Big Boats and Little Boats...Saying Good-Bye to Valparaíso

I've heard and read various opinions about Valparaíso: that is wonderful, dirty, ugly, beautiful, interesting, over-hyped, dangerous and so on. There is quite a bit of misinformation about the city floating around in cyberspace, starting with the UNESCO World Heritage designation, which is what confuses some people I think. The entire city does not have the designation, just the historical area around the port.                                           

So, is Valpo dirty and horrible? It is a big city, a working port and it is old-so yes, there is grime. Of course, I did not go to every part of the city and many places are dangerous. Many of the hills have substandard housing, which can have devastating results when things burn, as happened here in April. I've also heard that mud-slides can be a problem when it rains a lot.

But where I went around the metro line, port, points south and north closer to Viña were interesting, charming in places, run-down in others but I like the city very much.

 The boats are one of the things I found so interesting, coming as I do from a state far from the ocean. Peoria does have a river, which I like, and we have interesting traffic on it but it is, of course, nothing like Vapo!

I've seen the man in the row boat every time I've visited the port. Today was the first time I saw people with him, and I realized he ferries folks back and forth to the anchored tourist boats. Not the tourists, the people who work on the boats. We never took one of the water tours around the port-the boats looked really sketchy to me. I've heard the tours are really interesting, that you can get fairly close to the cargo and navy ships, but the way the tour boats were packed, the way some listed far over to one side...it wasn't for me!

 Here the row boat señor, on a different day:

                                                                                                                                                                                                       

The ship below was one Steve, Joel and I saw about 6 weeks ago. It was really different looking from the other container ships we saw regularly, and we couldn't figure out what it was. I finally asked someone in the port office, and she said it was an vehicle transport boat. Out of curiosity, I googled its name Athens Highway, and discovered a really cool website, that shows ship locations all around the world (marinetraffic.com). This is a Japanese registered ship, and is, as of this writing, 3 days away from Nakanoseki. It left Valpo on June 3rd, so it will have taken it over a month to get back home.

 Pilot boats are vital of course, in a port like Valpo. I got to see one pull in and tie up today.

A different day, another big ship. This is the Orange River, built in 2007 (registered in Hong Kong). Yeah, I looked that up too, on the Pacific Basin website. This company specializes in "dry bulk," minerals, metals, construction materials and the like. She's currently on her way to Balboa, Panama.

Hasta luego, Valparaíso! I felt lucky to have lived next door to you.

The Diplomatic Pouch

It is great that (at this writing, things may change), Fulbrighters to Chile are able to ship books via the pouch. Of course, the two people I know who had a grant (one in Ukraine, one in Chile) did not have good luck with their shipments. The person in Ukraine shipped 4 boxes, and received 2. My friend in Chile shipped 2, and got ZERO. He told me that Fulbright told him there was nothing they could do without a tracking number.

So I shipped two boxes today, via media mail to the State Department, with everything labeled as requested, and got a tracking number. I was very careful to tape things up with, well, gusto. I think one of the problems with this type of shipping is the very rough handling it gets (there is even a caution about this on the shipping directions). So the boxes I sent were almost more tape than cardboard. And while I do want the contents, I did not include any books that I absolutely had to have for teaching. Those, I'm including in my luggage-I will have two suitcases of books as a result, since I'm teaching a children's lit class, and I have to bring all the materials.

We'll see if and when those boxes make it-keep your fingers crossed for me!