Home away from home

Lovingly dedicated to the exchange students of Casa Mariposa, especially to our beautiful friends Davide and Pippo.

We ended up spending six weeks in Valparaiso, trapped by the charm of its winding steep hills and stairs, its raw locals, the beautiful sunsets and the ubiquitous street art.

Eclipsing every other city in Chile.

And the yummy empanadas.

Chey's beautiful eye for pictures+ Valparaiso= awesomeness

"Monument to WC, world's heritage"

A crazy house.

Plants turned into hair and body hair for a colorful
painted lady.

Art. Art EVERYWHERE.

And stairs.

And cats.

After the end of February, Mariposas the hostel turned into Mariposas the exchange student house, which meant the dynamics of the house changed enormously.

The first two weeks it had been a travelers heaven: clean, with a chilled atmosphere by day and a great terrace party at night, full of good wine, good music and good conversations.

Overnight, with the arrival of the students, it became a mess inside the house, due to everyone being too busy studying and the cleaning lady unfortunately dying.

But it also turned into something out of control at night, with a mad terrace party full of canned beer, horrible music and loud drunk yelling. We are clearly too old for that kind of student parties.

Still we became friends with two of the students (and friendly with many): two wonderful Italian guys who were always happy to share their cooking wisdom with us and didn't mind our no-partying-with-shit-music policy.

Our dynamics also changed quite a bit during that time.

To begin with, we were the only travelers left, ant the only sort of adult-minded people, according to Kent, save three of four of the students.

So we suddenly switched from the last people to go to bed, to the responsible adults in charge of the house's "order".

Ah, but I haven't told you about Kent!

He is an expat from the States, the owner and king of Mariposas, and a very special man.

During the time the house was a hostel he would usually hang around at the terrace since the afternoon, sharing his nice wine with us and starting interesting conversations and debates.

He has a way that keeps people charmed, even if he can be a little bit too strong on his way of exposing his ideas.

He also has a wonderful amount of very cool stories of his life (which was a very interesting one), and of people that went through the hostel (not for nothing the top rated one in Valparaiso).

We enjoyed debating and arguing with him a lot, since I don't mind confrontation when faced with a worthy "opponent" and Chey has a very philosophical mind. We even had quite a few religious debates, despite that unwritten rule about not talking religion, politics or soccer if you want to keep peace.

For a while, Chey was helping Kent by painting the roof and doing some other jobs, and ended up building a full deck. And I must say he did a very neat job.

Chey, a boss on the roof (don't worry parents, it was not steep)

Chey's deck, work in progress.

And finished! (*random guy not included)

Oh, what a beautiful deck! And there's also Kent.

Like that, we made Valparaiso "home" until the end of March, when the arrival of that envelope from Australia set us free to keep going.

We hugged our wonderful italian mates goodbye, thanking them for all the shared dinners and hoping to meet up again somewhere in the world, and we saw the relief in most of the students' faces when they saw the back of us. Now they could play their reggaeton in the living room all night and never do dishes again.


WARNING: The rest of this post is a bunch of Valparaiso pictures, because when it comes to that city we're like a teenager in love for the first time and just can't get enough of its beauty. You have been warned.

Housing for strays and art, of course.

Chey making friends.

Some insane Aztec art.

Moar cuteness: most elegant cat in Valpo.

Cat and colorful houses, pretty much what Valparaiso is about.

...

Chey and I became sneaky picture masters.

"Take responsability for your garbage"

Old elevator ("ascensor") to go up the hills,

Nostalgic port dog.

Leg collection I

Leg collection II

Leg collection III

Last supper with our favorite Italians.

Packing bags.

Packing mess.

Our funny Valentine

When we first arrived in Mariposas, the hostel with the view, the first other traveler we met was Jakob.

He is a nice german student living in Argentina, who was spending his uni holidays in Valparaiso. One of those people I envy because he speaks three languages fluently.

 He was very friendly to us from the very beginning and, when asked about a place to eat something not-meaty, he cheerfully recommended us his favorite spot: a hipsterish little vegan place down in the town "centro" with an extremely cheap daily menu.

Chey and I happily headed there, being hungry and excited about one veggie meal that was not bland pizza or bland pasta.

Heading down the stairs to the city centre.

Once at the vegan place, the menu didn't look too exciting, but we wordlessly agreed that it was too cheap to complain.

The lady handed us the first: a pretty tasteless and watery pumpkin soup. We eat it without complaining.

Then the main: salad with some sort of bean cream/paste. It was a very hard to swallow thing, thick and with a strong undefined taste that I couldn't really decipher, but since I saw Chey eating without pulling any weird faces, I thought it was just me being all foodie.

So I said nothing and tried to keep eating, because it was so cheap.

Finally we finished and left, without saying much to each other about our not too succesful lunch.

...

At our return to the hostel, it was almost sunset. The terrace was beautiful and there was a fire going and nice people listening to cool music around a table.

We sat at the table too, and met a swedish couple and a dutch solo traveler, had some beer with them and Jakob, and started playing a pretty funny game of word guessing that I can't really remember.

Slowly the stars appeared, the view of the city and the port got more and more beautiful and the game got very lively...

City view.

More city view, we couldn't get enough.

Valparaiso port, from our terrace.

It's all fun and games until...

...at some moment through it, I got up and said "I think I feel a bit sick", and left the table.

I really want to spare the readers the details of what followed, but I also really want to tell you all that I got so violently sick that I was surprised I didn't lose the insides of my stomach.

After 15 minutes of consistent vomiting I thought it was probably over, and pale-faced and dizzy I returned to the table, where Chey still looked perfectly healthy.

He gave me a "poor baby" hug, wondered what it could have been, since he felt perfectly normal and we had had the same food all day, and then kept playing while I sat next to him, too weak to continue.

The swedish couple and Jakob (all vegan, so their team for the game was "the vegan team") insisted that it couldn't be the vegan food. Vegan food doesn't make you sick. And it was obvious by the fact that Chey had also had it and was feeling perfectly well.

Until he wasn't.

Suddenly, around twenty minutes after my return from my throw up expedition, Chey said he wasn't feeling too well either...

That was the beginning of almost four hours taking turns to go to the toilet and throw up, then going back to the room and holding hands, cursing our "healthy" food choice.

Chatting between toilet runs, we found out that we both felt a strange taste in our lunch, but we both preferred not to tell each other because we felt it was "probably nothing", and it was so cheap.

(Also, none of us had never been food poisoned before, so of course we were not expecting it).

And his is the story of how Chey and I spent our Valentine's night in the nicest, most romantic place in Valparaiso... vomiting until we fell asleep, exhausted and with sore throats.

The moral of the story is: if it tastes bad, it's probably bad. And also: the cheap can be very expensive.


*Do not consider this post to be against vegan food in general by no means.

**Also, I forgot to mention that after I got sick, Chey (who was already feeling not too good himself) walked uphill just to get me a bottle of water, because he is AWESOME.

Valparaiso

 By the day we left Santiago, we were already aware of a slightly heartbreaking fact: there was going to be no hitching.

Truth be told, the outskirts of the city are huge and can get dodgy, and we already knew that in Chile proper hitchhiking is always on the higway. Turns out that getting all the way to the highway by bus was pretty much the same as getting to Valparaiso all the way by bus. So we did.

We took the bus with one of our hostel's mates, and then parted ways because we had booked different hostels.

Stina and Apollo (the Random Backpacks) sit at the bus terminal in
Santiago with their new mate, Adam's backpack.

Barry the hippo enjoys bus traveling like nobody else

On arrival, the first thing Chey and I did was taking the local bus "O" and finding our hostel, which was up a steep "cerro" (the city is all made of "cerros", which are hills, covered in houses), and a whole bunch of stairs.

We finally found the address we had been given, exhausted and sweaty, only to find a note on the door saying something along the lines of "Dear travelers, congratulations! you almost found it. Now walk up a last set of stairs to the actuall hostel's address". Signed by Kent (can't wait to tell you all about Kent).

That last set of stairs was so worth it when we finally got settled in into a beautiful double room (for the price of a dorm!) and saw the view from the terrace of what was to become our favorite hostel in the whole trip.

The view.

There's a thing about Valparaiso, and I find it hard to explain. Pablo Neruda, the wonderful Nobel laureate Chilenian poet, was madly in love with the city and wrote things about it way better than anything I could ever write with my meh English. Many other writers and bohemians shared that love, so if you want to read something fancier on the city be my (and google's) guest!

I basically grew up fed with all this beautiful images of a myriad of colorful houses seemingly falling into the ocean, a labyrinth of stairs, and a mysterious mist coming from the port. I was definitely not ready for the insanely amazing street art everywhere and the cats.

Because it wasn't enough with the beauty, the atmosphere and the mystery. The most beautiful city in Chile also has cats. Cats everywhere.

Anything else? Ah, yes: the day we arrived was also Valentines day. But let me tell you all about our very special Valentines night in the next post.

Santiago II

Like any big city, Santiago made us walk a lot, which is always nice since it gives you a feel of what the city is like.

We walked around looking for a place to do our laundry.

We walked around looking for the local market.

Which we finally found, and it was just amazing.

Seriously, so good.

We walked around to see the few sights.

Like the ugly and dirty river.

We walked around (many times) looking for decent coffee.

We walked around to get Chey some new flip-flops (not using the Australian word because the internet is unforgiving).

We walked up and down a hill to go to a nice swimming pool to cool down a bit and rest from the crazy heat of the Chilenian summer.

People soup.

And in walking we found that the city is actually not boring, but vibrant in a discrete way.

We enjoyed the colours, sounds and smells from the market; and above all we discovered that people from Santiago are extremely smiley and helpful and easy to approach.

And we took some interesting shots.

Like this lady melon.

Or this cat, the president of the market people.

The President cat, chilling by the capsicums.

This was made the day Chey and I discovered we could edit pictures online.

Chey is so cool that he bought that melon juice because
it matched his t-shirt.

Boy and his beloved cat.

Most random walls near our hostel were covered with art.

A creepy abandoned old house.

Pretty street art.

"Funicular", or an elevator that takes you to the top of Santiago, the Cerro San Cristobal.

Chey and a view of Santiago. That mist you see is actually pollution :/

Enjoying the city view and the crazy summer heat.

Strange and sort of cute water source.

However, we stayed there only for a few days to recharge our batteries after so much hitchhiking adventures.

Actually,  I couldn't wait to get up north, to one of the (many) cities of my dreams: Valparaiso.