It´s been a good day to lie around and nurse my sunburn. Actually it´s not that bad, my sunburn experience tells me it´ll be good and peeled by wednesday. How did I get this sunburn? the beach, of course. What beach? Quintia, about 40 kilometers from Valparaiso. It was an important trip for me and my intense relationship with the ocean, first of all because I really missed the beach before yesterday and it was good to see it, second of all because I´m not in the tropics anymore and the water was as cold as Elvis is dead. This is important because who wants to go to the beach with water that cold? This leaves me free to explore many other places without constantly thinking about the sea. Sounds strange? So am I.
Bright and early Friday morning the group of us caught the bus to Viña del Mar, then after dicking around at an old house full of bad portraits of rich 19th century aristocrats and seeing the stadium where I´m gonna see Mana play next month, 4 of us ditched the rest of the group and caught the bus back to Valparaiso. We stopped off at that vegetarian restaurant for lunch, it was pretty decent. We had these things that the restaurant called tofu tortillas, which was tofu, soy milk, spices and some thickener fried into a flat patty that tasted more like an omelette than what you´d get at McDonalds for 99 cents. It was really good and looked simple to make so I´ll have to try it out one of these days. Valparaiso is really really beautiful and two blocks off the ocean the steep hills start. We hiked up them and arrived at a hostel the MIT students who were here last week recommended to us. It was awesome, big rooms and a kitchen and breakfast pretty cheap, I´m probably going back this weekend with Vince. Friday night we saw this 3 piece band from Brazil play in a coffee shop. I haven´t had any coffee since I left Costa Rica and that one cup got me good and wired, so after the shop closed I went walking the hilly streets of Valparaiso by myself in the general direction of one of the three houses of Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet and known Communist who won the nobel prize for literature back in 72 or 73. Yesterday morning we dicked around in town for a bit before taking a colectivo taxi out to the beach. The tiny little beach where we first got out was okay, but the much larger and privately owned one around the rocky headland demanded we do some gatecrashing. That beach was fun, I braved the cold water and got tossed around by some good sized waves and a strong riptide. We came home last night. The buses from Valparaiso back here to Santiago had more leg room than I knew what to do with, I could throw one ankle over the other knee and not kick anyone in the process. It was weird.
Still orchestrating the trip to Argentina, I think we´re gonna leave not this weekend but the week after, I´ll probably be able to stay Friday through Monday morning.