Mar 03 - Santiago here we are !

Mar 03 - Santiago here we are !

After a leisurely breakfast we headed out to explore Santiago. 

First stop was the hardware shop to get Steve a set of allen keys for his camera tripod which the fascist security at Birmingham airport had decided were dangerous weapons and confiscated them. 
A friendly English speaking Santiagoan helped out to get us what was needed. Everyone is so friendly, very unusual for such a big city and we are sure that everybody is going to be easy to get on with.

Then on to the central market where every kind of fish and shellfish was available. Santiago and Valparaiso have great seafood.

Steve was hating this, complaining about the smell of fish even though it was minor compared with the stench of penguin poo we had experienced 

We then spotted a city bus tour and decided that was the best way to get our bearings, so we headed off to the office to buy our tickets.

Now we had had several warnings about looking after our belongings and trying to remain low key for safety reasons in Santiago, but the tour bus company blew that out the water ! All we needed was a neon sign and we would have had the full set………

Fortunately for us, Santiago while a big city (9 million people and half the population of Chile) had none of the edginess of Buenos Aires and felt much more friendly and safe. Everyone we encountered was friendly which for a big city was really great.

We were very glad we did the city tour when we realised how vast this city is ! We would never have covered the ground the tour did. We were on the bus for 3 hours and just covered the main central areas. It let us see which areas we wanted to try & visit in more depth and was a great introduction.

There is a real street culture here and the area we are staying in has lots of great bars and restaurants, so we strolled out in the evening to a little area in La Sterria and had some beers, Chilean wine & pisco sours in a bar on the street and ended up spending the evening there watching the world go by. 

Not a bad way to spend an evening !!