To Valpo & Beyond!

Sunday we checked out the markets they have on the weekends. It's a lot like a swap meet. People sell everything there from computer junk to power tools to old magazines. Jeff bought a pair of sunglasses that were only $1.000clp. They also had a lot of food vendors. I had a delicious empanada with cheese, meat, and olives (they apparently don't remove the pit in their olives) and Jeff had some sort of sausage in a hot dog bun with some kind of onion/meat sauce (it almost looked like entrails, but I'm not sure if it actually was). The market was super long and went for about 7 blocks! It was crazy how many people were there.

We also ate at J Cruz, a social club/museum. Nacho recommended it to us. When you go in the entire place is covered in writing and pictures that people have left behind. You're supposed to sign your name wherever there's room. They only serve one meal the whole day. When we went it was meat cooked with onion and scrambled eggs over french fries. It was delicious! We definitely plan on going back there again. To the right is a picture of one of the walls in the cafe.

We spent the past few days looking for a place to live through March. We found a nice apartment in a quiet, nice neighborhood that we will be moving into at the end of January.

Until then we have moved into KasaBellaVista, which is student housing. Although we seem to be the only people living here at the moment. It's pretty affordable and we get a huge bedroom with a nice view. The only downside is that it's on the top of a very long and steep hill. We're not quite used to walking up steep hills, especially with groceries, though by the time we leave we'll be able to scale them no problem. Around town there are funiculars, or elevators, that take you from the bottom of the hill to the top. The place where the apartment is has one close by as did the hostel we stayed in Saturday. However, there is none near Kasa Bellavista. The elevator basically consist of a small wooden station that's on a track going up a steep hill. It's pretty scary if you actually see one because it looks like it will break at any moment.


At Casa Elias, one of the places we looked at renting a room from, they had a cat that had just had kittens three days ago! The woman showing us the place had a little girl who showed them to us. She let me hold them too. They were so tiny they didn't even have their eyes open. They were the cutest things ever! I've never seen kittens at three days old before. I kind of wanted to live there just so we'd get to play with the kittens.



In Valpo there are two big supermarkets, Jumbo and Lido Express. We now live closer to Lido so we will do most of our shopping there. We discovered in both supermarkets that Chile has awesome fresh bread! They have huge bins where they dump all of their fresh breads and buns of various kinds. You have to put them in a bag then take it to get weighed and they put the price sticker on it. Today we found out that you have to get all your fruits and veggies pre-weighed as well. I guess that makes it easier on the cashiers. All the cashiers sit in chairs like they did in New Zealand. I don't know why the cashiers in the US can't sit in comfy chairs all day. At the supermarkets here you're also supposed to tip the baggers. I'm not sure why you tip them but we give about $100 pesos.

Yesterday we discovered a nice assortment of fresh pastas at Jumbo. We got tortellinis con queso. We decided to try the sauce in a plastic container again. This time we picked a nicer looking one. It wasn't that bad. Definitely better than that first one we bought. Then today at Lider we found Safeway Select sauce in a glass jar! We were so excited! I don't think many people buy it cause it looked kind of dusty but we had to get it.

Other than visiting supermarkets we've been wandering around town and even visited Viña del Mar today by metro. We enjoy riding the metro even though we still have no idea how much it costs per station. We just put $1.000clp on our cards and go. It was only a 10 minute ride to Vina and we found out that there are a lot of shopping places there. It seems a bit more expensive though because it's a tourist town. While in Viña I learned that beer costs as much as soda, which made me happy. People in Chile drink more soda than any other kind of beverage. This is good for me since it makes the beers cheaper!

Next Monday we start language school. I'm taking two weeks and Jeff is taking four weeks. I hope that it will help us. I'm not sure if we mentioned this previously but no one here speaks English! Even at Nacho's party everyone told us we must learn Spanish because no one in Chile speaks English. We've been able to get by on the minuscule amount that we know but it's been difficult.