chile:exploring.valdivia.

after a very temperamental shower, we grabbed a yummy breakfast of fruit and yogurt and toast at the hostel and set off to wander valdivia. one funny thing we’ve noticed here is the abundance of dulce de leche, which is like really soft spreadable caramel. they put it on their breakfast toast!

anyways we set off to walk along the river since it is the draw of valdivia. it was super neat.

we once again found some cool street art, this one on the bridge

and then took a break for a lunch of Chinese food! it was surprisingly good, but the one annoying thing is that since we’re in the city we can’t drink the tap water. paying for these tiny glass bottles of water is annoying.

after lunch we were off again. we came across some of those funny playground workout structures i mentioned a long time ago when we were in temuco.

we made it down to the fish market where we saw some cool boats

and the german-influenced section of town. it was charming.

we saw mcdonald’s and couldn’t resist so we got twix mcflurries. which were SO much better than mcflurries here. look at that hot fudge.

there is a little island across a bridge where the university is located, it is called isla teja and the view of the riverfront from the island was so cool.

we went into a couple of museums, this cool wall was outside of the contemporary art museum but unfortunately it was closed for the afternoon so we didn’t get to see it.

 one museum we went into was kind of strange. it was in an old german family’s house and it had a lot of their belongings but then it also had some mapuche artifacts (mapuche are the native people of chile) and then in one room there were photographs from students of the college. i don’t know, we saw some cool stuff though.

we walked back through town and saw a huge mob of people up ahead gathered around the school. as we got closer we saw desks piled up blocking the entrance and police in riot gear and stuff. there was a huge protest going on! we decided we didn’t want to be in the middle of that so we turned around and went the other way. it was neat to see though.

in the evening we got our laundry done at the big grocery store (and thank goodness because we didn’t have ANY clean clothes left) and picked up some stuff for mac and cheese and quesadillas/guacamole. we made dinner in the kitchen and hung out with our new roommate named julia who arrived earlier that day. she’s from germany and she’ll be working in valdivia for the next six months. she’s been traveling around south america all by herself the past couple of weeks! cool girl, but we’re glad we aren’t alone, we make a pretty good travel team i think.