Good morning, Valparaiso

In the unlikely event that you didn't know, I teach English. (Even if you didn't know that to begin with, what other job could I possibly hold down in a country where I communicate at the level of a 2 year old?).

Two days a week I have a class that begins at 8am. This puts me out the door at 7am. This would never happen by my own design, but it is a surprising gift in my days.

Outside, it is blurry silence and the click of the bolt seems loud. Between two buildings, through a rusting iron railing, I look down onto the port. It is coated in mist and fog this early. Soon the sun will burn it clear, but for now it is all in haze. At the bottom of my stairway-street, the street cleaner who works my neighborhood is taking his cigarette break. The smell of the smoke mingles with the damp sea air. Twice a week, we see each other here, like clockwork: he is doubtless well into his shift; I am pulling on sweater ends and yanking wet hair around as I stumble into my day. All over the city, the street-cleaners are awake and working silently with their brooms and mops and trash cans. The streets never seem to get any cleaner, but it's not for lack of trying.

Valparaiso is soft and sleepy in the morning. I walk through pink half-light. Two old men in wool suits push and pull until they succeed in heaving open a store's metal security paneling. Uniformed children walk to school, chattering quietly like birds. Men wait to buy their newspapers and cigarettes at the kiosks that glow like the lanterns they resemble. The streetlights, determined to fulfill every moment of their service, glow on ever-less strikingly against the lightening sky.

The rumbling beasts that are Valparaiso's fleet of micros are not yet awake, except for a scant few that scream past and are absorbed again into the quiet. Seagulls are the only other jarring noise. Conversations seem muted. Suited businessmen and vendors pushing carts walk haphazardly through the empty streets.

It is a temporary, tenuous tranquility. The light hits the top of the hills first. It shines off of windows and brings the brightly colored houses back to life, and then it begins to creep down into the Plan.

This is not a sedate city. It is a humming city, a pushing-and-shoving city, a city of shouts and drums and motors. No one who finds themselves falling for this place would wish it to be any other way. But there is a beauty in the contrast that I find in the early morning. Even the murals seem to have their eyes closed, waiting for day to break.

Falling in love with a new city is like falling in love with a person. Walking through Valparaiso in the morning, I am lying propped up with one elbow on the pillow, hair tousled. As the light slowly wakes the cerros and creeps down towards the water, I am biting my lip, softly touching a still cheek or a slowly rising chest, thinking, He is so beautiful when he sleeps. Thinking, Wake up. Don't wake up. Wake up.