Santiago.... Chaos, mahem, South America !!

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What can I say, there's only so much you can do when you know you arrive late in the evening, in an unknown city, with an unknown language. So booked the accomodation and the shuttle ahead, only to find out that it was a general commercial bus shuttle service, who actually didn't have a clue of where we wanted to go... But somehow we managed to get to the Hostel Bellavista, in the suburb of Bellavista.

All's a bit of a guessing game still, with every day a new adventure (or challenge for that matter), but the Bellavista being a good choice, with helpful people at day and nighttime. We were not expecting much about, or actually doing much in the city. Had a walk around the burb we were in, Bin enjoying her special coffee with icecream every morning (ok, noon), mailing some cards and books to family, and trying to work out some accomodation for the peak time of Christmas and New Year.

In general the city was a mahem of people frantically running around doing Christmas shopping. In the midst of all that, we also tried to find tickets for the second game of the soccer finals, but after a few hours of running around in the wrong shops, and facing a 100m queue for tickets that wasn't moving, I gave up on getting to experience our first soccer fest in S America. In hindsight not a bad idea, as a Swiss fellow backpacker got mugged, at gunpoint, outside the stadium, we watched the second half with him and a second Swiss guy in a pub. Typical exciting latino soccer, not much, and then, 3 goals out of nowhere, and pretty spectacular as well.

We also spent an afternoon taking the funicular up to St Christobal, enjoying the view together with a very white Holy Mary statue, taking a gondola lift onwards, and then wandering, meandering, back to the hostal.

We enjoyed a few very nice meals out in Bellavista, cooked a few times, got my shoes fixed quite cheaply, and again, tried to catch up on some Zzz's (as this time there was a disco pub outside our bedroom window).

Nuf said, on to the canyon for Chrissie....

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