Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Part 1 of the Wallis Kid Adventure

My brother arrived the Chile last Friday and its really been weird but also really awesome having him here. I feel like I´m the tour guide, constantly having to decide what to do... well I guess I have lived here for 5 months! Anyways we started off our first couple days in Santiago, just trying to ease him into a foreign country and a HOT climate. On Friday after a lunch we headed up to Cerro San Cristobal (its such a short walk from my house now), and then we walked around a bit, visited Patio Bellavista and we walked down Pio Nono. On Saturday I planned a walking tour. We started at metro station Los Heroes and walked out way down the red metro line. Stopping at all the touristy or important things to see, we also went to the top of Cerro Santa Lucia during the middle of the day. We then headed to my Tio and Tia´s house for an asado - my brother loved the churipan and pebre (who doesn´t!?) On Sunday we had a relaxing day, woke-up late, went for a walk around and visited la Vega and the fish market, had lunch then headed out Parque Arauco. It didn´t feel right showing him this huge Americanized mall... I mean, it´s just a mall! We ended up seeing a movie, with subtitles for his sake! Once we got home we had to get packed up for our early morning bus ride.

On Monday we travelled to Viña del Mar. We surely started the day off right, cold showers (must have run out of gas), and then a rush to find the correct bus terminal which I didn´t know existed until 20 minutes before our bus! But we made it, made it to Viña and thankfully it cleared up and was sunny! After finding our hostel we walked around Viña, saw the girant flower clock (still don´t know why its so cool), then went to the beach. Went out to dinner at an Arabian resturant... not the resturants forte, but we had a good night out and reliving all these old childhood 90´s and early 2000´s music that was being played!

Today we went to Valpariso to go and explore. I myself haven't seen very much of this city so it was nice to be able to walk, and walk, and walk! We first went on a little boat tour around the bay, I translated for Matt since the guide was speaking in Spanish, and even saw a US Marine submarine. We then got Matt his first empanada which was special in its own right. After lunch we decided to go and find the Pablo Nerudo house on the top of one of the hills. In Valpariso they have all these elevators that can bring you to the top of the hill... this one wasn't working. So we climbed our way up the never-ending staircase up the side of the hill. After getting a little lost/confused we finally made our way to the famous poets house. It was such an amazing house with 5 floors and such interesting things. We then headed back down the hill and jumped on a micro back to Viña.

We´re just staying in at the hostel tonight hoping to get decent sleep before our bus to La Serena tomorrow morning!

No comments:

Post a Comment