Last night we took a red eye flight from Newark to São Paulo. Shortly after boarding the flight we were given a dinner service, even though it was already after 10 pm! I was delighted to find that my meal requests came through for me this time and we were served a vegan meal! The special diet foods tend to be of superior quality to the standard food and it gets served before all the other food, two pluses. The food was actually pretty good, and included two types Indian curried beans with jasmine rice and a side of apricot barley grain salad (which was delicious!), a fruit cup and a whole grain roll plus two glasses of free red wine! We were flying on United and happened to also be very pleased with the selection of movies. I watched the Intern and Jeff watched Austin Powers. We wanted to see more movies, but figured we should get some sleep. I know I am not old, but the older I get the harder it seems to be to get comfortable and really sleep on planes! My legs always fall asleep, and I always wish I could go back to being a kid and curl up anywhere and fall asleep!
In the morning we had a few hours layover in São Paulo in which we had to transfer to another terminal for our second flight to Santiago. We didn't even leave the secure area of the airport, but to get to the other terminal they still made us take another security screening in which they took away my brand new bottle of contact solution!! It was under 4 oz and I am always allowed to carry it with me on flights in the US but apparently Brazil has a limit of 100 ml and the bottle was 105 ml, so the security lady who kept babbling on in Portuguese took it and threw it in the trash! I was so mad! I hate waste! It didn't matter to them that the bottle had already been cleared by US TSA and that I hadn't left their airport with it. I also saw them throwing away bottled water that other passengers had acquired on the flight from Newark. Having that security screening there when we'd all already been screened in the US was a waste of resources in my opinion!!
After another 4 hour flight with beautiful views of the Andes, we arrived to sunny Santiago. It was 4 pm when we arrived and had taken around 16 hours of travel time. (We are 5 hours ahead of the west coast here time wise, and 2 hours ahead of the East Coast.) Once we cleared customs, we out figured out how to take a combination of bus and subway/metro from the airport and saved ourselves and expensive taxi fare. We are lucky to be starting our trip with over $200USD worth of pesos leftover from our last trip. It was a good incentive to come on this trip, using up those leftover pesos from last year! We never exchanged them at the end of last trip because the exchange rate was terrible.
We are staying at Hostal Providencia near the downtown area. It's a very expansive hostel that must have over 100 beds! It's a nice place though, and in a good location.
We didn't need to eat since I never take a plane ride without an assortment of food. I carried on board 3 recycled leftovers trays filled with very filling potato and veggie meals. So instead of eating after we arrived we went for a lovely and much need walk along the Mapocho River though Parque Forestal, a nicely landscaped strip of park land that borders the river. It contained quite an assortment of beautiful and big old trees. It is an area used by many locals for exercise, so we saw many runners, cyclists and other interesting forms of fitness, like outdoor cross fit, Thai chi and dancing. There are also many lovers in the park and we saw lots of smooching and fondling going on in the grass which seemed to be a very normal occurrence!
<Very congested area near our hostel, this is the least smoggy view of our stay in Santiago.>
<Lovers at the far left while children swim in the fountain at Parque Forestal.>
Thursday, January 14th 2016
This morning I was very happy to find our hostel actually had something more than bread and jam to eat! They had a big basket of fruit! We got to eat oranges, grapefruit, nectarines, bananas, apples and pears! It is such a joy to be back in the land of summer fruits like nectarines!!
Today was spent walking around town and doing errands. We first took the metro to the main bus terminal and bought tickets for a 12 hour ride to Pucon, one of the most popular vacation destinations in Chile, along with Torres Del Paine National Park. It is located in the Northernmost part of the Chilean lakes district and is an outdoor wonderland with its many nearby volcanic mountains, lakes and rivers. We decided to book a day ride for the next morning rather than an overnight because our hostel is already booked for tonight and we are ready the get out of the city ASAP!
We also went to the grocery store to get some supplies for our first bus ride and to check out the selection. Chilean grocery stores are so much better than Argentinean ones because they seem to have no limits on importing food, like Argentina does, and they have a better, less arid climate for growing produce, so the selection of produce is worlds better. The produce is actually fresh, crisp and beautiful compared to the sad, old and wilted stuff you find in Southern Argentina. I will have to take some photos of the grocery store produce section in Argentina at a later point in our trip for reference. We also got some whole grain bread rolls to replace the white bread the hostel offers. Bread is a breakfast staple here, so you can buy many different kinds of rolls in bulk. We got 6 and it cost us just over $1.
We had lunch at a nice vegan restaurant overlooking the Parque Forestal. They had a set menu which included fresh pineapple juice, a fresh tomato and green bean salad and lentil soup. It was pretty good and cheap, and nice to find a vegan place so close to our hostel!
We had to go to many shops looking for contact solution for me, to replace the one thrown out at the airport. I didn't know if I would find it because I wear hard lenses, which is rare in the US and probably even more rare here. All of the solution we found in the regular pharmacies was for soft contacts. I don't know if it really makes a difference or not, but since I only have one pair of contacts, I'd like to take care of them. So we instead walked to an area downtown where the front desk guy at our hostel said there seemed to be a lot of optical stores. We went in probably 10 shops before finding one that had the right solution for me! I was very relieved that we were able to find it. It seemed to be the only bottle they had, and I doubt there are many others in the city.
In celebration of finding the solution, we bought a snack from a street vendor called "mote con huesillo," the mote (mow-tay) part is cooked wheatberries and the huesillo (way-see-oh) part is either dried whole peaches which have been rehydrated in peach juice or canned peaches halves. Huesillos apparently means little bones and refers to the pits inside the peaches. Using the dried whole peaches is the traditional way to make it but it seems to often be made with canned peaches now. The canned peaches here are far superior to the ones in the US, they are delicious! To serve it, the street vendor fills a plastic cup half full of wheatberries, then tops it off with peach juice and peaches and you eat it with a spoon like cereal. It sounds kind of strange, but it's a very popular typical/traditional food of Chile and it's very good. It comes in many sizes, from 8 oz up to a liter! One day I will force Jeffs hand and we will have a liter of it!
After our main chores were completed we took a walk through the Cerro Santa Lucía park. It was a really neat place that must have been more than 100 years old. It is a small rocky mountain right in the downtown area. It is surrounded by flat land that has been developed with multistory apartment buildings, offices and skyscrapers. To go up the hill there must be a few dozen different possible routes, as there are a maze of trails and cobbled stone steps and walkways. The hill is also covered in all kinds of lush vegetation, including many large trees and it is meticulously cared for by many park maintenance workers. It was like a little island oasis in the city. About halfway up you can look into the buildings and from the top you can see over them to the surrounding Andes mountains and coastal mountain ranges. Unfortunately, Santiago is a huge city and there is a lot of smog, rendering the mountains barely visible. We loved the park and could have spent hours there, it is probably the nicest place in the whole city.
For the last item on the agenda for the day we visited La Vega Central, a huge produce market that's open every day and is housed in a permanent building. I was very excited for this, as the Lonely Planet book stated: "if it's grown in Chile, you will find it here." It was like wonderland for me walking though aisles and aisles of produce stalls! I knew I didn't want to be weighed down traveling with too much produce the next day on the bus, so I restrained myself and only bought a few things. We got a giant yucca root, some neat pink and yellow spotted Andean potatoes and a big beautiful avocado. There were so many other wonderful things available though, gigantic ears of corn bigger than my forearm, all kinds of berries, peaches, mango and huge broccoli and cauliflower! It was wonderful! One other thing I really wanted, was purple corn! But I was informed by the sellers that it is really tough and requires a pressure cooker to soften it properly and even then it's not typically just eaten, it's used to make other things, like beverages and breads. I sure am glad I got to see it though, it was very pretty!
Once back at the hostel we enjoyed a very simple yet delicious dinner of yucca, boxed beans from the grocery store and avocado. To flavor it we used some hot sauce, salt and a little roasted red pepper pesto that we found in the hostel kitchen. We were so exited to see that we got a golden yucca, normally it's white inside and we didn't even know there was such a think as the golden variety.
We went to bed full, happy and excited for the coming days. Today was a good day! It was sunny and warm, but not too hot! We have just come from Alaska a week ago where it was in the mid 20s with about 6 hours of daylight and now we have over 15 hours of daylight and temperatures in the mid 70s! The days will be longer the further South we go.
Thanks for giving us a sense of Santiago. I have long looked at it on the map, and wondered what it would be like to go there. And whether I would like it. The farmers market sounds delectable. I love farmers markets. We have almost none in the U.S. anymore. Italy, however, it quite a different story (thank God!). We get a lot of Chilean fruit - particularly berries - in the U.S. this time of year. They are always big and perfect...and almost completely tasteless. We wondered if they were all GMO. Sounds like maybe the Chileans keep the best for themselves! (The Italians do!)
ReplyDeleteYes the Chilean produce is excellent, I've definitely come to the source!
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