Living the same day twice!!!

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Hola

After a 3 hour delay we finally took off from Aukland and made our way to South America - only an 11hour flight to contend with!

Unfortunately sleep evaded me, (which is quite unusual as since we began travelling I´d learnt to sleep in the most bazarre of places - I think the abundance of silent camsites in New Zealand has made me soft!) and it was a long old flight with a ¨groundhog day¨feeling to make it all more trying.........Let me explain - we left New Zealand at 8pm on Tuesday evening and arrived in Santiago 5 hours before we left (3pm Tuesday afternoon!) Crossing the international date line takes a bit of getting used to! The best thing we discovered though was that this meant that there were 2 wine-o´clocks in the same day!!!

We arrived to sweltering heat (which perked me up a little as I´d missed the tropical temperatures!) and made our way to the city centre where we found a nice little place to stay in a big old fashioned house....it was very creaky and slightly haphazard but that just added to it´s charm.

We were soon given a wake-up call though as we were faced with trying to decifer what the owner of the guesthouse was trying to say - it turns out that not many people speak English here and will rattle off spanish ten to the dozen - a speedy learning plan is in order I think!!!

Dan - So finally time to hit the streets and soak up a piece of the latin American way of life!! Santiago itself sits just west of the Andes so what you have is a beautiful backdrop of mountains on one side (often hidden from view by the smog problem here!!) and the city skyline on the other.

Back to Nic´s ´Speedy learning plan´ we bought a Latin American Spanish phrase book and are ploughing our way through it, I seem to get prodded all the time and have a random number or phrase thrown at me by Nic and forced to answer!! although it works as I know most of the numbers now and loads of useful phrases!! Naturally Nic is better (or practices more) so she takes the lead at the moment. Well that said during my child hood days me & my family spent alot of time in Spain plus my folks have a place out there so I actually knew alot more Spanish than I thought, funny how you subconsciously pick things up!!!

Nic - We don´t normally get on well with cities - being on a tight budget - but Santiago was a refreshing change to us - It was lovely to have a new genre of architecture and people to look at and the heat made it possible for us to sit and watch as the city around us lived on. They seem to love socialising here and the ubandance of ice-cream parlours and cake shops gells well with me - I love the idea of meeting up for ice-cream, and let me tell you, these are no ordinary Mr Whippy - think the biggest sundae you´ve ever seen and triple it!

The massive time difference from New Zealand has of course made us go a little crazy and the jet-lag is unbelieveable - 3 days of sleep deprevation tends to make you a little hysterical and so the slightest thing has had us in fits of laughter while stupidly alert in the middle of the night!!!

Dan - There´s loads of street entertainers here especially at the traffic lights, when the cars grind to a hault a performer will jump out in front of them, take a bow, do there thing; dancing, juggling etc collect some change from various car, all just before the lights hit green again and the cars race off!!! beats windscreen washing by far.!!!

As we only have limited time in Chile we´re heading across to Valparaiso and Viña del Mar for a sneaky peak before racing back to Santiago to catch our flight to Bolivia.

More soon
us
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