Chilly?

A word of warning. I loved Valparaiso so much that this post may make you kind of sick.

Josh also really liked this city. Not quite as much as me.

Valparaiso - Santiago

It was only a matter of time before somebody made that joke. Chile is not a warm country in the winter. To make matters worse, our hostel in Valparaiso was unreasonably cold. At one point, Josh and I were watching Live and Let Die while desperately trying to find tools to get warm, including a non-functional electric heater, a black lab named Chico, red wine, and finally our sleeping bags. It was a pretty pathetic Tuesday night, if you can believe it.

El Yo Yo, our excellent hostel. That orange gas can heated our hot hot shower, a crucial part of our cold cold days.

Otherwise, I have been about as happy as I possibly can be over the last three days. I can´t contain it whatsoever. At first, Josh was happy for me, then annoyed, and finally pretty well furious to the point where sometimes I just say "man, you know..." and he just says "stop it." I must admit, I´ve been fairly obnoxious in Valparaiso. Now that we´ve arrived in Santiago, I can calm down enough to comment. We´ll do this one in highlight format because, really, there aren´t any lowlights.

On the ground level, it appears that Valparaiso is like any other pretty post-Colonial town...

...but in the hills it´s a different story.

Highlights
Dogs
Unlike Argentina, the portside dogs at Valparaiso could not be classified as "laid back" (Josh´s assailants were notable exceptions). Many of them are clothed, and they chase everything, including cats, each other, pretty women, men carrying huge tanks of gas, us, motor bikes, and cars. Not exactly irregular behavior? Imagine 7 dogs at 11 pm hanging out in the middle of one of the city´s busiest intersections. Each car that approaches is stared down (and I mean a direct face off, like the Tianamen Square protester against the tanks), as if the driver is likely going to change his mind. When the driver cautiously begins to accelerate (not even aggressive drivers want to run over dogs), the pack goes totally wild, following the car in the middle of traffic until it outruns them. We were waiting to meet somebody and saw this repeat 10 times, with more and more dogs joining the party.

Like the Argentines, Valpo dogs wait at traffic lights, but they also clearly have things to do. Some dogs enter buildings, and everybody feeds the dogs including the shop keepers. Some dogs even ride the acensores, the cable cars which make the hilly commute far easier. As dog people, we love it. It´s like leave-a-penny take-a-penny but with dogs. Needless to say, the cats spend all of their lives on rooftops.

The guy with the fife
So here´s this city that hugs the Pacific Ocean. Every house is completely different, with beautiful shades that I didn´t even know existed. The streets are cobble stones, and famous artists have created murals on virtually every wall. Each turn requires a dropped jaw and a photo. The many hills create a ripple of colorful civilization that extends from the sea to the peaks. By all rights, this city should be a huge tourist trap, but it really isn´t. We were virtually alone as foreigners, with a few notable exceptions. Primarily, Valparaiso is a university town, an artist´s town, a Navy town, and a trade town, just as it always has been.

This is a port, first and foremost. The houses go deep into the hills.

Basically forever.

You can use a labrynth of stairs to climb.

You can also take many funiculars (acensores) up to the top of the hills.

Public art is everywhere.

You feel like you´re in a painting.

Some people take it to a whole new level. This is a Roberto Matta painting that Josh is defiling.

We were a little lost today, and we sat down in the shadow of this beautiful blue house. The afternoon was, in the words of Alex, "dead". Some guy, probably our age, came down the street playing (I kid you not) a fife, as if this was some seafaring town in the 18th century. There was no money involved, no vagrancy, just some guy enjoying a silent afternoon by playing music while walking down the street. What kind of place gets away with that sort of thing? Unreal.

The meal
Josh likes meals a lot, but I have a more complex relationship with them. To a large extent, I am a product of my parents in this regard. My mother and her family have instilled in me a natural distrust of overexcessive dining "experiences" (a tradition which my father´s family of well-fed men values highly). While several in my mom´s fam are decent chefs, the reality is that they are highly efficient with their food, extremely rapid in tucking it away, over-enthusiastic about health (who the hell wants whole wheat pasta?!), and in the case of my mother, extremely disdainful of TLC. I largely take after this tradition, but in recent years I´ve been sucked into a dining culture among my DC friends where a premium is placed on going out to eat and enjoying good food. So whether I like it conceptually or not, I can be a sucker for a great meal as well.

This was the case today, big time. Ok, excuse me for a second as I turn on the pretension nitro boost. We´ll put this in itallics for extra pizzaz:
Imagine that you are walking through the silent, cobbled streets of an old, portside city in Chile. The day is cloudy, but unlike most days the overcast holds in what little heat exists in the world so that the temperature remains nothing less than a slight cool. You´ve climbed several flights of stairs through bright, impossibly colored houses and are currently overlooking a street which curves downward so steeply that it disappears from view, yielding only the docks and the tankers and the still ocean, extending forever. A small market sells produce to a few old women in the shadow of a Catholic church, but beyond this the streets are empty. Your friend tells you it´s time to eat, and you easilly agree.

Lunch is the big meal of the day, so the decision is fairly important, but with little debate it´s decided to stop into a tiny hole in the wall place. After all, it´s right there, and Lonely Planet has been decidedly mixed in the accuracy of its reviews. You´re seated by a waitress who is so pretty and who has a smile and quiet laugh that is so perfect that all you can do is grin like a fool when she talks to you. As the only customers, you get percect, uninterupted service. Unfortunately, the cute waitress speaks so quickly that it is impossible to understand her. The hostess interjects, and explains for about five minutes all of the options on the menu. Everything sounds amazing, but you are feeling mellow and get the Menu del Dia, which has an appetizer, an entre, and dessert. Everything is fine.

The food comes, a cream of cauliflower soup, then a pork chop with corn pone and a subtle honey sauce, and finally a baked apple with a sorbet. Everything is presented beautifully, like a gourmet magazine. Everything tastes amazing. Old men connected with Buena Vista Social Club sing from the speakers. The walls are covered in paintings.

So it´s all basically perfect, but then this guy comes in. He is wearing one of those beanies that really are only appropriate while skiing or if your name is Jack Johnson. Then he starts talking to you, first about your food, then about your trip. Normally, this would be a real "oh, come on dude, I´m trying to enjoy my meal here, let´s save the chit chat." Remember though that today is a mellow day. Who doesn´t have time for their fellow man on a day like today?

We are presented this unreal food. (Ok, at this point I´m pretty well sick of writing in this crummy second person present tense, and really, it´s not appropriate for the rest of story). Anyway, this guy´s name was Shaahin. He was an Iranian who had left as a kid following the 1979 revolution, and he lived in LA doing documentary film and writing. He was currently traveling and writing while in the middle of a project on the paranormal. After he told us this last detail, he asked us what we thought. We told him. He proceeded to tell us who we were in great detail, including our spiritual beliefs, our relationship with technology, our intellectual approach to the world, our style of travel, and our status as friends. He was largely incorrect, but quite affable. Everything this man said was in complete earnest.

Here is a snippet of conversation.
Shaahin: "So what did you study?"
Me: "Economics, basically."
Shaahin: "Really? Like what."
Me: "International economics, like trade and foreign direct inv..."
Shaahin: "That´s great, like business."
Me: "Well, actually I work for the government."
Shaahin: "Oh like the CIA, FBI, kind of thing"
Me: "No, more like economic analysis"
Shaahin: "Oh, you work for the Justice Department?"
Josh: "Have you ever heard of the U.S. Trade Representative?"
Shaahin: "Yeah, yeah."
Josh: "He works for an agency that works directly underneath that."
Shaahin: "Oh, ok so like the Attorney General. Great."

And that´s just the small talk. We got into religion and nationalism. Every question of his was followed by a follow up. At one point he asked if I wanted a picture of my food. He got up and started framing and composing photographs as if my face and my dessert were part of a fashion photo op (yes, I have now had a documentary filmmaker take photographs of me eating). Josh and I were at first taken aback, but actually it was quite an acceptable experience.

There´s a lot more to say about this guy, but if you are interested in a taste of his worldview, I recommend going to his blog to read about his travels and his work with the paranormal. It´s not awful, although the post "Love in the time of swine flu" is a little off the deep end of normal.
http://www.thebigmyth.blogspot.com/
Josh and I did not reveal that we had a blog to this man. We enjoyed meeting him, but are not sure we would enjoy him in any more doses.

If you survived this far into this post, you´re a real sport. I must insist that you go to Valparaiso. You too will need to write this much, and you´ll probably feel as incomplete in your description as I do now.

In a fourth life (after my second life as a mountain store owner/husband of fat, happy wife and a third life as a sedentary, conversant food-eater in New York), I would stay here forever.