beach! hangover... apartment!

So I finally made it to a Pacific Ocean beach, only the second time in my life I've managed that. I left Friday around 1 for Viña (a little less than 2 hours by bus), where I met Alex, Durham, Rosie, Tim, Vickie and Joe on the beach, lay in the sun for a bit, swam in the freezing-cold ocean, played frisbee with Rosie (the shoulder works!...mostly) and generally enjoyed the gorgeous weather. Then we walked to a Mexican restaurant that Alex knew about, ate a kind of overpriced but pretty good meal, then watched the sunset. It was very nice. We went back to our hotel, which Alex had hooked us up with through family connections, chilled for a while, showered (after a fashion) and then commenced drinking. I had talked to Laura earlier about meeting up, and she said it would be perfect because her whole group left for the traveling section of their program (SIT--it's a weird program, but kind of cool) on Saturday, so Friday was their last night together. We met them at a bar in Valparaiso called Duff (yes, like the Simpsons) and basically all got very drunk. It was really fun, but the collective hangover yesterday was VERY bad. Also the weather on Saturday, which was supposed to be just as beautiful as Friday, turned out to be cloudy, cool and windy. Not exactly great beach weather. Disappointed, we wandered around Viña for a while, ate some brunch--this disgusting-looking concoction called chorillana, which is french frieds topped with fried egg, cheese, chopped hot dogs and fried steak (I didn't eat it, just drank some tea and put my head down on the table)--and came home. I ate dinner, talked to Luz María for a little bit and then tried to make plans with people to go see "Padre Nuestro," a Chilean comedy that's supposed to be really good, but it was only playing at really inconvenient times. So instead we went to Valeria's new apartment, which was really fun. I had seen it when I went apartment shopping with her a couple weeks ago, but she'd added some curtains, glasses, etc. But it was her first day there, so she still doesn't have a fridge or TV or really any furniture other than an inflatable mattress, a foldy-chair-mattress-thing and the little stools that came with the apartment. Anyhow, we ordered some disgusting, fantastic pizza and hung out for hours. Joe, Tim and Raúl (Tim's Chilean boyfriend) left around 2 but everyone else (the rest of the beach kids plus Gaby and Vale) were there until 4, at which point I walked Rosie home and then went back to Vale's and slept on the aforementioned foldy-chair-mattress-thing, which saved me about 7 bucks. Very gracious of Vale to let me sleep there; she also said it was an open invitation. This is great news on a wholly selfish level, because cab fares suck. Anyhow I woke up around 10:45 (the light in the apartment is wonderful--in place of windows she has sliding glass doors that open onto a balcony and form almost the entire exterior wall--but not so great for sleeping in), said bye to Vale, who woke up just after me, and came home. And now I'm here and I've got some homework and whatnot to do, lunch to eat, etc., so I'm going to stop writing for the time being. But that's the update on my doings for the past couple of days.