Santiago is soooooo modern. This was good and bad. The downtown area makes you think that shopping and malls are all there is to the city. That’s bad, but they did have a really sweet movie theater so we got to see a few movies we’ve been dying to see, namely Sweeny Todd. Kim and I have both seen the musical, Kim more than once, and we love it, so we were very happy to see the movie live up to it.
Aside from amusing ourselves with movies, we explored the parks and went on a wine tour to Concha y Toro, the most famous vinyard in the area. Everyone talks about how great Chilean wine is, but it’s also expensive, even in Chile, and the vinyards don’t make doing tours easy or cheap. The Concha y Toro vinyard is accessible by taking the subway then a bus, so it’s about an hour and a half from the center. It’s $12 and only includes two small tastings. Decent tour, but nothing worth $12. The wine was nice too, but nothing to rave about. If we wanted to go to other vinyards we really would have had to rent a car or go on a really expensive tour. I’d rather just go to the vinyards back home in Washington.
We stayed in a fun hostal called La Casa Roja, which is in an old mansion and has a pool, free internet, ping pong and cricket batting cage (weird). The nicest thing about this hostel is that they’ve got a travel agency inside with very helpful people who will do a lot of stuff for free, like reserve wine tours or reserve hostels in Valparaiso. Kind of a party atmosphere with lots of young people drinking.
Santiago has some nice hill parks. We went to the two major ones. The views would be very nice if it wasn’t for the smog. We road up a funicular to the top of the big park and then walked down. The paths are very dusty. One thing we noticed in the parks, actually everywhere, is tons of people are making out like horny teenagers. Not just teenagers either. Tongues are shoved so far, sloppily down each others throats it makes me gag. Apparently when your culture involves living at home until married, you need an outlet in public places. Gross.
Once we got out of the center the food got a little better, but we still think people in Santiago are retarded when it comes to vegetarian food. We ate at one restaurant, whose name is El Vegetariana, and their set lunch included chicken. Not fake chicken either, we asked. Apparently only the regular menu needs to be meat free. Service and food were terrible. In all of Chile if you go into a normal restaurant they often have a vegetarian option which they’ll point to, smile and tell you it’s “pura verduras” (all vegetables), which usually includes really old, canned weird vegetables, usually corn, all mixed together. In other words, it’s a disgusting option.
We had fun in Santiago, but it’s definitely not any kind of highlight or place to go back to, except maybe to watch some good movies at a theater.