Valparaiso

We work quite a lot here in Santiago, and sometimes the city life gets to be a lil hectic,  so for our three day weekend (its a Catholic holiday here in Chile) we decided to take a trip to the coast to the artistic city of Valparaiso.  Valparaiso is only a hop skip and a jump (about two hours) from Santiago by bus.  So we boarded a bus on Friday, excited to escape Santiago for the clean ocean air.

Valparaiso is built entirely on hills.  It is truly the most colorful city I have ever visited, brightly colored houses built on stilts cover the hills and beautiful graffiti covers most of the city walls.

As Valparaiso is built on hills, there are Ascensors or Funiculars (i.e. elevators built on tracks) built on the hills to take residents to their homes.

There was even a slide to take down one of the hills instead of stairs!

We stayed at a colorful hostel with bottle cap murals and trapezes hung from the ceiling!

 
Friday night we went to a vegetarian restaurant for dinner (a rare treat in Chile), but vegetarian food seemed more plentiful in Valparaiso than in Santiago--I guess all the artsy fartsy people like their vegetarian food.

Living in Santiago, where the air quality is beyond the danger zone set out by the UN, our lungs thanked us for taking them to the coast.

Tear gas and water cannons.

Hydrosan Dam

     Chile seems to have a thing for protests and the police have a thing for shutting them down as quickly as possible. Our first experience with the protests was a few months ago. Unknown to us, the Chilean people decided to protest against the new dam that the government is trying to build. I was sitting in the common area of our apartment building when the sounds of thousands of people chanting came echoing from the street. One of the guys in the room with me ran off to presumably join and I decided to follow and check out what all the noise was about. Thinking it was a soccer celebration or something I walked out to the street only to find nothing there. 

    

 Slightly upset that I missed whatever it was I walked down the street a little and saw that the police were standing there with their full riot gear on, helmets, shields and pads everywhere, blocking off the street. Thinking it was probably a bad idea to try to get past them I turned around and started walking back when I was met with the protesters. At first all I heard was some chanting, then thousands of people came pouring out of one of side streets, trapping me between them and the police. Ducking up the side street in an attempt to go in a huge circle around them I was faced with more protesters. Street after street I was blocked by protesters until the 5th or 6th block.

Making my way around I finally got back to the apartment area but first I had to cross the street that was freshly tear gassed and water sprayed. The problem with this is that when the tear gas is set off and then they use the water cannons, the tear gas gets into the water and sits on the ground instead of going off into the air. Scarf pulled up to my eyes I made my way across choking and teary eyed. 

     

Britt was caught coming back from class. She was sitting on the metro when there was an announcement on the speakers in the subway car. Not speaking the best Spanish she didn't know what it meant but when she saw everyone closing the windows of the car she figured it couldn't be good. During protests the subways close their gates and sometimes send cars past the exit until things have settled down. Britt luckily was able to make it out of the stop before they locked her in only to have to walk through the tear gas water that I had crossed not minutes ago. 

We then watched from our apartment balcony a hundred people or so started chanting in front of the Enedessa building ( a company involved with the dam somehow). Right when they really started getting into it the military came and water cannoned everyone. They then had cops on motorcycles chasing down some of the more active protesters and arresting them. Quite a show for a Tuesday night.

U. Católica v/s U de Chile

     I got a call from my friend Ricardo one night as me and Britt were getting over strep throat to go see the celebration of the football game. Turns out that U de Chile beat U. Catolica with a 2 point deficit to start ( don't ask me how, soccer rules are strange).  There are three major futbol teams in Chile and this was the championship between two of them. So I walked out to meet him down at the celebration in the square/street. As I am getting closer I start passing more and more people in various states of intoxication, chanting and yelling. After I meet up with Ricardo we make our way to the center where we see thousands of people as seen in the vid below:

People on the roofs, street lights, setting off fireworks and throwing flares. 

But unfortunatly we were not there for long until the police showed up and shut everything down pretty quickly.

     As we were trying to disperse, a cop rolled out a tear gas canister roughly 5 meters away in my direction, I was temped to kick it away but the thought of spending a night in a Chilean jail changed my mind. After getting away and calming down a bit we tried to find a bar but no one would let us in because Ricardo was wearing a soccer jersey and they were not allowing any one with a jersey in. Eventually we found a bar in the very touristy area of Santiago but afterwards we had the same problem trying to get a taxi back home, no soccer fans were going to be picked up by a taxi that night. So we ended up walking back and calling it a sucessfull Sunday night.