Valparaiso

no comment needed

you wish you were here - Shirley and Frank are!

listen! - can you hear the dogs?

Valparaiso: We arrived at 7 am in this port city and disembarked around 10. All went very smoothly, and we said our good byes to passengers and crew. A taxi took us via the scenic route up the hills to our boutique hotel Cirilo de Armstrong which overlooked the hillside houses, valley and the sea. Being too early to check into our room we left the luggage in the ‘oficina’ of the hotel and made our way to downtown on foot. Luckily we were located only blocks away from many restaurants, sightseeing spots and the famous ‘ascensor’, a German made funicular that takes tired visitors and shoppers from the waterfront up the hill. There are 4 of these old machines – they all have wooden box carts in which about 20 people can squeeze into standing up. Apparently the funicular was built in the early nineteen hundreds, and we just hoped that technical maintenance was kept up over the last century… We took a late lunch at a fantastic pizzeria in an atrium garden with real Chilean beer (‘Kross’) and cool ambiance. Hotel check-in done we enjoyed a long siesta in our great abode – on 2 stories with the most modern furnishings, Chilean art on the rough plaster walls and hand woven rugs, cushions and wall hangings as decoration of the minimalistic rooms.
Dinner was eaten in a typical Chilean ‘resto bar’ on recommendation of the hotel receptionist Elisabeth. The ‘Vinilo’ was just a hole in the wall with simple furnishings and a juke box from the fifties, a tiny kitchen that turned out fabulous authentic Chilean food. There we enjoyed our first ‘Pisco Sours’ as an aperitif and great Chilean red wine later with dinner.
Next morning at 11 am the Foos arrived at our hotel, ‘fresh off the boat’ (they had taken a month long Princess cruise from Europe to Chile), and we had a noisy great reunion with lots of talking and laughter that went on the rest of the day till after midnight. We had a lot to catch up on since we saw each other more than year ago in Vancouver.
A curious thing occurred to us in most of the South American cities and towns we had so far seen: There are a LOT of stray dogs. They seem to own the streets, nobody takes notice of them except to avoid the mounds of their ‘doo’ on every sidewalk. In Valparaiso the number of these dogs culminated into almost stratospheric numbers, and the worst thing was, they all started a barking concert that lasted from sundown to the wee hours of the morning. Every night!! You cannot be a light sleeper in Valparaiso, you have to move!