trains, planes and funiculares

Dan: Though we’ve already used no fewer than 7 forms of public transportation, we’ve decided that the name for this blog should be subtitled ”the biped diaries”, just because whenever we go somewhere, we tend to do a lot of walking. So far this trip has been no exception.

The first few days were spent in the downtown area of Santiago, Chile. This area is bustling in the daytime and sort of a ghost town at night. On Saturdays especially, the pedestrian malls are crowded with shoppers, vendors and performers. Despite the warnings of every guidebook, I am not able to resist sampling the foods sold by street vendors. We tried something called Mote con Huesillos on a hot afternoon. It was a glass of flavored (I think with tamarind) water, half a peach, and the bottom of the cup filled with a grain of some sort, wheat maybe. Cool, refreshing, and energizing. Anyone who knows me knows how important dinnertime is. And lunchtime. Not breakfast so much. Maybe my portion of this blog will be about the things I’ve eaten this year. And my opportunity to type ungrammatically. And to begin sentences with “and.”

I don’t know if it is unwarranted, but I’ve felt relatively safe in Santiago, even downtown, which everyone says can get a little sketchy, any time of day we’ve been out. So far I haven’t had to bust out the old kung-fu.

The subway of Santiago seems pretty straightforward, clean, and efficient. Our first ride took us to Bellavista, where we went to the Santiago landmark, Cerro San Cristobal. To get up the hill, one pays for a ride on a funicular, a kind of old-school elevator on railroad tracks. From the top, we had a nice view of the entirety of Santiago, and some of the mountains that surround it. Also perched atop the peak is a large statue of The Virgin, watching over the citizenry. From the top, we took a gondola down the other side of the hill.(how many forms of transportation is that now?) Now when I say hill, I don’t mean like Buck Hill. In fact, if such a hill were located in Minnesota, we would surely call it a mountain and plant resorts, chairlifts, cabins, and a waterslide on it. The Chileans, on the other hand, merely put two swimming pools, a gondola line, playgrounds, a botanical garden, a zoo, restaurants, an amphitheater-church and a 30-foot tall Virgin Mary atop it. But they call it a hill.