Today was a day where we got some of the exercise that the body needs every day. The reason for that is that we went up and down the long flights of stairs near our house to get away and to it 3 times throughout the course of the day when the sun was in the sky and when the first stars were starting to come out of the blanket of darkness that had settled around us, blotting out all glimpses of the sun as it continued to light other parts of the earth in our continuing circle around the star.

We woke up and ate the breakfast that we had bought at a supermarket last night before sitting around and reading books. After that, we arranged a tour from ‘Tours 4 Tips’ with Nacho, and then went into town to look for money to pay our guide, Benjamin. When the guide arrived and after we had gone up the flights of stairs once to get back from the bank, it turned out that he was not Benjamin, that Benjamin was busy, and that our new guide’s name was Francisco. As the tour was a walking tour, we went by foot until reaching the bottom of our hill (one of 43 in the city) and taking a trolley bus over to the port. The reason for the trolley bus, our guide had explained, was because it took a long time to get to the port by foot and he didn’t want to use up our precious time of 3 hours.

At the port, we got off the bus and looked out across the blue-green water filled with boats of all shapes and sizes, from great cruise ships, to small fishing boats, to cargo boats, almost every type of boat was accounted for. While he explained how there were a lot of poor people around begging and pickpocketing from people, a beggar came up as though top prove his point. We looked out over the Navy building, which was blue, and under one of the arches, an ornate plaque with curls said ‘Armada de Chile,’ the Armada of Chile. Out in the harbor, there were also several large, gray, metal, dull, Navy ships, sitting by the edge of the port, as if being springs, waiting for someone or something to push their luck to far and have them push them away, maybe down to Davy Jones’ locker, but who knows?

From there on, we walked along one of the streets and imagined it in its former glory, all stonework, buzzing, humming, and alive with people, sounds, smells, and sights. All normal sights, except now, instead of having people on balconies lining up their laundry on a line or listening to the radio with a beer and a friend or two, there is nothing but boarded up windows and crumbling banisters, supporting arches cracked under their weight that they have been bearing for years, not complaining as they are stone, unyielding until the end. Another house that we went into also used to be full of glory, though it had not lost as much of its grandeur. It still had green onyx steps and English oak floorboards, still carved doors and banisters and wall panels. But in the end, under it all, there was an incompleteness;  the onyx was cracked, the floorboards faded and scuffed, the carvings on doors were, in some cases, almost completely rubbed away by people touching them. The roof used to be glass, classy and in style. Now someone has replaces that style and touch with some thin corrugated material, yellow and blue and hardly held together. In the end, it was an almost pitiful display of what was once one of the richest streets in all of Latin America now reduced to shambles.

We went back out of what used to be the rich section and went up an ascencio, which is like an elevator that goes up hills on a track like a train on a very steep incline. At the top, we paused for a minute and marveled at the architecture of a building that turned out to be a free museum that we didn’t have time to go to at the moment, but planned to later. We then heard about how graffiti artists respected the street artists and if you had your house painted by a street artist, most of the ‘taggers’ wouldn’t touch your house. We walked past several up-to-date restaurants with views and a large selection of wine and immersed ourselves in learning why there were small, de-elevated sections in the middle of some alleys; they were for horses and rainwater and horse poop, to wash it all away when the rains came, letting there be a clean slate to start over again. We then walked down several streets and into a trolley car and then back up our hill, making it twice. Eventually, we went out to eat, and then down the hill for ice cream, having to come back up again to get home for the night, making it three times coming up the hill to go home.

That’s all for now, Folks!