View over Santiago with the mountains in the background...and smog
We have been in Chile for 6 days now, at first we booked into a nice little hostel called the Chili Hotel, and tried to recover from the jet lag.
The first day we walked around the city and discovered the main Cathedral which was quite beautiful. Interestingly the priest holds the confessions from a box but the confessor kneels outside of the box for all to see. All I can think is that their sins are not so sinful here if they can confess where everyone can see them. We ended up outside in a lovely cafe later that day and had the Menu of the day which was a five course meal for a fiver. I think I am going to like South America.
The second day we got up late and took a funicular train up a hill in the centre of Santiago, to vist the Virgin Mary on the hill where they pipe religious musak over the speakers. We had a nice walk around and ended up in a student bar and hung out on the streets with the cool kids. The beer here is good and cheap, about a pound for a litre, and there is a great energy around the student area which makes for a great place to chill out and people watch.
Like a virgin
The third day we took a wine tour to Concha Y Toro http://www.conchaytoro.cl (shell and bull) winery as we spotted a bottle in the local bottle shop that we drink at home and realised that the winery was only outside of town, yay lets go!.
On the way we ran in to a student demonstration - yes the same students that I was praising above - and El and I got a load of tear gas in the face, and that was from a block away. I cannot imagine how painful it is up close. It makes your eyes and face sting like hell and took ages to go away and lots of people on the tube seemed to be suffering as well. Very exciting and quite interesting to see a good bit of civic unrest.
Els face after the tear gas
The grounds of the winery were beautiful, lots of French objects were imported over when it was first built and the Castillero del Diablo (Cellar of the Devil) was very impressive, we even saw the devils shadow! The owner of the winery discovered that as the wine was sooo good some bottles were disappearing, so he spread rumours that the devil lived in the cellar to put off the thieves, and it worked!! I think I might have to buy a house with a wine cellar, maybe without any resident demons though.
We have booked ourselves into an intensive Spanish course for 5 days consisting of 6 lessons a day, 10-4. The professors only talk in Spanish so it is quite hard on the brain, but good as it immerses you in the language. We have only had one day of our course so far and have the weekend to do our homework and soak up some more South American Spanish culture. http://www.escuelabellavista.cl/
Eleanor is fantastic and is learning really fast. I am stumbling along but I did manage to say last night to the waitress, "I will have what ever they are having", while pointing to a massive jug of beer some locals were drinking.
I also had the local meal of what tasted like sheep's or cow's stomach. I have never had it before but that's what it tasted like. I only had it because the waitress said it was animal meat and stroked her stomach. I thought that she though it was meat and very yummy, not that that's where the meat came from!
I just googled the name of the dish Callos a la madrileña
INGREDIENTS: (6 people)
1/2 kg of calf calluses
1/2 kg of nose of cow 200 gr. jamón
1 Blood sausage
1 Garlic sausage
1 onion
1 heads of garlic Pimentón Laurel
Oil Pepper Salt
How can you eat the nose of a cow!!!! If I get a cold today I know who I got it from: Daisy.
We are now living with a lovely Chilean called Bianca, a niece of Susan who is a work colleague of Eleanor's Dad. Susan kindly said that we could stay in the apartment with Bianca and Bianca concurred. This is fantastic and works like a home stay program as Bianca´s English, though much better than our Spanish, is not good enough that we don´t have to make the effort to speak Spanish to her or at least look up words in Spanish and then mime our meaning. The first night we resorted to babel fish to help us out, http://babelfish.altavista.com, but we´re slowly getting the hang of it.
Bianca took us out last night to meet a few friends and we went to a club, at the very early Chilean time of 1.30am to dance to traditional Chilean pop music like Humano Leagueo and 1920 swing and YMCA!
Bianca and Patrick show us some traditional Chilean moves after hours
Santiago has a lovely charm, to it. It is a vast city stretching for miles in each direction. In fact, you can´t see the edges of the city as they are obscured by smog - an unfortunate problem that the city is finding hard to solve. The mountains to the East are huge snow-capped beauties, again rather marred by the smog - the snow looks yellow from a distance. It is not really a touristy town though and on a number of occasions we have been mistaken for locals which is a nice feeling as in Asia we stuck out like sore thumbs! One of the unmistakably Latin American things about Chile is the number of couples necking in random places. In a 5-minute walk we saw about 10 couples, on park benches, in the tube station, at a pedestrian crossing. But we don't mind the Spanish passion and occasionally have a neck ourselves...just to fit in of course.
Para mi, una copa de vino tinto, Me encanta esto.
Ciao Darling
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