Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

Yesterday was a bit frustrating. The night before, Jenny pointed out that the hostel requested that we not use their water to wash clothes in the bathrooms (the OneBag system of washing every day works pretty well... if you wash every day, but between hostels that forbid washing and hiking, I've been washing less often than I should). I figured I could get back to Temuco early and just visit a lavanderia and get it done... except that it was Sunday and all of the lavanderias I could find were closed, along with the vast majority of the other business I passed. (For some reason, the carnicerias de equinos all seemed to be open, though. Perhaps horsemeat is a traditional Sunday treat?)

I ended up just hanging around the train station with my luggage for six hours. Luckily, I had a book to read and my iPod to listen to... except that my iPod flipped out and stopped doing anything that involved the hard disk. Browsing the menus worked fine, but it would freeze up whenever I tried to play any music. I'm glad that I bought the extended warranty, but I fear that the nearest Apple Store is 3000mi away. They probably have authorized dealers here, but I don't think I want to deal.

I was happy when the train boarded and I could go to sleep and wake up somewhere else.

Somewhere else is Valparaiso, and I like it a lot better than Temuco, so far. It's built on and around a bunch of hills, and there are neat little funicular railways/elevators.

We've spent several hours just wandering around the plaza down in the flatlands and a bunch of the hills.

This place feels like it has some history, but it's also the first place that I've visited in Chile that feels like it's in decline. There are a lot of buildings standing empty with broken windows and missing roofs. Some of them were clearly once quite grand. There are also lots of stray dogs. I've seen that in towns before, but never in a city this size. Even the pigeons here are extra filthy.

There are a lot of ships in the harbor, though, and and endless procession of trucks waiting to load or unload cargo. Clearly a lot of business is still done here.

Oh, and getting laundry done here was trivial. And my iPod seems to be behaving itself much better now that the battery has been completely drained and recharged.

Escudo: a fairly tasty local beer. It's hard to pin down the style, but it's darker than the more common lagers around here and has a lot more flavor.

Kem Xtreme: Prueba tu limite. Vaguely citrusy. Not nearly as much caffeine as the gale-blown palm trees on the label might suggest. Interestingly, there are three kinds of flavorings here: "natural", "artificial", and "identical to natural".