RTW: Exchange in Chile

Visiting Valpo

Last week I had Patricia, a friend I just met when I was passing by Mexicali, here for a visit. Of course we had to make the tour of the worthwhile places and do that while partying almost every day..

We passed through Viña, where we had a great time partying with the French in their apartment. It is becoming a trend here to not continue the party in a bar, which can mean one of two things: we are either really having too much fun just by ourselves or we are just getting lazy and old. Or maybe both are true, who knows. The penguins were a great hit in the party, and below you got Gael showing some moves.




Anyway, from Viña we continued with Patricia to Valparaiso, which was definately worth the visit. I will need to get back there someday for some serious clubbing, as some of the places there looked really cool. Valparaiso is just some 10 minutes from Viña in a bus, and the funny thing is that I remember most of the maps I have looked at showing Valparaiso as a bigger city than Viña, which it actually is not. The importance of Valparaiso has been diminishing along the use of its big port. However, it sill houses a naval base, the Chilean Congress and is the capital of the 5th region (instead of using the actual names, Chileans have their country divided into 13 regions with the imaginative "names" of 1st, 2nd, etc. except that Santiago is its own Región Metropolitaneo). "Valpo" has just some 250,000 inhabitants and with that its just a bit smaller than Viña that keeps growing as a holiday resort/summer house city. And for those Finns that think it is disturbing that people flock into Helsinki, here's a fact: Valparaiso and Viña are among the biggest cities after Santiago, as its region houses about 2/3 of the WHOLE population of the country!



The city itself was all about the port, which just about ratifies the whole existence of the city. The locals were also really proud of their engineering wonders, small cable cars that run up the mountainside connecting the oceanside with the rest of the city in the hills. Personally I did not see their wonder, but then again, my education in engineering is not quite at the MSc level yet so maybe I missed something crucial...

posted by Kassu @ 7:59 PM