Kelly's Visit: Day 2 and 3

We decided to keep the next day pretty low-key since we had stayed up pretty late the night before and we were a little hungover.

My host mom, Paulina, wanted to have them over for lunch, so I went and got them at their hostel and we headed to my house to eat. Paulina made Cazuela a Chilean beef stew which is pretty good, and of course, a ton of lemony vegetable side dishes. It was a good, relaxing lunch after a hectic first day.

Cazuela

After lunch we headed to Concha y Toro, one of Chile's biggest and most well-known vineyards for a tour and tasting. I underestimated how long it would take us to get there, so we were a little late for our scheduled tour, but we just joined the next available one, so there weren't any problems! The grounds were beautiful and it was cool to learn a little about the process. I wish I could do a tour in the summer when the grapes are ripe and the vines are bigger. We got to taste two red wines, one of which was their famous Casillero del Diablo but unfortunately I found them both pretty nasty. They were very woody and smokey. The first one actually tasted like smoked ham, and the second like sawdust. I think I will stick to my sweet whites and roses for now...Towards the end of the tour some Brazilian ladies asked me to take their photo. I recognized that they were Brazilian since they were speaking Portuguese and I mentioned that I had just started learning Portuguese online. One of the ladies was very excited about this fact and started speaking at me in very fast Portuguese; to be honest, I don't think she spoke Spanish. Luckily I understood most of it, due to my few lessons and its similarities to Spanish and we had a pretty lengthy conversation in a combination of Portuguese and Spanish. We ended up swapping emails and she told me to email her with any questions I had about the language or if I ever wanted recommendations about where to eat or what to do in Brazil!

Administrative building at Concha y Toro. Used to be the owner's house.

So after the tour we headed back to the hostel to freshen up (such a weird saying) and we went to meet another girl from Kelly's program for dinner that had been in Santiago for the past week visiting. We went to a restaurant called Galindo which came highly recommended, especially for their pastel de choclo. Pastel de Choclo is another typical Chilean dish that is essentially a corn and beef pie (choclo means corn, pastel means cake or pie). Kelly and Nolan ended up getting that and I got some mini cheese empanadas and some fries. The pastel de choclo was a really interesting combination of sweet and salty, and they ended up loving it, though I'm not really sure I could have eaten an entire meal of it, maybe as a side dish.

Pastel de Choclo

We ended up calling it a night pretty early because we had a bus to catch for Valparaíso the next morning at 9:20am. We all got to the bus station fine and had a pleasant hour and a half journey over there. We went to Pablo Neruda's house there, bought a few souvenirs (I got presents for my dad and Gina), checked out the Naval buildings and statues, looked out over the port, rode several acensores up the cerros, visited the market, walked around the city admiring the graffiti and crazy buildings, drank wine, ate good food, and just generally had a pretty fun day. Feel free to check out my earlier post on my first visit to Valpo to get a little bit more detail.

Unfortunately the day kind of ended on a sour note when my purse was stolen in a park outside of the bus station while I was putting on my jacket. :( I lost my wallet ($20, all my ID's, and one of my credit cards), my iPod (biggest sad face), my camera (which I was borrowing from my parents), and some makeup (my MAC MSF Natural, my favorite NARS Orgasm Lipgloss, my MAC lipstick in Hue, and my Korres Lip Butter).

But we made it back in time for me to watch the latest Dexter episode online :)