richter Scale and was 30 kilometers deep. The epicenter was 47 kilometers north of Valparaiso. Bailey and I did not feel it though, and we didn't find out about it until Carlos picked us up in the Santiago bus station tonight. Crazy!