Today Sylvain woke me up. In our entire relationship I have never slept later than him. Usually I'm up at least a couple hours in front of him. I like to wake up early and this way I have time to myself, and usually if we watch a movie at night, I will inevitably fall asleep (they're my movies, I know how they end) within 30 minutes of pressing play, and often he will have an hour or two to himself before he goes to bed. So this extra sleep my body needed could only mean one thing; I'm getting sick. I had a feeling this was coming.
Last night we went to Cafe Vinilo for a plate of tapas. Delicioso, octopus with bacon, onions and garlic on toast. Most tapas are literally a bite or two, but we had a whole bowl to share, spooning it atop our toasts bites, and we washed it down with white wine and pisco sour. I am fundamentally a new world white wine drinker and prefer sauvignon blanc to anything else or when appropriate I like a lager. Sylvain and I got in the habit of occasionally sharing a bottle of champagne or having a glass of southern comfort in New York, but you will not find me drinking Ale, or anything resembling a cocktail- far too sweet. I think I am going to have to switch to red wine here in Chile, they make some good ones, and they're much better than the white wines I've had here so far. Still a bottle of wine goes for about 3 bucks and we've already found a few we like. Cafe Vinilo was old world cute, and it's only about a block from our house, everyone there already seemed to know Sylvain and I imagine we will be by regularly. The clientele was mostly Chilean, but this is the kind of place that is so charming it inevitably is going to draw the tourist crowd as it is probably written up in the lonely planet and there was a table of three midwestern Americans just in front of us.
I've had a blackberry alert me to new emails for over a year now, and the quaintness of checking my email with nervous anticipation of whether my inbox will have anything new for me is another charm to life in Valpo. I used to reply to my emails walking down the street in New York, I love being able to enjoy a walk and take in my surroundings whether at a cafe or on the streets in Valpo without feeling like I ought to respond to someone's text or email more or less because the technology of my phone allows me to. My parent's live in a log cabin in Bear Creek, Wisconsin with about 42 other people sharing the same post code; this is what they call the simple life. Well they have theirs, and I have mine.
I got up to make coffee and tea but came back to bed to read some of my book. I'm reading a travel book about Provence, creatively entitled "A Year in Provence". It's written by a Brit, whom I'm coming to find don't write the best travel literature. Sorry my friends, but after reading "Travels in a Long Thin Country" about Chile and "It's not about the Tapas" about cycling through Spain, I'm finding the Brits, although commendable in their dedication and commitment to travel, write dull histories of their adventures, and far too often spend too much time talking about how many Chileans tell them they're pretty (the book jacket photo lends one to believe otherwise) or how much weight they've lost and what a skinny stick they are (subsequent research on google images tells me, you are an average sized woman). This is odd, because I've never found self-congratulation to be a British character trait; perhaps these two ladies who also complained of being over 30 and single just need some love and manly companionship, after all, who doesn't.
I've been hankering after a Cortado- it's half milk and half coffee- but magically separated (hence "cortado" meaning cut) with some foam on top - since Sylvain and I met after his class and I foolishly went for a cappuccino italiano only to find his cortado was what I really wanted. Cafes here serve coffee drinks with a juice glass of fizzy water and sometimes if you're lucky a juice glass with juice, and here that juice is often a delicious sip of kiwi. We spent the afternoon in El Desayuno a sweet cafe across from Cafe Vinilo and enjoyed a cortado. Sylvain had finance homework to do, and I wanted to read my book about Provence, all the while pestering Sylvain with French vocabulary and geography questions, and generally planning my retirement in the south of France. When my Ipod ran out of juice and he couldn't use the calculator to do his homework we decided to go down to Lider and get some milk and chicken; and I suggested after this errand it would be about time to take a nap; see above, I'm under the weather. At home Sylvain made tea for me and an elaborate plate of milk, toast and dulce de leche for himself and after posting this, I intend to take said snooze.
This photo is from Sylvain's boxing gym; he claims, although I find it hard to believe that the gym he went to in the Bronx was even more dodgy. He had a few practice rounds in the ring on Friday and is now nursing a swollen hand. We're calling it fat hand.
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