Last Evening in Valparaiso

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On our last afternoon in Valparaiso, we again left aside the tourism itinerary and walked through the singular hill out of the many that comprise the city that is undergoing what all the travel writers say is a renaissance. To try to put it in perspective, this is city of 600,000, not a small town. And there is one fairly small area, the area where our hotel is located, that is undergoing this transformation. Maybe it’s more than that but if it is, it is not much more. Still the revival seems to be expanding outward. A lot of it is based on graffiti. From what we've seen in Santiago and along the road to Valparaiso, graffiti is something of a cultural scourge. Everything is vandalized by paint. This is true in Valparaiso too but on our hill, somehow most of the graffiti has been channeled into interesting art, some political, some about love, and some about showing off the illustrative talents of the artist. And so, graffiti becomes a tourist attraction, a la Wynwood Walls in Miami and with the tourists come revenues for hotels and hostels and restaurants and jobs and galleries and shops and bars and the “artisanal” ice cream shop that my food police wife would not let me stand in line for. The best way to explore here is to walk which is what we did. When we stopped for a drink at a bar with an outside terrace overlooking the city, Fran tried her second pisco sour which she has now declared undrinkable. I ordered a margarita which was quite drinkable. I think there is a reason why pisco sours do not show up as big sellers anywhere but in Chile while margaritas are made all around the world.



As mentioned before, Valparaiso, like Santiago, has a large population of “homeless” dogs and cats too. They are all reasonably well-fed and despite news articles to the contrary, our experience was that they were either friendly or indifferent. Last night we met two, a dog and a cat, that were extremely friendly. At the bar, there were a couple of cats and Fran offered one a piece of a chicken finger that we ordered. While the chicken finger was truly disgusting and shouldn't have been offered for human consumption, the cat gave it a careful sniff and a taste before rejecting it. On the other hand he or she was quite enthralled with the piece of Camembert Fran decided to share. A few minutes later this same cat decided to adopt me, not her, me, plopping down in my lap completely uninvited. I don’t even like cats and this affectionate thing, in addition to being a cat, had not been bathed in this century. Yuck. But it was cute.



Some of you readers do not like cats and some do not like dogs. I know who you are. But the next part of the story is so weird that you might actually stay interested. At the bottom of a little walking street there is a small market. There were two dogs hanging around, one with one white eye and one brown eye and the other an absolute dead ringer for our dog, Buddy. Fran of course, headed directly to the Buddy look alike and began talking dog talk. Amazingly, this Chilean dog knows American dog talk and the two of them quickly struck up a conversation with the dog convincing Fran to purchase a package of hot dogs in the market and feed it to him and his companion, White Eye. White Eye had excellent manners and took the hot dog as offered in a gentle manner but the Buddy look alike apparently hadn’t been fed for at least 20 minutes and he was not about to waste any time with manners – gobble gobble – fingers still intact – barely. Did this discourage her? You know the answer. I grabbed her by her hair and dragged her kicking and screaming down the street, leaving the filthy mutts on their corner. She recovered when we got to the restaurant and after a perfectly average meal accompanied by a very good wine, we called our driver to take us home. The guide still says we should not walk the neighborhood at night but even though we saw no evidence indicating that it might be unsafe, we are in another country, we are not young and sprite and we are not stupid. So Alwin came in the van and we headed back to the hotel but not without a detour to the corner with Fran’s dogs. They were still there and were thrilled to see her. Buddy look-alike even gave her a hug. Another dog from another corner came to see what the commotion was and that’s when we understood that this really was Buddy look alike and White Eye’s corner. No way was the interloper going to get on that corner. It got a little noisy but the new guy finally retreated. Fran said goodbye but she’ll remember these guys and as you can tell from the photos the resemblance to our Buddy is uncanny. I guess when dogs go through sufficient generations of mixing up, this is what they end up as.

I'm sending this from the hotel Alta Atacama in the Atacama desert. Now this place is fantastic. The desert is spectacular. More tomorrow.

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Comments

[Linda]

Dogs
Can't believe the dog. They find you Fran. They know!!