Santiago, Chile, South America

We had another great day today, even though it didn’t quite go according to the plan. By the plan, I mean the calendar of possible things that we could do, that Melissa put together in the last few weeks. She had things planned for every day we are here, and today we were supposed to go to a national park to visit the hot springs, and then maybe hike around. We found out this morning that there was only one way to get there and you had to go at 7:30am, which meant we would have had to leave our hotel at 5:30am. That just wasn’t going to happen. We decided to take it easy and spend the day in the city, since it looked so nice yesterday.

We had a really nice brunch at the hotel, and then headed out around 11am. This was much nicer than getting up at 5am! We headed up to Cerro San Cristobal to get a view of the city, and it was spectacular! We took the old funicular to the top, which is almost 100 years old. And because it was Sunday, there was all kinds of stuff going on at the top. We got up there just in time to hear the Sunday service finish. There was singing, dancing, and tons of people running and cycling up on the mountain. They do this thing in a lot of South American cities where they close the roads to all cars, and people can use them as running and cycling lanes. It’s a really cool idea that I’ve never seen anywhere else.

We had a nice walk down to the Botanical Gardens, and took some time to just lay in the grass and enjoy the beautiful weather. In the two days we’ve been here so far, we haven’t seen one cloud in the sky, except for over the Andes Mountains in the distance. It’s pretty awesome. We walked down to the Japanese Garden, which was really peaceful, and did look just like how you would picture Japan. We continued to walk down the hill until we got back into the city.

We went back to the fancy mall so I could look for some new traveling clothes. I found some new trousers, so I was happy about that, but didn’t find anything else I was crazy about. We went to the massive supermarket Jumbo and picked up some supplies for the next few days. We have a pretty big hike tomorrow, so we needed some snacks to tide us over for that too.

We were going to walk over to Pio Nono, but we were both pretty tired from all the walking, and I think all the pisco sours from yesterday had a tiring affect as well. We decided to just get a taxi and headed over to a restaurant that was recommended to us for traditional Chilean food on the tour yesterday. It was called Galindo, and it was excellent! We shared a couple of dishes. The first was Pastel de Choclo, which is a corn pie, filled with minced beef, chicken, and some small vegetables. The second had a name I can’t remember, but it was a kind of thick soup made with beans, and served with a huge sausage in it. They were both really delicious. We also each had a pisco sour here, but it was the worst one we have both had, and we didn’t even finish them.

We headed back to the hotel after dinner, but of course we had to stop for a couple more pisco sours on the way, just to be safe. And these ones were delicious! I think we ended up having six or seven today, and we’re really getting a taste for them now. We’re trying to get to sleep early tonight because tomorrow morning we are going to get a bus at 7am to a small town called Olmue where we are going to start our hike up Campana Mountain. It’s going to be a long day, but I’m sure it’ll be beautiful. I have to say, I couldn’t have pictured a better first two days than we’ve had. Everything has been perfect so far.