arriving in santiago

from Sept 26 2006

The flight seemed to go all too quickly really. It wasnt too pleasant of course. Tiny seats. 11.5 hours, and only limited movies vailable. But we arrived in Santiago at 2pm sept 26, as promised.
Getting the bus into town was easy, where we experienced our first taste of ´mucho-ism´in SA. The boy who pointed us in the right direction would look at me, and only me, despite Sara doing all the talking in spanish, and me standing there with an idiotic look of miscomprehension...

Our hostel, the Green House, was nice enough. A three story building with all windows strongly barred up. this sight became pretty apparent within minutes actualy.. bars everywhere.. on the windows that is.

Lots of smog. My eyes actualy hurt, and we couldnt see the mountains, which are only a 30 kms away, and the second highest in the world, after the Himalayas..! Even climbing to the top of the highest hill in town they could only be seen in patches where the wind might blow open a temporary gap.

We could have been in any European city really. This was what we had expected so that was fine. In fact it could almost have been Auckland, apart from every sign being in Spanish. So much for culture shock!

One amusing difference was just how wired up the city was for internet. It seemed every shop or cafe advertised a free wi-fi connection. Our hostel had a free ADSL connection, and there were internet cafes everywhere-full to the rafters!

Things were certainly cheaper than NZ, except our first rookie mistake of chosing to dine at a restaurant reccommended by the Lonely planet. This was something I would never have done in SE Asia for the exact same reason, but indeed we went to Ocean Blue seafood restaurant in ´bohemia´. The place was fantasticly kitted out, looking like the inside of a pirate ship. They had all sorts of marine memorabillia, almost to the point of being tacky... almost. Maybe we should have walked out straight away, but to cut a long story short we ate some pretty average seafood, whcih cost us $74NZ. Our daily budget for the two of us is $100NZ, so this was a mistake not to be repeated...