Cerro San Cristobal

Day 2 in Chile is almost over, and it was such an awesome one!!!

We woke up pretty late, still recovering from our journey. We had lunch at a little cafe near the hostel, there are literally hundreds of them! Their lunch special was lasagna, a salad, fruit juice and coffee for 2.990 pesos (about $6). The salad was kind of gross (from a spoiled California standpoint) but the lasagna was good and the fruit juice was pineapple.

After lunch, we started walking to something called Cerro San Cristobal which Brittany and I both knew about, vaguely. Someone had described it to me as "a hill" and she had heard about "eggs" that you could sit in on a monorail and see all of Santiago. As it turns out, it's a huge park, kind of like Chile's Golden Gate park. They have a zoo, swimming pools, picnic areas, and something called "funicular" which is a tram that pulls you all the way up the incredibly steep hill to "la cumbre" (the summit.) Once we got up there, it was the most incredible view. We really could see all of Santiago which is an enormous, sprawling city. We could even catch a glimpse of the Andes (although they were mostly shrouded in mist and smog). By the way, it's summer here and we were sweating buckets by now.

We walked up a pretty serious flight of stairs to get all the way to the statue of "La Virgen" where the view was even more spectacular. There seemed to be an outdoor church that looked like it would be really cool to go to. After a while, we headed back down and got some water a popsicles. They were selling "huesillos" which appeared to be caramel sorbet over rice krispies. We didn't try them...yet.

We took the funicular back down and walked back through Bellavista to get back to our hostel. Its a really cool neighborhood with tons of bars and cafes. We'll have to head back there soon.

Our next mission was to find hairdryers. First, we found giant bottles of water that we bought because it is blazing hot here and the tap water is no good. It took a while but we found hair dryers and got Brittany's phone activated. For now, we'll probably figure out dinner and probably just lay low tonight. Tomorrow's the big day where we finally get to meet our host families and the other members of the operation. Very exciting. Chau for now!