From Allende And Horse Statues, To Great Sunset Over Mapocho River

Some pictures from our walking history tour in central Santiago.  Airbnb gives local guides the opportunity to offer their tours on the Airbnb website.  They’re reasonably priced and you get a small group - in our case yesterday, three - and a guide.  We were scheduled for 3 hours, but we went longer.

There was a lot of information packed in and I didn’t catch - let alone remember it all.  Our guide was definitely an Allende fan and echoed economic concerns that we heard in Argentina.  He said Argentines think Chile is doing much better than Argentina.  But Argentina has free health care and higher education.  Chile has neither.  And while I thought the prices in Argentina were high (except for local products, like wine, and locally grown food, prices in Chile are higher.  And people, Pablo told us aren’t getting raises to keep up with the prices.

Here’s the entrance to our Airbnb.  It’s the red door in the middle.  It leads to a hallway.   

 

We have a tiny studio.  Entry, kitchen and bath downstairs and a loft upstairs with the bed.  It’s $ 34 a night, which is reasonable.  But for some reason, my iPad isn’t keeping cookies for sites I vis  i t  frequently so  I am constantly logging in.  But Airbnb wanted me to v erify who I was by getting a code from my cell phone.  But I’ve replaced my US sim card with an Argen tine sim card for t he trip so I can’t retrieve the code.  Once they gave me the option of sending it to my email.  But no l onger.  So I was cut off for a day.  Can’t contact my host, can’t make new reservations, can’t book a tour.  I  finally got their attention (leaving notes in the help? Box when I couldn’t use the code  and tweeting them.  And I got back on.  But less than 24 hours later I’m in the same fix.  We have a reservation in  Cordoba, but I don’t know the address and can’t contact the host.  And I can’t contact my host now to see if we can leave our suitcases here after checkout tomorrow so we don’t have to drag them  around town.

Turns out we’re in a district that’s sort of like Venice Beach - lots of murals, free spirits, bars, late night clubs.  But we’re also close to things in central Santiago.  But finding a grocery to get eggs fto make  breakfast yesterday, or even eat breakfast was hard.  We ended up at Fuente Aleman.  German Fountain.  It turned out later on the tour it was just across the street from a large fountain that the  Germans who were given land  in Southern Chile in the mid 19th Century  gave to Santiago (or Chile) at the 100th Anniversary of Chile’s independence.  (I think that’s right.)




It turned out that basically this was a grilled beef sandwich restaurant.  J was game, but the BBQ we had in San Juan was well beyond my annual meat quota.  I got a meat sandwich without the meet, but with avocado and tomato.  It was ok, but cost the same.  It was about $15 for the two sandwiches.  But what was unique was the waitresses who took orders, cooked the orders in the middle - that’s number 11, our waitress, next to the pile of meet for J’s sandwich.  (It could all have been for one sandwich, I don’t imagine.). And then they serve us.  They don’t take the money though, that’s for the cashier whose head you can see in back between the two at the grill.  But our waitress, who seemed a bit dour, did eventually ask where we were from.  Alaska is a great place to be from.  Most people haven’t met anyone from Alaska, but they know it’s cold.  I have to tell them this week that it was about 30˚C in Alaska.  That messes with their stereotypes.

We took the subway a couple of stops, because we were having trouble keeping to the path to where we were supposed to meet the guide.  It was only a little over a mile, but we were making a lot of wrong turns and backtracking, and I didn’t want to be late.    Early on the tour we got to this square in front of the (former?) presidential palace. Allende shot himself near one of the second story windows as the army was closing in.  The guide said to avoid torture and death by the army.  These two young women were out protesting the lack of progress against climate change.   The Trump sign said something about not believing in climate change.

To put these two women in perspective, here’s another view of the plaza.

The two women are on one side and four police are on the other.

The next photo is from where I took the picture above - the statue of President Allende.
And that’s our guide Pablo.  I can’t get into Airbnb to say what a great job he did.

[I don’t want to complain again, but the wifi is slow and cuts out regularly, my iPad problems with blogger continue,  and now I keep getting messages that blogger can’t save this post.  That means if that doesn’t clear up, I can’t post it either in the end.  And everything I’m typing could disappear.  So I’m going to stop now and see if I can fix this and post at least this much.  Each post takes me three or four times as long as it should to get up.].  [I guess it was just an internet interruption]

Here’s our guide Pablo in front of the statue of President Allende.

 Anchorage has three to five thousand foot mountains as a constant backdrop.  Santiago has four thousand meter mountains as a back drop.  That’s about 12,000 feet.  And they’re just as close as the Chugach.  But in Anchorage to get dramatic mountains in the background shots, you need to use a telephoto lens.  Not in Santiago.  Though normally the air is clearer in Anchorage - but from what I hear about forest fires, that’s not the case now.

This photo is of a rather cryptic mural of Gabriela Mistral  who is according to Wikipedia the first Latin American author to win a Nobel Prize. 

Only two more pictures (I’m leaving some out) and this torturous post will be done.  Next is a cultural center and these are some teenagers playing with light sabres.

And finally the sunset over the river Mapocho.

If there are odd spaces here and there, it’s because I need to hit the space key to be able to navigate blogger on my iPad.  Sorry.