Introducing Your New Summer Hangover Game Plan
Introducing Your New Summer Hangover Game Plan
Helados York in Valparaiso
The late afternoon sun beamed through the open window and onto my face. I pried my eyes open and reached for my phone to check the time: 3:30 in the afternoon. I looked at the faces of the other sleeping bodies around me. Some were familiar, others not so much.
The room was a pseudo-hotel for transitory visitors, kids making their way through Valparaiso, Chile, the gritty port town an hour outside of Santiago. They were all here for the weekend in search of late nights, good music, and endless carretes—parties. A Chilean friend of mine had offered me refuge in this tiny bedroom apartment with him and his friends. I wove my way across a floor strewn with bodies, comatose and recovering from the piscolas they had enjoyed, ad infinitum, the night before, and walked out into the labyrinthine chaos of the city. A mural of a grandma seemed to cluck her tongue at me as I walked past, chiding me for the debauchery I had taken part in the night before.
Summer in Valpo, as the locals call it, is warm and crowded. Tourists ascend and crowd the cerros, the hills upon which the colorful city teeters, in search of snapshot worthy street art. Main plazas fill with itinerant merchants, accompanied by heavy backpacks, handmade jewelry, and small paintings. And the students who usually fill the city’s universities wait out the heat indoors, preparing for the night to meet up with friends and start the festivities.
I check my pockets and feel the cold bite of three Chilean peso coins against my fingers. I spy a woman rolling a cooler across the Plaza Anibal Pinto as a bead of sweat drips down my sticky spine. Ice cream for breakfast it is then.
I flag her down and show her my meager funds. She, without hesitation, recommends a York Popsicle. She points to one of the hills that dot the crest upon which Valpo is built and explains that these popsicles are made every morning in a factory right up there. I grab a coconut and a mango and thank her before she continues on her way, shouting, “Helado fresco, Helados York en todos sabores…”
I break open the plastic and grab the wooden popsicle stick. The cold, milky coconut chills my tongue and soothes my pounding headache. I brace myself for the twenty-minute uphill walk back to the room full of sleeping twenty-somethings. The stark white of the coconut milk is a welcome contrast to the corrugated metal walls of porteño houses, painted in pastel blues and deep oranges. As I reach the end of the popsicle and feel the rough scratch of the wood against my tongue, I realize I have no idea how to get back to my friend’s house. I sit down on a curb to stare at a large-scale, black-and-white mural of a backpacker only to realize that the mango popsicle is nothing but juice in the front pocket of my jeans.