Today I had another awesome breakfast at the hostel. They give us fruit, juice, coffee or tea, and a ham and tomato sandwich. A pretty good breakfast for a hostel. I wandered around the city with Jonathan, with one of our missions being to find a Halloween party (we had met some French people that are staying at our hostel and we all wanted to do a party for Halloween). We succeeded in finding one online - it was a ferry boat party with an after party at a bar in town. Halloween on a boat sounded pretty awesome to me! Our other goal was to try out these sort of elevators that go up the hills (Valparaiso is very hilly and many streets are quite tough to walk up), but go up at a slant, not vertical. They are called Ascensors and only cost about 300 Chilean pesos ($.60) to go one way. Found a couple which offered gorgeous views of the city and bay. We ate lunch at a nice little restaurant called Richards Pub and I had my first taste of the sea. The fish was delicious and came with a rediculously huge serving of mashed potatoes! We stopped for ice cream (which Chileans love, it seems) before heading back to the hostel.
We found the French in the hostel lobby and announced our exciting Halloween find. While in there, a Dutch guy, Kevin, was checking in and soon became a good friend to all of us as well. We ended up learning from our wonderful receptionist (who is from Mexcio, but spoke French, English, and Spanish), that the boat thing was maybe for a slightly younger crowd and helped us find a couple better options on the Internet. Finally, we decided on Oasis Night Club, where you only had to pay 7000 for guys and 5000 for girls ($14 or $10), and it was open bar. Sounded like a good plan to us!
So, with my new found French friends (4 girls and 2 guys), Dutch friends, and Israeli friend, we decided to all stay in and cook a big meal to share. We bought food at a close supermarket and cooked up some delicious food. The French are amazing cooks! We had some drinks and played Kings Cup and it was a hilarious awesome good time. Later, as it was getting late and we weren't supposed to be in the common areas any more for noise reasons, we decided to venture out for a last drink at a bar. On our way we had many street dogs following us which made for a fun journey. (Have I mentioned yet that there are a TON of street dogs and cats everywhere here?!) Every time a car would pass all the dogs would chase them, unsuccessfully biting at their tires. We found a guy with a guitar on the street and sang some songs with him -- music is so universal! La Bamba and John Legend, for examples.
We eventually made it to a place and danced to our hearts content (it was a two story bar and we had the entire upper floor to ourselves for quite some time), in which only a few times the bartender had to come tell us to stop jumping so much. Haha. We made it back to the hostel as a loud and crazy group and sat outside talking for a while before finally heading to sleep....

FUN FACTS: French people are envious of Americans' prom because they don't have them; Stereotypes have a lot of truth to them; the French love to cook; the Dutch do know how to fix bikes!; Chileans public school really sucks, so almost everyone goes to private school which is expensive, and you are with the same group from preschool through high school; Chile's universities do not have sororities and fraternities; ...more to come later...