Santiago and Valparaiso

Checking in with you during hopefully what is the last few hours here in Santiago--starting to feel that northen pull that keeps us moving...
The last few days have been great. Our first two nights in Santiago we stayed at this nice hostel that was modern, clean, fun, and served a great breakfast--which is the first time we have stayed at a place possessing all of those characterstics. It might also be considered progressive in the ways of hostelling as the bathroom was just a bunch of co-ed stalls together, making # 2 a whole different experience. Santiago was interesting enough but nothing really out of the ordinary--the only experience of note was the street fight we witnessed during a night on the town. It was actually more of a mini-riot which Petro accurately described as scene out of Westside Story with men posturing and dancing around each other with broken glass bottles. The only visible sign of harmful intent was the continuous hurling of rocks by the hooligans. As participating in a South American streetfight is not on my to-do list, watching at a safe disctance was about all that experience entailed. But it is good to know that if someone in the future breaks a bottle and makes threatening stabbing motions at me, they are most likely not going to actually go through with it. That should be an interesting bluff call...
Experiences got a little more authentic a couple of days ago when we got into communication with a girl who is a fellow couchsurfer from Valparaiso. For those of you unfamiliar with CouchSurfing, it is basically a service where people can offer their couch for travellers to sleep on with the intent of meeting people from all over the world. And so, if you have no qualms about having absolute strangers sleep in your house, you may want to look into this website. Lucky for us, we do a pretty good job of disguising our creepiness on our Couchsurfing profiles and email correnspondence. In this case, Paz, who lives with her mother and two sisters in Valpariaso, agreed to meet us at the bus station and eventually extended the invite to stay with them for a few days. Home-cooked meals, funs times around the city, and awesome seafood defined the experience. During our two days there, we were in a perpetual hang-out with Paz and her friends, which involved an interesting progression of meeting up, setting out for some sort of purpose or experience, parting with those friends, only to meet up at the same plaza to meet up with other friends and start the process over. This circular pattern of hanging out occurred about 5 times one day and was quite interesting as something new and fun came about as a result of each meet-up. On Sunday night we went to a Chilean movie theatre--which consisted of a neighborhood street corner, chairs, a projector, and a pirated movie. We saw The Pursuit of Happiness with Will Smith for the second time, but this time was much better....

Now we are in the process of trying to get ourselves way north to San Pedro Atacama--a 20+ hour bus ride, which is something really to look forward to. It will probably be our last stop before Bolivia.

Enough said,
Q