¡Hola!

I am currently wearing a shirt I bought from a Chilean store. Combine that with all the chile-specific phrases and vocab I have been learning, and I am practically a real chilena now. Almost.

Today we had another tour of valparaiso with the tour guides from our university, which we just call "la catolica," since we're sooo chilean. We went to La Sebastiana, which is a museum and Pablo Neruda's old house (one of three). Everything in it is just how he had it, and it is a museum in itself because he collected all kinds of random, cool, interesting things. He has a carousel horse in his living room and the door to the bathroom in the bar is just an iron grate..completely see through. It's at the top of one of the cerros, and it has the best view of the whole port and all the cerros of Vina and Valpo. Too bad he's dead, because I wish I could have been friends with him.

We also saw the Museo al Cielo Abierto, which means the open sky museum. Appropriately named, because you just walk around a neighborhood and there are murals painted all over and some plaques describing them. It was cool, but there is so much cool graffiti all over the city that I wasn't that impressed. But there was one guy painting scenes from all over chile, especially this area, on the houses, streets, and stairs. It was crazy! he was covered in paint and must have started doing it years and years ago.

At the end of the tour, we got ice cream again. There is an ice cream store everywhere you look here. It would be like if every McDonald's, burger king, starbucks, and walmart was an heladeria (ice cream store). So I might be fat when I get back..but it might be worth it.