Santiago, Chile, 13 May 2011

I´m happily settled in my hotel in Santiago after arriving here yesterday. The flight to Auckland was quite pleasant, I was sitting next to a couple from New Zealand who helped me work out the video system. They made me feel better by saying that it had taken them about 30 hours to work out. Then I had a few hours in Auckland before the longer flight to Santiago (11 hours). This flight passed pretty quickly through a comfortable combination of sleeping, eating, and watching movies. I was sitting next to (well actually there was a free seat between us), a lovely lady from Chile. She talked to me for quite a while (in Spanish) about various things including what I should see in Chile and about her recent experiences in China. I was quite proud about the percentage that I understood (about 50%). All in all everything feels quite difficult without an extensive knowledge of Spanish, but I´m doing ok and I hope to understand at least 75% of what I hear by the time I leave.

Yesterday I did a bit of exploring and then slept for about 15 hours, waking up this morning to check out the hotel breakfast. It wasn´t too impressed... until I saw the bananas! Later on I went to a supermarket and saw that they´re about the equivalent of $2 a kilo.

I also did a tour of the city today, on my own initially, and then a guided tour in a tour bus. The traffic here is a very curious thing, firstly as a pedestrian it´s quite interesting that you don´t have to press any buttons for the man to go green, he does this automatically, clever guy. And in the bus I noticed that entire streets are dedicated to one direction. In order to go the other direction you basically have to keep going left or keep going right, to go round the block onto another street that will let you go in that direction. There´s a lot of beeping that goes on, and there are often people as well as stray dogs crossing the road. One dog tried to cross a very busy highway today, I felt quite afraid for him, but he decided against it when the cars started beeping at him. He seemed quite annoyed that he couldn´t cross and started barking quite heartily. There are a lot of dogs that wander the streets, sometimes in packs of 5 or 6. They don´t seem too unhappy, they look moderately well fed, and people leave them alone. I saw a few sleeping today (at first I thought they were dead but they did a bit of twitching), they choose funny places to sleep, like in the middle of the sidewalk

Here are some photos from my tours of the city. Mostly it is the architecture that fascinates me, as well as some of the vehicles ie. the coca cola van.

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