Hotel Oceanic Vina del Mar

I feel like for just a little bit I have stopped travelling and am back in the US. I´m spending time in Viña del Mar, a modern and fairly wealthy beach resort town in central Chile. I´m also staying at the home of a new friend, Kaye, who is a missionary working with the professional community here. Her house is very American and it´s been so nice to ride in a car and speak lots of English with her and her roomate Rosemarie. Kaye has been here for 10 ...

... br>
Jucer smo isli na plazu tako da sam prvi puta "okupala" noge u oceanu :) voda je prepreledena, a valovi su prelijepi :) ja kao dijete sa sela, takve valove jos nisam nikada vidjela :) u oceanu sam vidjela neke surfere, ne znam kako mogu uci u tako hladnu vodu (iako je zima ovdje, temperatura iznosi nekih 15C)! slikala sam ko pravi turist. ocjesam se ovdje kao kod kuce. iako je prvi dojam (u valparaisu) bio malo losiji, ovdje ...

... they only take cash. This just goes to show that plastic is dominating small, family businesses even in Chile.

Today was also the day for our second Caminata de Valparaiso (City Tour). The ISEP group took a bus to Cerro Bellavista to visit the house of Pablo Neruda. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature and is highly known around the world for his poems and other writings. We only visited one of his houses, but there is another here in Chile and one ...

... early tomorrow. Luckily, we fiddled around with it for a while, and Scott managed to get it more or less working again. Then, our driver was super-nice and helped us find a camera store in Vina del Mar where they were able to take the lens apart and clean it properly. Camera rescued, we set off to accomplish a few other missions. Chris was successful in finding a new electric shaver, after his broke on the first day in Santiago, thus preventing him ...

... fill both our hearts and our cameras. All in all we managed to leave both our hostel and the town with the yearing of staying longer, but knowing if we stayed we would most likely never get to tick anything off of the ever and rapidly increasing list of places to go, things to see, and future friends to make. So all that faced us next was surviving the dreaded overnight 12 hour bus south to Pucon...

Hier een kort berichtje: we vertrekken vandaag naar onze laatstse tussenhalte Vina del Mar, we verlaten dus La Serena (een heel aangename stad). We zitten een beeetje achter met de blog maar we zullen later aanvullen.Aan iedereen vele groetjes en een gelukkig jaar gewenst.

... to find them later, but to spot them in a crowd of a few hundred thousand people? Not going to happen! I spent 90 minutes looking - first of all, there was no restaurant named "La Playa" at the intersection Liszett showed me, and I walked up and down along all four streets that were mentioned in Ben's note. I gave up and firmed up plans with Diannah and Brent - Ben has my cell phone number, so if they called I'd find them, but I wasn't going to ...

... they do bolt on their hubcaps! A nice view Going back down to catch our bus back to Santiago... Our last photo....at the Santiago airport.  sniff. Well, we had a great day in Valparaiso and were sad to say goodbye to Chile.   But we got on the bus, and headed back to the hotel. We had a 3:30 flight ...

... a love song....??? and then he spoilt the moment?? by proceeding to give each table an envelope for us to place a tip in! ha We spent the afternoon taking the funiculars up and down the hills and for dinner we went to the terrace at the Brighton Hotel which is a beautiful little pink hotel that hangs off the side of a cliff. Dinner at a place like this in Australia would have cost a bomb but was peanuts here (about $20 for 2 ...

... He helped us get another room with a larger bed and private veranda with ocean view for the same price. This place just got better! We are the only guests in the whole hotel so we are getting a lot of personalized service. As of now, we have set ourselves up a makeshift office in the dining room of the restaurant. We've been here all day and we have our own personal waiter/ concierge/ bellboy/ reservationist who's name is Patrick. Life is good.