What a day! I`m exhausted...Up by 6am, (in bed at my usual 3am last night...ayyy) at the Aldea to get the girls by 7:30ish and then on a bus to Valparaiso by 9:30. Valparaiso is on the coast of Chile--it`s largest port city and the way that Chile gets all that fruit and wine out all over the world. Seeing as Chile is no larger than 100 miles wide at any point of its length, it doesn`t take long to reach the coast--an hour and a half, max.
So we pull into the bus station and start wandering through the busy, lively Saturday market streets. Bam! 5 minutes into the day we have some guy run by and grab a camera from one of the girls--right off her neck--and keep on running...so fast I didn`t realize what had happened until he was well out of sight. One camera down--on a photography field trip no less. But everyone took it in stride and we kept going...
Spent about 6 hours or so wandering around the city with 3 gringa volunteers, one Chilean tìa and 4 girls from the Aldea who have been participating in this photo workshop for the past 2 months. This was the big finale--a trip out to the coast for one last photo session.
Other than the robbing incident, everything went really well...Climbed up the hills between multi-colored houses and took in the views. Good weather, lots of public art and murals to check out, as well as the requisite communist graffiti splashed on most walls. We even caught the last moments of a funeral in some random white church tucked up into the hills..It must have been a young man who died--his lover was carried out of the church wailing and completely distraught, difficultly coerced into a car (away from the coffin) and the whole car train set off. The last car in the line had a hand-made flower mural wishing the deceased ¨Adios Amigo¨...5 minutes passing brought quiet to the street again and shrouded any sign that anything eventful had happened there in months, much less minutes.
No comments:
Post a Comment