Hotel Eurotel Santiago

This entry is brought to you with the help of some serious jet-lag. I'm currently sat in my cousin Ben and his wife Rachel's living room in Auckland New Zealand - although I'll be attempting to recall our trip from Mendoza to Santiago whilst battling with the effects of no sleep and a considerable confusion about what today is (it's difficult trying to understand how someone can transition from Saturday to Monday without the event of a Sunday!). <br><br>Anyway ...

... journey with us, but we got abit stressed over whether we should maybe bring this cool kid playing about 3 drums at once on the street &#8211; he was about 3months old.<br><br>Ended up grabbing a few beers that night J 1 litre of beer is about &#8364;1.30 so things can get messy fast if you start playing drinking games with the litre bottles of beer which we obviously did!1st night was great craic and we ended up drinking away in the hostel and checking out the hostel bar, played abit ...

... 2000m. Its quaint old buildings and dirt roads were charming, but the tourist prices for meals and accommodation were shocking! Luckily, we found a nice hostel with a kitchen so we could cook our own meals. Like a blessing from god, we had a ping pong table at our hostel as well, and memories of our ping pong rooms in our Vancouver homes brought tears to our eyes, as we played for hours. We took an evening tour that brought us to a ...

... these so we would have some information with us for the rest of the journey. The information on Santiago was a little thin, but there were a few major attractions to check out and we promised ourselves that we would..... eventually! One night was BBQ night in the hostel and we offered to make vodka jelly, a delicacy the owner had never tried. Two girls we had met in the hostel were heading off to the next nearest city, Valparisso, for the day and ...

Hola from sunny Santiago! Its taken awhile to find the time to write a proper blog entry - the `free` internet at the youth hostel was always either busy or out of order. Santiago has been a gentle introduction to South America and we have fallen in love with it - our hostel was great, really well situated and very friendly staff, the weather has been above 30 degrees every day and the people have all gone put of their way to help when our ...

... from travelers - largely uniteresting is the majority verdict. We ended up seeing much more of Valparaiso so I´m not really in a position to comment. It´s a nice, clean, big city (rare in SA) very different to what I have encountered so far. In that respect it was interesting and the trip on the gondola´s and the teleferico to the viewpoint over the city is good fun. Doesn´t have too many other outstanding sights though so I ...

... of those "Chino moments". I´ve had countless of these moments while traveling around Europe and in the smaller towns of Chile, but was surprised to experience this in Santiago, as the capital is quite multi-cultural. I managed to make a table of 12 people stop and stare at the same time, as I walked by. Of course, maybe it wasn´t because I was Chinese - maybe I had a piece of toilet paper stuck to my shoe, or maybe they were ...

... He seemed to understand and at least was kind enough not to laugh out loud and point at me, even if he did say the amount in English! <br><br>After I tried to give him 1/10th of the correct amount he said the number again, loudly, and I put the coins away and blushed as I ...

... We had lunch in a new arcade/shopping centre which looked like it had only recently opened and then got drawn in to a Lapiz Lazuli jewellers. We did buy two necklaces which seemed a very reasonable price though.<br><br>That evening we crossed town by metro to eat at Liguria in Providencia, which was very nice.<br><br><br><br>November 27 - Last day - back in Santiago<br><br> <br><br>Today we travelled to the Cousina ...