Santiago - Day 1

Hello everyone.  We woke up very early this morning, wide awake at 6am, and down to breakfast as the place opened.  It was lovely and cool when we left the hotel and walked to the metro station Togo into the historic part of the city.

Always a a bit tentative when you are in a new country and using the transport. Everyone wanted to help, but was easy and we soon got to Plaza De Armas, in the centre of Santiago.  Everything in Chile is measured from this place.  We had decided to do a free walking tour of the city to get a grounding. As we were early we went into the cathedral. Big, mind blowing and full of silver, amazing.

Presidential Palace and tired dog

We met up with Franco our guide and started on our four hour walk.   Franco was fun, fascinating and knowledgeable, so glad we did it.  Four hours later we were on our knees and the temperature was 35 degrees and sweltering.

1.  They have coffee bar with legs. When coffee was first introduced to Chile nobody drank it, And to encourage them to do so, a keen businessman opened up a cafe where the waitresses were the most beautiful and wore short skirts, these cafes are still going strong, but mainly a male preserve...really.  A couple of years ago someone opened a girly version, with scantily glad men, but it didn't last Long.  Woman seemingly had better things to do.

2.  Every year on the 11th September they have an annual civil war and Santiago is not a good place to be.  There is still very bad feeling between the Pinochet supporters and the Socialists, it all comes to a head on this day every year, and there is usually one big punch up...it can get very nasty.

3.   You can always ask a policeman.  It seems that after the country returned to democracy, police here had the same reputation as the rest of South America, police are corrupt and can't be trusted.  Now the police force is one of the most transparent in the world.  If in doubt ask a policeman, he can be trusted, as her of course.

4. The Brick - The Spanish company Telefonica decided in the 80's that they wanted to build an iconic building in Santiago. They built it in the shape of a mobile phone.  Technology has moved on, and people here call it the back, and are not very complimentary about it.

Anyway we had a great four hours, learned a lot about the history of the city, the bad stuff about how the Mapoche people were treated by the Spanish, the Pinochet era (nasty bastard) .  It seems they are still finding mass graves from that time.and a lot more.

statue to the Mapoche people

We hobbled back to the hotel and lay down for an hour to recover.  There was nothing for it, we had to have an ice-cream to aid recovery.

we think he was moving house