Valparaíso + Viña del Mar

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So, Its been 3 weeks, or so since I was in Valparaíso and Viña del Mar, but I finally have time to write about it. Viña is nice and modern, with big buildings right on the coast. There's a Starbucks, one of the few outside Santiago, and the oldest casino in Chile. Viña is one of the biggest music scenes in Latin America, and most major performers in the spanish speaking world played there before hitting it big, because of this there are a lot of great concerts. I only ate lunch on the beach, before heading to Valparaíso, which is a industrial working class kind of city. The architecture minus the Chilean congress building and a few other exceptions is traditional and only a few stories in hight, with many different and bright colors. The streets in the majority of the city don't follow the usual grid pattern of most cities in Latin America, but instead zig-zags their way up the hills following the paths of mule trains that brought goods to the port, which up until a few years ago was the national port and the port with the most traffic in the county. Now the port of San Antonio is both the national and most trafficked port in the country, and is a little bit further south. Valparaíso is also the location of the majority of the Chilean Navy, around 40 percent of the fleet is located here. Luckily I brought my camera and was able to take a lot of photos, except at Pablo Neruda's house, but honestly it wasn't that interesting, but the views of the port were nice.

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