August 20, 2013

We had yet to really venture into the hills of Valparaìso so we spent today walking along Avenida Alemania. This road transverses several of the major hills, passes the famous La Sebastina, and gives you a chance to see the city from a lot of different angles. Even in the foggy, overcast weather, this was an awesome walk.

After an hour or so of meandering through the hills, we ventured towards Mercado Cardonal. We had lunch on the brain and went straight for the 2nd floor where we’d heard there was some decent, cheap grub. Before even getting through the door, we were accosted by 5 or so waitresses screaming the day’s specials and trying to coerce us in to eating at their establishments. We were overwhelmed and I blurted out some made-up Spanish word before pushing past the first wave of overly aggressive greeters and moving on to the next. The next girl was a little less obtrusive so we agreed to take a table in her restaurant. We both got the special of the day and a beer to calm our nerves. While waiting on our food, we watched as other potential customers fell victim to the assault. It was like watching a bunch of vultures fight for their prey and then fight with each other. Market competition at its finest. When the food came, we were very pleased with the shrimp soup and empanadas. The fried fish however was a different story… After the first bite, we realized this entree requires a little bit of work. We spent the next couple minutes combing through the fish with our forks to pull all the bones out. It wasn’t awful but it wasn’t the greatest and we at least got a good giggle out of the whole situation.

We concluded our afternoon stroll with some grocery shopping. We saw that the weather was improving so we went straight home and googled the sunset time. We wandered through the hills only to find that there wasn’t much of a sunset because of the way the city is situated in the bay. We did find a rather impressive moonrise though.

August 19, 2013

After almost 3 months traveling, we finally broke down and took a tour today. Crazy, I know. We usually avoid anything that might even mention the word tour but we had heard good things about this particular company, Tour 4 Tips, so we gave it a go. All in all, it was a nicely put together tour with fun surprises along the way. It hit most of the highlights of the city and we were able to do some things that we probably wouldn’t have done otherwise such as riding in the funiculars. It also gave us some good background info on this sweet little bohemian port town. For example, that disgusting, little dish we accidentally ordered the other day called chorillana actually originated here in Valpo and is kind of a big deal. Everybody in the group was getting excited about ordering some of this local grub for their next meal so we decided not to share our opinion. But we felt good about being ahead of the curb, being the ignorant gringos that we are.

The only downside to this tour, was that we waited two days into our stay to do it which means we had already seen most of the things on the tour and there are several other parts of the city we’d still like to see. But, it was still nice to hear some history behind these things even if we’d seen them twice. We ended up tipping our guide and dipping out before the tour was actually over. I guess we’re poor sports, but we were close to home with only 30 minutes left in the tour. We felt good about our decisions and adopted a sweet little pup for the walk home.