Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Chilean adventures of Blake and Rachel

This time going to Chile I got to spend a little more time in Santiago. Blake and I had to figure out the metro upon arriving at the bus station. We've been on the go so much, I didn't quite do all my research for how to get to our hostels after the bus terminal. I had a general idea, but we had to ask a couple people to point us in the right direction. We've been traveling with two rolling suitcases, because Blake is helping take some stuff home for me at the end of the trip, so we are lugging a lot of stuff around. The first place we stayed in Santiago was a fifth floor apartment we found on Airbnb for cheap, with a rooftop pool on floor 27. From the roof we could see all of Santiago, and everybody else's rooftop pools. It was hot weather all weekend, but actually a little windy all the way on the 27th floor, where there was also a sauna, gym and patio.
    I took Blake to all the places I went to last time in Santiago. We stayed near Santa Lucia, a hill in the city with an old castle and great view of the city. We hiked up the castle, exploring the different churches and parts of the castle that are part of the hill. We went to the historical district to see the Plaza de Armas, walked through a park towards another park San Cristóbal, which has an old tram to ride up to the top of another hill for another great view. So most of our activities in Santiago involved finding great places to view the city.         Unfortunately, the workers were striking at this park, so it was closed for the day. One thing I have learned about Chilenos is that they like to strike. They are often striking at the border, like when Blake arrived to Mendoza, I've heard that the students strike a lot of years to protest paying for universities. We saw lots of little bits of paper flying everywhere in the wind and when traffic passed all throughout the city, and realized this is from other protests too, because a lot of student protest groups parade around the city with banners and loud noises throwing paper in the air. There is about to be a presidential election in Chile in a couple weeks, so it's getting the people all riled up.
    One thing I didn't realize about Santiago last time was how mountainous it is. There are mountains on every side of Santiago. It's basically right in the middle of the Andes. There are little mountains right in the middle of the city too, like San Cristóbal. And the city is very hazy. We could barely see the mountains the first morning. But the mountains are so tall we could see the snow on top of the tallest one through the haze and it just looked like clouds.
    Blake coincidentally knew a friend in Santiago who he studied abroad with in Guatemala, so we met up with him for drinks Friday night,  trying some German beer. Blake was pointing out the German influence all weekend in the style of architecture and layout of Viña del Mar and Valparaíso. Blake's friend Nicholas walked with us to a bar crawl that his friend runs in BellaVista, where all the bars are, and on the way gave us some great safety advice. We crossed bridges that he said were safer than the ones closer to tourist districts, because people wait for all the tourists at night, and at one point, Nicholas felt like someone was following us, so we stopped by an apartment building to get away from the potential robber. Chile has a pretty high pick pocketing crime scene, as does Mendoza, but all weekend people were warning us about keeping our valuables safe. The pub crawl turned into more of a hostel party, but we played some foosball against other tourists and met a bunch of people in a program that Chile's government funds called Start Up, and a bunch of young entrepreneurs come to Chile to start a new business.
      Saturday we spent some time at the pool, making use of our apartment kitchen to make salami and cheese subs, and then went back to San Cristóbal to take the funicular up the mountain. The funicular is an old railway cart pulled by a cable that took us to the top of the hill, passed the zoo, and up to a giant statue of the Virgin Mary and a church on the top. We were higher than any skyscraper or surrounding hills. While enjoying the view, I tried one of Chile's most typical drinks, called Mote, which is a very very sweat peach tea (all sugary syrup), with soft corn kernels in the bottom with whole peaches in it. The concept kind of reminded me of boba tea, because the corn kernels are a similar soft and rubbery texture. It tasted good because of all the sugar, and I liked the corn at the bottom, but could barely finish one cup because it was so sweet. We found a bunch of mountain bike and hiking trails down the mountain in the trees, which is such a neat part of Santiago because you can hike right on the middle of the city.
    Saturday night we found dinner at a Peruvian place that looked good, but really was just an over priced tourist trap, but then we bar hopped through BellaVista, trying more of Chile's typical drinks. The most common is the pisco sour, with pisco alcohol, similar to vodka, with citrus and egg whites in it. Then there are terremotos, which is basically a giant cup of white wine with pineapple liqueur and ice cream. I'd heard about these, but didn't know they were wine, so I made Blake try one with me, and since he hates wine, I ended up drinking both myself, which was plenty of wine and ice cream for one night. My conclusion about Chilean drinks is that they love to experiment with adding unique ingredients to their drinks: corn, egg whites, ice cream. And they turn out pretty good.
    Sunday we headed to Valparaíso, getting on a 6 dollar bus to take us two hours to the coast. Blake loved the rolling hills and graffiti on all of the cerros. Especially because GoPro filmed a downhill mountain biking video in the streets of Valpo, and we found the exact spot they filmed where the biker goes off a mount and rides sideways on the wall. We could tell based on the wall art. We explored the streets and I took Blake to where we saw the sea lions last time basking in the sun, where we also watched the sunset. I basically repeated what I did last time in Valpo with Blake, and tried to take him to where we surfed and sand surfed. However, since we were there on weekdays, nobody was out renting boards to surf, and the waves were too tiny that day to try to surf, so instead we beach hopped while walking along the coast, then hiked to the top of the dunes anyway to get another great view of the ocean.  I dropped my camera in the sand and unfortunately it isn't working well now, and we got some intense sunburns even though we put on sun screen all day, thanks to a hole in the ozone layer above Valpo, but despite this had a great time in Viña and Valpo.
   Sunday night, we discovered one of the best restaurants of all time. It's called the Color Cafe and it was two blocks from our hostel. The tiny cafe has maybe 8 tables, and the walls are completely decorated in magazine cut outs, notes and drawings from past customers, paintings, comic strips and everything else artsy. They have two options for a 5 course dinner for $10: vegetarian or meat. We both got the meat, and were extremely impressed with all 5 courses. It started with olive bread with 3 spreads that they kept refilling, a fresh salad with queso fresco, peppers, carrots, lettuce. Then a cream of vegetable soup, main entree of pork and steamed vegetables, and a dessert of coconut pie with dulce de leche. The meal options change every day, and I could tell that the chefs had no recipe, they simply find what is fresh that day and make it taste awesome. We talked to the two chefs for a while, both guys probably 30 years old, cooking in a tiny little kitchen, and left great tips because we were so satisfied. Part of how great it was came from the fact that it was so unexpected. We'd had pretty bad food lately on the go, and this made up for all of the previous bad meals.
    Monday night was our night for a fancy dinner, and we were tempted to go back to the Color Cafe, but instead we walked around Valpo to find a nice restaurant, and were drawn into a rooftop patio by the sounds of a trumpet player. So we got a table looking out over all of Valparaiso at night, with all the lights sparkling on the hills, with some jazz music playing in the background, and it was the perfect setting. The drinks didn't start off great, nor did the service, but we were pleasantly surprised how great the food was. We ordered a meat platter with sauces and fried  palenta. We had rabbit meat, chorrizo, and caramelized chicken. Also we had three different types of bruschettas, and I was amazed Blake actually tried and liked the smoked salmon. The problem with sharing a plate with Blake is that I have to fight for my share of food; he'll eat it all so fast before I even get a chance.
      Our last day of the trip we walked around Valpo more, hiking to the top of one of the bigger hills, but we found ourselves in an area that was no longer meant for tourists, it looked a little sketchy and run down, so we quickly got out of there and explored some more markets, making sure Blake has plenty of sweets and treats to take home with him. We went back to the color cafe for lunch, and were just as pleased with the asado lunch.
    Blakes flight was early Wednesday morning, at 5 am, so I tried to find a hostel close to the bus terminal in Santiago so he could take a bus to the airport and I wouldn't have to go too far alone to get on a bus in the morning. But when I was booking the hostel, somehow the address pulled up wrong in google maps, and it was actually located in the main Plaza in Santiago. So we tried calling the hostel; the number didn't work, and the website was very vague. We weren't sure if it even existed after all. So after weighing our options and getting advice from Blake's friend in Santiago, we realized he'll just have to take a taxi and we'd stick with the hostel reservation. We had to lug our suitcases through the metro again and were bitter about the extra trek we were having to make, but when we arrived at our stop late at night, the entire plaza has been decorated with Christmas lights, and we found out that the hostel was located in a super fancy old building. The hostel had the top floor of the building with glass doors to view out and a giant patio. It was a shame we were only there one night, or just half a night for Blake, because it was possibly the nicest hostel yet.
    Blake left at 2 am, and I got on a 9 am bus back to Mendoza. There were only 6 people on my bus, but my bus driver raged past all the other buses to get first in line for the border crossing, making some pretty risky passes on double yellow with cars approaching. I had the front row seat up top, and I hadn't stayed awake for this drive before, so I did this time, and got an amazing view of the Chilean Andes. The pass through the Andes is pretty terrifying. There are barely any guardrails, and if there are, they are probably the height of half of one of the bus tires. We made it through customs in exactly 12 minutes, which is probably record time and made up for having to spend 5 hours there on the way out. But now I'm back in Mendoza, packing up, and getting ready to travel another two weeks with my parents!

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