I love Santiago!

Street scene, downtown Santiago
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I must admit that I had mixed feelings about Santiago initially. The air here is very polluted, so that must affect any judgement about it of course. For example, the sky here is brown until about lunchtime, when some prevailing winds from somewhere blow it around a bit until the inversion over night fogs it all up again. That is the unfortunate thing about Santiago, Chile. Its flanked by the Andes on all sides so there are no sea breezes to keep the air reasonably clean. There are about 5 million here, and they seem to all have cars, so it makes for very dodgy air quality. Anyway that´s the bad bit about Santiago, but apart from that its a wonderful city for sure! It has touches of Buenos Aires, but is a little bit more edgy, and personally I think that makes it more interesting.

Street scene, downtown Santiago
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The people here are also different to those from the east and north (Brazil and Argentina). They have a more latino, indigenous look, rather than European like in Buenos Aires. But never ever think that because of this that cities are in South America are somehow backward or lack sophistication. This is the mistake I made before I came here. My expectations were (wrongly) set quite low I think, so I am constantly amazed at how well-organised South America is. The infrastructure and transport services are well-run, employment is high and hospitality is fantastic! I can´t judge about welfare or health, because that´s something only the locals can know about, but everything else is surprisingly cosmopolitan and modern. Yes you have the beggars, petty theives and pickpockets, and you do witness poverty, but somehow all that seems to co-exist and blend with the contemporary culture. Because these countries are born of strife, corruption and violence it´s institutionalised as part of their culture, accepted and rarely questioned. So you get this constant paradox of well-dressed business people walking down the street, and beggars on the side (although I have also witnessed this in New York city). I won´t go on any more about it, but this is the conclusion that I have come to anyway :)

The subway in Santiago (sorry its blurry)
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The first day in Santiago was spent wandering around and orienting ourselves. I also went to a hairdresser for another interesting experience! I have had continual hat hair (girls will know about this) for the last 4 weeks and couldn´t stand it any longer. So a couple of us took ourselves off to a nearby hairdresser for some pampering. A trim, wash, highlights and straighten cost about $40!! For the guys, that´s about a fifth of what it would normally cost in Aus. So yeah it definitely felt better to have hair that Í didn´t have to pull back for once!

One of the gazillions of statues in Santiago
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Yesterday about 10 of us went on a wine tour to some of Chile´s most well-known vinyards. What a fantastic day (yet again)!! We visited 2 of the main ones and had lunch between at a Parillia (meat barbeque place in a garden). It was all so beautiful! The wine tour was very well run, very informative and geared to the tourists. There wasn´t the over the top drinking you get on some of the Aus ones, as we sampled only 2 wines from each vinyard.

The first visited was Concha y Toro which is about a 30 minute drive from Santiago and set amongst the most beautiful gardens and park (see the pics). You can probably get better pics from their website if you´re interested. The second was a smaller, family-run and owned winery called Viña Cousiño Macul. Here we also went down cellars, saw "wine libraries" containing many thousands of bottles dating back to the early 1920´s. It was very interesting and informative, and the guides very enthusiastically explained the wine-making processes for the wines we were sampling. A few of us ended up buying wines, I bought a bottle of gris (very light red) for about $3 which we consumed last night. It was another truely wonderful day!

One of the museums in Santiago
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Anyway tonight is our last night in amazing Santiago. To be completely honest, I can´t work out whether I prefer Santiago or Buenos Aires; it is a close call. We are all going out for a dinner somewhere nice (Provinçal district I believe) and tomorrow we head off to some port somewhere on a 8 hour busride. I´ve become quite lazy about finding out our next destinations, because in a kind of way I don´t mind it all unfolding like some adventure. So stay tuned for the next instalment :)

Bye for now, and hope all is well and you don´t mind my ramblings too much ;)

One of the cathedrals in Santiago (another OTT example!)
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Love to you all!

Wendy