Blogs from Valparaíso Region, Chile, South America - page 7

We were shown on the Plaza Sotomayor/Independencia - the Navy Headquarters of Chile built in 1910, the Queen Victoria hotel decked out with furniture brought from England, a famous statue commemorating the 21stMay when Chile went to war with Peru and Bolivia, the outcome being Peru losing its national territories to Chile and Bolivia losing its coastline to Chile. The monument is guarded by a navy man and an eternal flame is placed in front of the monument. The statue has Esmerelda on the top, the man who lead the war. We saw the Barburizza palace built by a rich Yugoslavian immigrant on Paseo Yugoslav. The building was built by the public and is now the Bellas Artes museum. Valparaiso was the site of the first bank in Latin America? and the first protestant churches, built ... read more

My feelings which have been growing day by day since I arrived, could be summed up by this dismal town. My feelings and my perception of Chilean society, not altogether backed up by facts, is sprayed in the graffiti of every wall of every street here, haunting the delapidated buildings and conveyed by the isolation of the Cerros. In Chile there seems to be very little focus on society and community, people seem distrustful of their neighbours like described in the days of Pinochet, trusting the local policemen on every street rather than trusting their neighbours, there are still buildings where only the rich can go and the poor can’t, and money is all important here, if you have a lot of money you can go to university, if you don’t there seem to be no ... read more

The Italian immigrants created Emporios (corner shops) opened at the top of Cerros so people didn’t need to go down to the port so often. These still exist today. The British immigrants built 28 funiculars (electric cable cars) so that they could go up to their houses in the Cerros without climbing the steps. However only about 10 are still working and Cerros often go out of order and are left unfixed. My hostel is up Cerro Concepcion which is a nice and a more touristy Cerro. However the funicular/ ascensor was made in 1883 and is the oldest of all ascensors. It is old, rusty and apparently shakes when it goes up. It needs to be repaired but the authorities don’t have the money to do it. In any case as it leads to a ... read more

People began looking for ways to prevent their houses falling down in earthquakes, so they began to recycle plastic bottles and wrap their houses up in plastic so that instead of the house falling down, it would sway from side to side. To stop the material deteriorating over time, they found that by painting the plastic it would preserve it. This became the start of graffiti and due to a law having being passed which stated that once a house had been graffitied, it then marked the territory of an artist and nobody else could paint over the original graffiti. The inhabitants soon cottoned on to the fact that it would be better to pay a decent artist to pain their house rather than waiting fo it to be covered with less creative and more ugly ... read more

Today started out slow. We slept in and when I got up I wasn’t feeling right. I think something I ate did not agree with me. Shelly went down and got me a diet coke and we just skipped breakfast. At 1, we were going to go to Pablo’s house but Judith said it would be VERY busy today because the cruise ship was in so we just went back to the room and chilled until 2:30. We then walked down to the meeting place for the Tour for Tips, walking tour. There were about 30 people in the group. We learned a bit about the history of Chile and the graffiti. It was a fun tour but very slow. We broke off about half way thru as we were starved and found a great place ... read more