The Santiago City Slicker Meets the Sunshine House

Valparaiso is an olfactory smorgasbord. Nestled into a cove in Central Chile, it's a town that would prompt Liam Neeson to want to release the Kraken on its filth. The beautiful sea breeze wafts rotting fish, sewer water, and dried-out cat poop up into your welcoming nostrils.

Luckily for me, I love things that are slightly shitty. They appeal to me in that I-just-graduated-from-college-and-can't-afford-matching-furniture sort of way. Valpo, like Santiago, seems to have been constructed by a woman who has great taste in style but no matching fashion sense; stately art deco buildings are flanked by Swiss-style chalets are towered by slim San-Francisican-style tenant housing. Think Hell's Kitchen meets Lombard Avenue meets shanty town. Much of the housing is seemingly waif. Almost all the rooftops, though, are made out of sheet metal (as are the fronts of most of the buildings).

Valpo winds crazily up a series of cerros, or steep hills, where the sidewalk yields to a series of steps, like a staircase out of a M.C. Escher drawing. The city has hired a team of local artists to paint the otherwise grey stone buildings and cement walls, and everywhere you turn there is a fantastical mural or a bunch of guys fervently working on something new. In this way, Valpo is a growing comic book of pop art.

About halfway up Cerro Yuguay (spelling?) stands the Sunshine House, home of the talented Jeanette Hardy (whose blog you can find on the CIEE website or through the link here on my page). Tosh, Jackie, Matt, Laura and I slogged up with bottles of champagne and orange juice, sweating in the indian summer sun. We colapsed on Jeanette's makeshift deck (the boards aren't nailed in but are rather cleverly balanced on a wooden frame).

The Sunshine House makes much of material: its outside walls are drywall, sheet metal, wood, and glass, which explains the leaking Jeanette described after the tormenta they received; but the house is like the massive tree-fort mansion every adult secretly wishes they could live in. The rooms are big and bright, with whitewashed walls and distressed floors. Paper lanterns hang from the hallway ceiling. Outside the wooden portico curls upon itself in a series of whispy spirals, the cracked blue paint adding to the house's unending charms. We chilled with our mamosas and looked out on the rough Pacific Ocean and watched huge battleships sail in. I felt small in the wake of the ocean, but warm and relaxed in the company of friends.

We spent the afternoon exploring the insanity that is the city (a map of Valpo's streets exist, but it isn't at all helpful), coming upon neon-yellow and orange houses cheerfully setting in the afternoon sun. We faced undending bluffs and cliffs where the road abruptly ended or turned. A street vendor sold earrings carved out of avocado pits. Street dogs protected us from curious stray cats. My sandaled feet turned black in the street sludge. Music wafted from a reggae concert somewhere beneath us. A child offered me his half-eaten Chupa-Chup. I was loving it all.

As the sun set into the sea, I took refuge in a cafe. Sipping an iced mocha, I sighed into my chair, perfectly happy that I had escaped my city for a town that had as much growing up to do as I have. But I was so happy to come home to the order and elegance that my Bellas Artes pad has to offer, and to fall asleep to the noisy din of the bar below me, and, gently underneath, the purr of the night buses on their beat.