The Missing Link: The long lost Santiago post

It's funny, because now that I sit down to write it I'm like "We did tourist stuff." which sounds stupid, so I'll photoblog that couple of days and see how it goes. Interested parties can note that the full Santiago set of photos is located on flickr here.

After the drama of being delayed a day, which sucked, (but really, when you are spending 6 weeks in South America, you should sort of expect to be held up at some point, or it's not really a very good South American Adventure) we arrived at the Radisson to find that they were awesome, the room was nice and they even had American plugs. YAY! We also found that they had suicide windows, which totally entertained me or a few minutes:

(incidentally, that building across the street is the tallest building in South America)

You could go SPLAT if you wanted. You'd never find *that* in the states:


We went out in search of food, since it was dinner time and found that 2 blocks away from our hotel, was a totally awesome array of restaurants. We chose one that promised a gourmet market and it was fantastic! I don't know if we have mentioned it but Argentina has a monotonous food selection. In every restaurant the menu is essentially the same:
- Lomo (steak)
- pasta
- pizza

They all have the same salad: lettuce, tomato and onion, and most have some sort of chicken breast selection. Don't get me wrong, the food was good, it's just that 2.5 weeks of it was kind of long for the same thing every night. I don't really like pizza and I simply cannot eat steak for every meal.

Anyway, Chile has almost everything! YAY!

The next day we got a hop on, hop off bus tour ticket and really only got about 1/2 way around the circuit before we were forced to come home because it would stop running.

We went to the park to ride the funicular:


to the top of a giant hill, to "observe Santiago's remarkable extension" (I love translated Spanish!)

Sadly, it was really hazy out so we really could only see like 1/10 of the city, but I saw it on a windy night and it is BIG.

We went to Pablo Naruta's house:


and saw tons of really awesome wall murals in that neighborhood (there's a ton in the set if you are interested):








Found a building with the most awesome iron/copper work on it:


had some lunch and then hopped back on the bus.

After that is was mostly huge historical buildings that are now used for government or museums and the main church of Santiago:




this was kind of awesome:






And for dinner, we actually found tepanyaki! Our chef even worked at Benihana for 10 years! It was awesome. I was so, so, so happy to find that after so long of eating the same foods! YAY!

The next day, we slept in until 11 because we have been getting up super early for weeks and not going to bed very early either and we needed a sleep-in day. We decided to go back to some of the stuff that we missed on the tour the previous day and i figured out that the subway ran right under most of all of that. Have I mentioned how incredibly clean Santiago is. It's remarkably clean. Like, i noticed. It's very strange, and kind of awesome. Well, anyway, the subway is the same way.

We saw the world's hugest flag (fact not confirmed by guiness). The pole in the pic is 160 feet tall and there's a bus that is way closer to me than the flag in the picture for scale. When it gets wet it weighs 21 tons:


I met some guards:


and we accidentally went to an art exhibition about art in the Americas. It was legit, too, they had a Warhol.:


Then we climbed St Lucia hill and saw a stature of Neptune:


some cosplay kids (!!!???):


And a rad view of the city:


Then we ate and came home and quickly packed and I posted that I needed to sleep. Which I really didn't do very well, but A for effort. In short, Santiago is a really awesome city. Do not come here in winter as it is both cold and the smog is really, really bad, people say, but the city is clean, lots of people speak English, and they have fantastic food. I was not disappointed once. This is for sure on our "come back again for sure and check it out more" list of places we'd both like to come back to.

There, now I know that you all were on the edge of your seats waiting for that and you can all calm down. Sadly, after tonight, we will be doing the Altiplano desert and Solar de Uyuni part of our trip and will probably go off the grid for 4 days while we cross into Bolivia the really, really hard way. I'm trying to upload pictures from San Pedro now so that you can see them. I'll post again when that is done.