Cheap cherimoya champagne, plastic rainbow wigs, and far, far too many hours without sleep; if how we spend our New Year's Eve is at all indicative of how we will spend the next year, mine will be filled with love, laughter, live music, fireworks and more public urination than I'd care to admit.
Following the advice of several friends who told us traffic would be crazy if we didn't get to Valparaíso early enough, we left Santiago at 8:30 AM which landed us in Valpo around 10:30. We didn't book a place to stay since things were so pricey because of NYE. We figured we'd be up all night anyways so why not just wait a few extra hours and go back to Santiago in the morning? I carried around our few essentials in my purse and we got ready in a gas station bathroom (keeping it classy, as usual).
During the day, we entertained ourselves by wandering around (as if we didn't do that enough while we were there over Christmas) and meeting up with different friends throughout the day. We also did a boat tour of the bay which was nice (and only about 4 bucks), rode the famous outdoor elevators and ate a big delicious seafood lunch.
When nightfall hit, we headed to the Plaza Sotomayor for a concert, street party and an awesome fireworks display. After ringing in the new year, dancing and drinking there for a few hours, we met up with a friend from Santiago and a group of his friends and stuck with them for a few more hours of aimless ambling around the city (only this time slightly more inebriated).
Around sun up, we were kicking ourselves for not booking our return bus until quarter to eleven. At seven, we headed to the bus station which was a virtual refugee camp. Displaced partiers were strewn from one side to the other; littered across the floors and up and down the staircases. We wove our way around the labyrinth of bodies, only to find that it would be impossible to change our tickets for an earlier time. We decided to adopt an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach and found a loose scrap of cardboard, nestled ourselves amongst the other NYE casualties and made ourselves comfy.
The bus station personal eventually got fed up and intentionally set off the fire-alarm...three times. When that proved to be ineffective, they sent in a police officer to yell and shake his baton around. I had a nice spot next to the fellow with the tye-dyed fanny pack (pictured below) until the cop starting using his baton to smack the railing that was propping up my head. I'm not sure if his plan of attack was entirely successful but it was enough of an annoyance to make Jeff and I relocate to the grass outside.
By the time we bussed back to Santiago, metro-ed to our friends' house to pick up our stuff and walked to our new hostel, it was almost 2 pm. We stumbled through the front door and dragged our feet up the four floors of winding stairs just in time to collapse into a big bed and sleep off what was left of New Years Day.
Chile has some interesting New Years Ever Traditions, of which I participated in just one (see photo above). Most of them are meant to bring financial prosperity and, in retrospect, I probably should have done more of them. There is still a lot of uncertainty about what 2013 will bring. Will it take me back to Iquique to work in the mine? Will it pull me south to Puerto Varas to start a new teaching job there? Will the yellow underwear trick fail me and send me scraping together monedas to buy my return ticket to California? To be honest, all three are possible, if not probable.
If my New Year's Eve serves as any kind of window into what my new year will look like, there will surely be ups and downs ahead. Things may be sticky (like the cocktail of fake snow and booze that I spent a good part of the night drenched in) but I will find good things in surprising places (like confetti in my bra the next day). There will be beautiful miracles (like finding a drunk friend in a crowd of thousands) and some mysteries that are better left unsolved (like what kind of meat was used in the 'sándwich de potito' aka 'butt sandwich' that Jeff ate in Plaza Sotomayor). There will be some things that instantly become crystal clear to me (like the fact that a three dollar bottle of champagne sold on a street corner is bound to be terrible, no matter how much I like cherimoya) but there will others that I will never fully understand (like this cryptic message scrolling on loop our entire bus ride from Valpo to Santiago).
A merry new years to all and to all a young man neoplan bus young man truck.
German technology. Chinese prices.
No comments:
Post a Comment