Santiago, Latin American Law Program, Day 8

We woke up at 6:20a to make our 8:25a bus, which was probably a little unnecessary since we ended up waiting around a kind of shady bus terminal for over an hour. My back was surprisingly sunburnt, so the two hour bus ride to Santiago was rough.

Apparently, Santiago is dead on Sundays.  There was just no one on the streets.  It's a city of six million people and felt like a ghost town.  We stayed at Hostal Rio Amazonas.  Rio Amozanas has two locations: one superwell located in Bellavista (where all the cafes and restaurants are), and another in Barrio Brasil.  I meant to book the one in Bellavists, but I accidentally booked the one in Barrio Brasil.  The location isn't bar, per se, but it's not really a good location.  Either way, it was a pretty nice hostel.  Rebecca, Monica and I shared a room, and Zac had a room to himself.


The other half of the group was at Andes Hostel.  We all met up at Museo de Bellas Artes.  The fine arts museum was nice.  There was a "tango with Barack Obama" that was interesting.  We really wanted the Precolombian art museum, but got a little turned around.

We had a very tough time finding anything open nearby.  We ended up at this Spanish cafe a few blocks from the museum.  They were out of everything.  That was basically our theme of Santiago.  They ran out of stuff over New Year's Eve, so by January 2, there was no wine, and no quiche, and no fish.

After lunch we walked across the city, and through Bellavista to get to Cerro San Cristobal.  It was really cool.  There is a huge statue of the Virgin Mary at the top.  It reminded me a lot of El Cristo Rey in Guanajuato, Mexico.  We stayed up there for a while.  I drank some Mote con huesillo, which was weird but not necessarily bad. We headed back down and went to our hostels for a siesta before the evening.

On Liz's recommendation, we headed toward La Piojle in Plaza de Armas.  Apparently, they have this awesome wine and ice cream combo.  Unfortunately, after walking through all of Plaza de Armas to find it, it was closed on Sunday.


We went to some other restaurant with tables on the plaza and had some wine and fries before going onward for dinner.

We had dinner at a restaurant called Patagonia, that was very good.  We decided to dine family style with wine and a bunch of different entrees, all of which were really great.  After dinner we headed back to the hostel so that I could change shoes (I broke one).  Once we got back though Monica, Rebecca and I were all pretty beat.  So, we sent Zac out by himself to Bellavista.