Poetry and Sun

I had the day to myself while Paula and Lola visited their mother and then made plans for a fiesta tonight in honor of my birthday tomorrow.

I headed to Valparaiso again today - this time my destination was the home of Pablo Neruda, the Nobel Prize winning poet from Chile who died in 1973 (his houses are kept as museums now). Pablo Neruda has three houses in Chile - the one in Valparaiso, one south of here on the coast at Isla Negra, and a third in Santiago. Six years ago when Paula and I were here we visited the Isla Negra house. It's a funky, quirky, odd little place right on the ocean. Inside it was like a ship with all sorts of nautical geegaws around and narrow passages between one room and another. A fun place and a very comfortable place to live I would imagine.

I arrived at the main plaza in Valparaiso (Plaza Sotomayor) around 10am and asked the guy and girl manning the little Tourist Information kiosk if they spoke English. The girl there said she spoke a little. I asked in English where I could catch a bus to see Pablo Neruda's house. She pointed north and said (mostly in English, but also partly in Spanish) to go three blocks to another plaza and then she said in Spanish to go derecho (straight ahead) one more block and catch the "O" bus. But when she said the part about the extra block straight ahead, she pointed to the left. And the guy in the booth helped with a translation right then and said in English, "to the right". Hmmm... Spanish "straight ahead", finger pointing to the left, English "to the right"... Rather than try to unravel all that, I headed to the plaza. I figured once I got there it would be only one block farther to the "O" bus in some yet to be determined direction.

It all worked out. The bus came from the far side of the plaza and when it got to the plaza it took a right hand turn (which was probably the left pointing part of her directions). I hopped on the "O" bus and it started to climb the hills of Valparaiso.

And climb.

And climb.

And climb.

Waaaayyyy up the hills. Constantly climbing and turning right and left on narrow streets. A beautiful 20 minute ride.

I managed to get off at the right spot and a block down a side street was the Neruda House. Like the one on Isla Negra, this one is small but fun to wander through. Everywhere were signs saying no cameras (a camera with a circle and line through it). So I left my camera in my daypack that had to be checked at the entrance. Turns out I was the only one that paid attention to the signs. Everyone else was shooting photos right and left! Oh well... Here's a photo of the outside of the house. It's built vertically - 4 floors and only really room for one room on each floor. Narrow staircases go from one floor almost vertically to the next. Again lots of nautical relics were scattered around the house and it certainly has Neruda's stamp on it.

For more information on Pablo Neruda, check out the Wikipedia.com article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Neruda It includes tidbits of vital knowledge such as Pablo Neruda was cited in The Simpsons episode "Bart Sells His Soul". Lisa: Hmm. Pablo Neruda said, "Laughter is the language of the soul." Bart: I am familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda.

After touring the poet's house I caught a bus from downtown Valparaiso north through Viña del Mar, past Reñaca, and to the small beach town of Con Cón. It has a very nice beach with big waves today and I relaxed in the shade of a beach umbrella at a small cafe on the walkway overlooking the beach with a completo (a hot dog with the works for those of you that haven't been paying attention) and a coke. As you can see from this photo of the view from my shady beach perch, it's going to be hard to return to cold rainy Seattle in a couple days...