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"When God created the world he had a handful of everything left - mountains, deserts, lakes, glaciers - and he put it all in his pocket you see, and as God walked across heaven it all trickled out, and the long trail it made was Chile"
We arrived in Santiago on Monday. After an 11 hour flight we arrived in Santiago 5 hours before we left Auckland because we crossed the date line. The Jet Lag hit us hard and out of our first 24 hours in the city from 2pm monday to 2pm tuesday, we spent 20 hours in bed. 5 hours asleep, 4 hours eating dinner, 5 hours asleep, 5 hours trying to sleep, 5 hours asleep. It didn�t help also that we are in the hotel that never sleeps. There is a party on everynight outside our room until 6am and then at 6am the cleaners arrive and they are even louder.
We went to the cinema twice in Santiago because we were not really in the mood for cultural stuff because of the jet lag. It was a good way to practice our Spanish anyway, because it was quite difficult asking which films were in English. We saw Mission Impossible 3 which was quite good and Scary Movie 4 which was rubbish.
Everyone told us that we needed to know Spanish before going to South America and we probably didn�t really believe them. Now we are here it`s obvious that no one speaks a word of English. this makes things really hard because our spanish is terrible. We know lots of the phrases that we need to know but when they respond we never know what they are talking about. Sometimes we go into a restaurant and we ask for a table and we order our food and then the waiter starts explaining something to me and it takes a long time to work out what he is trying to say. He will use all sorts of sign language and gestures and get all the staff and customers around to help explain and none of them will know any english. It�s quite good though because we are learning Spanish much quicker than we would be if they gave up immediately and spoke in English like they do in Europe. It`s not as embarrassing either, because our spanish is always better than their english.
On our first night we went to a restaurant and I looked at the drinks list and I saw a list of European beers and at the top of the list, just above Heineken it said Bebedas. Bebedas was half the price of Heineken and I thought it was the local beer so I asked for dos Bebedas. The waitress started rattling something off in spanish and we didn't have a clue what she was talking about so she repeated it twice, slower each time, and then started listing drinks like coca cola and sprite. So I said, `no, dos bebedas`. She gets really frustrated and goes over to the fridge and gets out some bottles of coke and sprite and starts waving them around. I say to Katie, i know what the problem is they must not have any bebedas. So Katie asks for dos Heineken and the waitress actually understands us. We found out later that Bebedas is Spanish for drink, so we actually were just asking for drinks over and over again.
I heard that Santiago has a good nightlife so we went to a local pub for a drink and to find out where to go out. By 4am we were having a laugh with about 10 locals who couldn`t speak a word of English and they were inviting us to a house party.These English girls who had a continuous line of chillean men chatting them up all night told us to call ourselves Pedro and Carmella for the benefit of the locals. We didn�t go to the house party though, we chose to eat hot dogs at the local petrol station - just like home.
We went out last night to a pub where the drinks were enormous - the beer was 1 litre and Katie`s pisco sour came in 2 glasses. We spent ages playing on the video jukebox and must have paid for about 20 songs to play on there.
We went up a hill one day to see nice views of the city. We are leaving to go to the Atacama desert tomorrow. The two best things about Santiago has been the food and drink which are cheaper than we thought they would be and really good quality. There are some amazing things to see south of Santiago but it is terrible weather at this time of year and we wouldn't mind leaving Chile and doing more stuff in Peru where the weather will be better.
Aidan.
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