Getting to Santiago was
a pleasant 2-day journey – for once I am not being sarcastic. We relaxed in
Sucre in the morning, drank some lemonade, read a book, and eventually caught
the local bus to the airport. From Sucre we flew to Cochabamba for a quick
layover and then on to La Paz for our last night in Bolivia. After some quick pretty
typical taxi drama, we made it to Host San Sebastian, a home stay on El Alto
with a really nice local owner that chatted with us for a while and brought us fruit
and coca tea before bed!
Before leaving for the
airport yet again, our host prepared breakfast complete with an entire carafe
of strong coffee which Andy happily went to town on. It wasn’t until the host
came in a few minutes later and looked at Andy with a shocked horrified
expression, that he realized that the coffee was actually coffee concentrate,
meant to be watered down. Andy had finished the entire carafe and the home
owner called him “loco”. We all had a good laugh!
After an uneventful flight,
we settled into an airport hotel in Santiago, worked out at the “gym”, watched
Goldfinger in Spanish, sat in the sauna, and ate an expensive hotel restaurant
dinner of gnocchi and chocolate flan – all around a pretty decent couple days
of travel.
Now that our travels
to Chile were complete, we returned to the airport… to pick up Matt and the
rental car! Matt found us easily with our awesome welcome sign, the rental car
pickup went smoothly, and before we knew it we were off to the Vega Central
market. At the market, we learned very quickly that Chilean Spanish is not Spanish
at all, it is a crazy unintelligible language that sounds nothing like Spanish
(okay… technically it is Spanish, but you would never know it). I could not even
understand numbers to know how much the produce cost – I literally opened my
hand of money and they grabbed the coins. They understood what I said just fine,
but it was like starting all over again learning the language. Anyway, I think
they were honest and the market was awesome with so many amazing food choices! Since
we are staying at AirBnB’s for the next 2 weeks, we stocked up before hitting
the road south to Chillian for some POW!
 |
| Around Santiago. |
No comments:
Post a Comment