Valpo. You should go.

Valparaiso, Chile, that is. It is just called Valpo by people here. You know, like me.
J and I spent about three days in Valparaiso, which is a UNESCO world heritage site. The entire city is built into a very steep hill, overlooking the ocean. When I say the hill is steep, I mean they have encorporated outdoor, public elevator-like devices (called 'ascensors' in Spanish), as part of their public transportation systems. These bad boys are OLD, but they seem to do the trick. All the houses are painted bright colours and there is graffiti everywhere. It was esthetically so interesting, and we loved it there.

I think our favourite part was the day we decided to go for a walk to this museum we weren't terribly interested in, and then decided that instead of actually going into the museum, we would take the public bus to the bus station so we could purchase our tickets to La Serena, Chile, which was our next destination. During our walk we had seen the bus we needed to get on pass numerous times, so we knew we were in the right place. As we were walking we had seen one go down off the main road, so we followed it and decided to wait at  one of the bus stops, which happened to be right under an open window in the house. We waited for about five minutes, until the man from the house came out and in very patient Spanish explained to that we were not actually waiting at the bus stop and that we would have to return to the street we had been walking down. We joined the several other Chilean women also waiting for the bus and boarded when it arrived. We paid our fares (which is always a bit tricky. I never seem to actually know what the fare is), but there were no more seats left. This was a bus, but really more like a large van with lots of seats. It was really the first bus that felt to me like we were in Latin America. Chile, Argentina and Uruguay are all quite developed and definitely have nothing on Guatemala in terms of their bus systems. No chicken buses here!

The bus driver took great joy at barrelling down the hill, taking corners at full speed, shaking up his cargo (read: us). I expelled more energy trying to prevent my bottm from banging into those sitting all around me than I had doing anything else that week. J and I could not stop smiling at the experience, and once we reached the city center, which was where the bus station was located, a Chilean man (who had offered us his seat earlier in the ride) leaned over, and in perfect English suggested that we may want to get off at the next stop and turn left. As we started to walk to the front of the bus we realized that the driver was also looking up to tell us that this is where we wanted to go.

Chileans are so helpful. Valparaiso is lovely. You really should go.