Nerenberg Sabbatical in Chile 2011-2012: Guest Blog

We spent the last two days on the coast about 60 miles from Santiago. We walked around Valparaiso on Monday, returning to the scene of one of my muggings 16 years ago! Actually, it is only the area immediately around the port which is seedy - there were really some unsavory types there, but the rest of the city is great with funiculars connecting all of the sections.

We went into a "bargain" hotel in Viña, the resort town up the road from Valparaiso. It was next to where we happened to park our car, and convenient with respect to the beautiful waterfront, elegant (from the outside) casino, and an interesting seedy pedestrian mall where we dined for 9 dollars in a "bargain" place replete with a pimp and a waiter who really wanted us to appreciate his amazingly greasy filete a la pobre (kilo of greasy french fries, carmelized onions egg and century old steer).

Yesterday we drove north to Concon, which is a nice beach resort where Sarah is renting a place for the December fam trip. The hotel was very nice and should be a good way to spend some beach time. Last night, we had an inadvertent housing upgrade. We stopped at a beach Radisson, I miscalculated the price and ended up staying at a much nicer than usual place (for us that is). The "driver of our vehicle" scraped the paint on the fender by touching a fence when backing up, so we had a chance to visit the local police station. The damage was totally trivial, but any incident involving insurance requires stopping into the police station.

We drove another 59 km up the coast to a beautiful town called Zapallar, which is where the local ricos (wealthy) have their places. There is a great walk along the beach which you future visitors should take. Our room had a 12-foot wide window that directly opens over the ocean. I was waiting for a bird to fly in. I admit that it's nice, but many people here are Americans (Fran edit: "baloney - there were plenty of locals"), both tourists (of which there are few this time of the year) and a business group to whom a local bank is trying to sell investments.

Today, we then drove to one of Neruda's three houses in Isla Negra, which is filled with his various collections of shells, boats in bottles, etc., had a winery tour from a young sommelier (sp.) who knew his American oak barrels, and then came back to see Sarah et al. in Santiago.

The Chileans are receipt crazy. There is a receipt (or two or three) for any payment and every time you sign you are supposed to put down your national identification number. I have been generating sequences which are primes, fibonacci numbers, old telephone numbers from Schenectady , Philadelphia etc.