Sea, hills and lots of food!!!!!

For the last few days, I’ve been going to several museums and walking a lot around Santiago...It’s a huge city and there are lots of things to see...especially interesting museums! Chile has such a diverse cultural inheritance, be it pre-colonial or colonial influence, that there are several very distinct artistic things to be found all around the country....For example, woollen products from the South(sheep) and North(llama), hundreds – if not thousands - different snacks, dishes or sweet delicasies, horse hair crafts, things made from copper, silver or leather and ofcourse the gemstone only found here in Chile and Afganistan: Lapizlázuli (a blue stone with a white marble affect) etc etc.....

This weekend, I went to Valparaiso and Viña del Mar, two towns on the coast, jsut 110kms from Santiago. I went with Paola and two of her friends and stayed the night in Viña. I saw loads of things, especially a not so tranquil Pacific Ocean, a large Casino (where we decided to put one coin in to play, and ended up winning 8 times that amount of money! We had a coffee with this money.....), BLACK pelicans (never knew there were black ones, only ever saw white ones till now) and again ate several typical Chilean dishes....ALL of them GREAT!!!!!

Valparaiso is the main port of Chile, but it famous for it’s asensores (lifts) which take people up and down the several cerros (hills....yeah what ever! For a dutch girl, they’re more like MOUNTAINS!!!!) where people live....most of the houses are on the sides of hills...and we went up and sown several....they have one that is like a real lift as it goes vertically after walking down a long tunnel under the hill, but unfortanately it was closed, so we walked up the hill instead....A LOT of stairs!

Viña was lovely too. There we a lot ofparks, a building that was shaped like a boat (on the side of the harbour so it looked very much like a stranded boat), several castles, and ofcourse the sea which was full of seagulls and black pelicans!

On the way back to Santiago, we went to this place called “Isla Negra” which is famous for having one of Pablo Neruda’s (a famous Chilean Poet) three houses he had. It had a lovely view of the sea but we decided not to go on a tour becuase they had “tourist” prices, which we weren’t prepared to pay....

I{ve gotta run...going north to a place called San Pedro de Atacama, a town in the desert....apparently the driest desert in the world!!!!...which is a 24 hrs bus ride, and we have to leave in 30 min! Will tell you all about it!