Kaitlyn in South America: MoCo in South America!

Well readers, I don’t know if there are really any of you out there anymore because of my complete lack of dedication to my blog. If you’re still reading, thanks. Now that it’s August and I just returned from my WINTER vacation, I should finish writing about my SUMMER vacation so that I can eventually write about the vacation I was just on. Jajaja.

OK, so way, way, way back at the end of January after finishing my tour of the South of Chile, I flew back to Santiago, spent one day doing laundry and organizing my life, and then headed to the airport bright and early the next morning to visit my first visitor to Chile—Maureen, one of my best friends from high school! It was so amazing to see her and show her around my new stomping grounds.

Maureen and I spent a couple of days in and around Santiago. We visited all of the typical Santiago sights—Cerro Santa Lucia, Cerro San Cristobal, la Plaza de Armas, el Mercado Central, and lots of other cool places. We indulged in delicious meals and I introduced Maureen to her first taste of South American nightlife with my roommates. A true New Yorker, she adapted like a champ to the 5 AM nights.

After a few days, we took a bus to Valparaiso, a funky beach town two hours north of Santiago. Valparaiso is one of the top ten most colorful cities in the world and has a unique bohemian, port town, artsy, coast town flavor. We visited one of Pablo Neruda-Chile’s poet-laureate’s- many homes, which was pretty awesome. It had a funky decorating style and the museum painted a great picture of how he worked to create such masterful poetry. We wandered around Valpo and its hilly, twisty, extremely confusing roads, befriending the many stray dogs that live in the city. Maureen, I might add, did not adapt as well to the South American stray dog phenomenon as she did to South American nightlife, but we both survived. In our trip to Valparaiso we took an excursion to another coastal town called Con-Con, famous for its giant dunes. We also baked in the sun in another beach town called Riñaca. I had not had much beach time and Maureen was coming out of straight up winter, so we both relished in the sun. Maureen took some beach mobile upload photos to “sacar pica” to all of the neoyorquinos (New Yorkers) freezing their butts of back home.

One highlight of this part of the trip was tracking down lofts that Maureen had researched and found out about before our trip. One of my favorite qualities of Maureen is her random obsessions. She put me on a wild goose hunt to find these lofts in Valparaiso that she loved because of their architecture and design. After following the circuitous streets of Valparaiso, being pursued by street dogs, and eventually hailing a taxi, we found the esteemed lofts and Maureen was in bliss. The pictures show it!

Maureen and I after hiking Cerro San Cristobal, looking over a smoggy Santiago and us dining at Patio Bellavista.

Looking out over Santiago at Cerro Santa Lucia and Maureen in bliss after finding her lofts!

Valpo's coast in the distance.

We spent a quick night and morning in Santiago and then flew to Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires is where the fun really started. We put ourselves into tourist overdrive the first day, taking down all of the major tourist attractions: Museo de Bellas Artes, Cemeterio de la Recoleta, the main government building at which the famous Evita scene was filmed, etc. That night we got all fancied up, went to a way-too-nice-we-shouldn’t-be-eating-here sort of steak house and hit the night- life along Puerto Madero. We had a fantastic night dancing the night away and returned to our hotel (shamefully) as we saw some people going to work! (whoops!)

The next day we recovered from our fun first night out and moved from the hostel we had been staying at to a fancy hotel Maureen had managed to score with credit card points she had accumulated. It was a true treat to be in a nice hotel after about 5 weeks of hostel jumping. We explored Palermo- SoHo, what quickly became our favorite area of town, for the rest of the afternoon. Maureen and I both could not get enough of this West-Village-with-a-South-American-touch part of town. Cute coffee shops, boutiques, outdoor markets, and street-front dining sprinkle Palermo and at night the restaurants are teeming with beautiful Argentineans enjoying great wines, grilled-to-perfection-beef, and creative salads while chain-smoking.

We quickly adapted to the Argentinean schedule. This means that we started eating DELICIOUS dinners every night at about 11 PM, sharing a great bottle of wine, hitting the town until roughly 5 or 6 AM, and starting our next day at around 1 or 2 PM. It was great fun to participate in the alluring charm of this wild lifestyle, but by the end of the week our bodies were hurting. In our daytime touring we mainly hung out in Palermo, but we also explored the Buenos Aires version of Central Park, which was gorgeous, packed with people roller- blading, picnicking, and just hanging out. On Sunday we explored the famous San Telmo market that sprawls over miles of cobblestone, windy, streets and boasts great artesenia. A few times we met up with some of my roommates that were also in Buenos Aires, but we mainly did our own thing. On our last night, Maureen, Aisilinn, Megan, and I went to a tango show, which was fantastic. Maureen got to be one of the lucky people they call up on stage at the end of the show and her years of dancing lessons paid off as she strutted her stuff.

Maureen and I parted quite sad that she had to go but “muertas con sueño” or “dead tired,” which means that we simply had TOO much fun. It was really a blast to completely indulge for those ten days. Maureen and I are already dreaming South American adventures part 2. ¡Ojalá que se repita!