Well, I don't even know how to start to explain my Chile trip. It was both extremely fun and extremely stressful. Some pretty ridiculous things happened (more on that later). I loved the country, but was so happy to go back to Argentina. Monday morning I had to get up at 3:30 to catch our early flight. There was some turbulence, but flying in to Santiago over the Andes was amazing. We got scammed taking a taxi from the airport to the hostel, but it was our fault because we stupidly arrived without knowing the exchange rate. Turns out a dollar is 530 Chilean pesos. I knew it was something big like that, but we basically took out an unknown amount of money at an airport ATM, were accosted by a million taxistas all claiming to be official, got lied to about the rate, and then paid an obscene amount of money, all the while knowing we were probably being scammed but really having no other transportation option. Our hostel was in the Plaza de Armas, the main historic plaza of Santiago, which was pretty cool. After we checked in we walked around there, saw the Cathedral, and went to the two main look-out hills, Cerro Santa Lucia and Cerro San Cristobal. We had absolutely beautiful, sunny clear weather, which is apparently very rare there. On the other days it was hard to see the mountains because of all the smog. Anyway, the hills were full of these luscious green gardens, palm trees, and flowers, which was odd because it was winter. There were old castle-like structures of different architectural styles on each hill. On Santa Lucia we found a vendor selling mote con huesillos, which is this delicious cold peach tea with pieces of dried peach and barley in the bottom. It looks a bit disgusting, but we loved it. To get up San Cristobal we had to take a "funicular" or this old elevator thing that takes you up these super steep tracks to the top. At the top there was a huge outdoor church where Pope John Paul II apparently said Mass, and there is also a humongous statue of Mary. The view from there was absolutely beautiful. After that we walked in some parks by the river, saw the bohemian Bellavista neighborhood, and had more money confusion at lunch. It is really strange and hard to get used to lunch costing like 6 thousand pesos. After lunch we discovered this frozen yogurt place where you pick from all the frozen fruits and they mix it in with sugar and a block of yogurt. Monday was actually a feriado in Chile for two saints' days, San Pedro y Pablo, so there wasn't all that much activity in the city. At night we went out to try to find some dinner around the plaza, but it was pretty sketchy and creepy, and all we could find were rows and rows of brightly colored, greasy fast-food type places. There are no cafes on every corner like in BA. We ate some nasty pizza in this little place where they were basically closing down as we ate, and we had to crawl out this little door in the metal outer garage-door like thing they put on at night to get out. We got locked in a panaderia trying to buy the next morning's breakfast too. That night there was no hot water, and the power went out when we were in the bathroom taking out our contacts. Not fun. It was also FREEZING in our hostel, and I slept in my jeans, scarf, and fleece. The buildings here just trap the cold, and it ends up being way worse than outside, without any heat of course. Our room also had three outside walls, up on the windy 6th floor, so that was also probably part of the problem. The plan for Tuesday was to ski, so we stayed up researching the various resort options, checking snow conditions, calculating prices of renting everything, etc., and went to bed early.
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