pictures

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...still in Santiago and having a good time. Met up with some friends of friends and discovered a little bit of the night life and learned more about their culture. Apparently the one Irish pub in town has a 3 day St. Patty´s day celebration, so we caught the last day of it. Still trying to get used to the change in times people go out. I was invited to dinner at 10pm and then we didn´t go out until midnight...my kind of hours, but still have to adjust.

I met up with another friend of a friend and she´s been so nice showing me around. Her boyfriend works for the Airlines here so I´m tyring to work a free ticket to the south of Chile instead of taking the 11 hour bus ride this weekend. She took me up to another vista in Santiago which was beautiful, with a statue of the "Virgen" at the top...see pictures. It really is a beautiful city, especially with the mountains in the background. Apparently it is usually really smoggy in teh city because they are located in a valley, so these views are fairly rare...so enjoy.

A lot of the foods here involve corn and pork, and pastery type wrappings. They even sell some fruit drink on the streets with corn in it that I tried today...kind of a wierd feeling drinking something and then getting a mouthful of corn (choclo) every so often. Chile is also famous for an alcoholic drink called Pisco. You can have a Pisco Sour which is really sweet, or a Piscola, which is combined with Coke and is like a bourbon and coke...a little stronger though I think.

The power went out randomly for about 30 minutes and this caused the metro to close (that´s why I´m on the computer now, waiting for the metro to start back up again) There is a bit of caos as people are waiting outside every metro station in lines. The traffic lights went out as well, so horns are beeping everywhere, and now fighter planes are buzzing low overhead...what in the heck was going on. I know there was a massive anti-war protest (50,000 people) on Friday because Bush and others are in town for some sort of Asian economic and trade meeting. I just hope that there wasn´t some sort of terrorist thing that caused the power outage, etc. Crazy to think about the possibilities and how nobody really knows what´s going on without the news, media, etc. Anyway, I think the metro is back on, so I´m headed back to my hostel for the night.

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Photos

la virgen
on top of Parque Metropolitan overlooking Santiago

Parque Metropolitan
same park, excpt with me in the picture

Fenicular
little tram taking us to the top of the parque, and then you walk back down

Casa Condell
my hostel on Avenida Condell in Providencia, Santiago.

the yankee
A picture of some new friends and the "yankee" at the St. Patty´s day celebration (they call all americans "yankees")

Comments

[anonymous]

Nice Job Gregs
Good reading, how was the St. Patty's day celebration? Let me guess. Gregory 1, Santiago 0 - Nate