An entry in the TFS Travel Journal
We felt quite refreshed after sleeping over 10 hours.
After enjoying the not bad hotel breakfast buffet, we checked out the two local supermarkets in search of more bottled water, then went back to the room for more reading and relaxing. After an hour or so of reading, Wendy took another 30 minute nap.
Finally, the time for our city tour had come, and we headed downstairs to the lobby to meet up with Felice - our traveling companion for the next week, and Maurice, our voluble guide for the day. We boarded his mini-van and saw most of metropolitan Santiago while getting an enthusiastic running commentary. Saw the Moneda (present Gov’t HQ), learned all about the Pacific War (in 1882 between Peru/Bolivia and Chile), walked around a neat little neighborhood built around 1900 by a wine maker to house his employees, then headed up to an affluent area in the foothills with fancy new houses and a sweeping view of the city and the nearby 10,000ft. Andes. We also stopped at the flagship store of the largest lapis lazuli producer in the world where we were treated to a video on the subject and four showrooms of lapis and related merchandise. Despite their hospitality (and a pisco sour) we bought only a little lapis penguin and a pillbox of lapis and malachite.
Even though we were supposed to see some of the city’s cultural sights, Maurice seemed more interested in showing us many of the middle-upper and upper neighborhoods, delighting in pointing out the houses he particularly liked and, in one case, their dining room furniture (which, he admitted, one can see better from bus-height) The tour did little to change our perspective on this city (nice to visit, no hurry to come back), though there is an abundance of nice parks and nice people.
We returned to the hotel where we dined with Felice (as it was included in our tour, so we all had the same thing). Appetizer was some ok ham with a good avocado (Wendy went off-menu and had a nice onion soup), a good salmon that was a bit over-done, and some ice cream (vanilla and a yummy creamsicle-tasting orange flavor) for dessert. We ordered a Chilean cabernet, which was good but light. We then ran back to the room so Milton could watch the second half of the SF-Green Bay game (though with the sound off as it was in Spanish), while Wendy continued her enjoyment of reading “Angela’s Ashes”.