Santiago de Chile

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Hi all,

Finally managed to get access back to the world wide web so a few posts to describe our Journey in Santiago, our short but worthwhile visit to Valparaiso, and finally our stay in the Atacama desert.

Santiago had been described to us as a city where you'd only need to spend a day but our experience was totally different. We used tours4tips for a couple of walks through the city and the off the beaten track nature of them made it a special experience. We discovered a city of contrast where although prawned to repetitive hearthquakes throughout its history, the list of monuments and buildings to see is endless; some of the city's architecture has been inspired by other cities and so you can find London, New York or Paris street right the middle of Santiago - the city has nothing to envy to our Western capitals in Europe and has everything of a vibrant and developed economic center - some of the Chileans commonly refer to the sky scraper areas of Santiago "San-atthan" in reference to the New York district of Manhattan - alongside all of this we discovered streets full of character with their book stalls, trendy cafes, restaurants, grafitis... and at last but not least the famous Completos ! An historically more advances version of the hotdog that some Chilenean decided to bring back from one of its visit to America.

We spend our few nights at the Providencia hostals where we met a group of Chileneans, ended up trying the tourist night out "Miercoles Po" with them and others from the hostals until the early hours of the morning. Next day it was BBQ night at the hostal and a lot more drinking then.



Finally a big thank you to Mr Muller from Foto Muller whose expertise means my camera seems to be running just fine...

Kisses x

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