Best of Santiago (So Far)

Some highlights from my trip to Santiago, Chile:

• Taking the metro. Santiago has really good public transportation and a very clean/safe metro system that's very extensive. Unfortunately it takes me 2 hours to get from where I'm staying in Buin (a suburb of Santiago) to Barrio La Reina in Santiago.
  
• Cheap food and drinks. Sometimes 1/5 the price of Buenos Aires
• Cajon de Maipo. About an hour outside of Santiago in the mountains. Places to hike, hot springs, solitude.

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El Calafate Bike Trip

Here's a summary and some photos of my bike trip this weekend with my advisor and his friend.

Day 1

We left Gallegos around 12 and arrived in Calafte in the late afternoon. From Calafate we drove Lago Roca, about an hour away by dirt road. Lago Roca is pretty rural. There's a small lodge for tourists at the end of the road, a campground, and a camp owned by the Province of Santa Cruz. We stayed at the camp which is owned by the government and is free for residents. It has over 100 bunk beds in around 15 rooms. Visitors also have access to a communal kitchen and dining hall. Very nice. After we unpacked we went for a short 15 km roundtrip ride to the end of the dirt road. There we met two french tourists and I even was able to practice a little of my rusty french. On the way back we got stuck behind a skunk going down the road in the same direction. We kept a safe distance for about 5 minutes until it wondered off into the woods. When we got back Hugo made us homemade pizza.

Day 2

The next morning we drove to the entrance of Parque Nacional de Los Glaciers. From the entrace we rode about 20 Km uphill into the wind to the Perito Merino Glacier. After eating lunch infront of the glacier we rode back (downhill with a tailwind). When we got back to the entrance Hugo prepared an asado (grilled steak).

Day 3

On day 3 Hugo's Calafate friends met up with us at the camp and we rode the 60 Km from Lago Roca to Calafate. There were hardly any cars on the dirt road plus we had a tailwind and were going mostly downhill.

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7 Months

I started to think of all the things I haven’t done since I left for Argentina. Some good, some bad.
-Eaten shrimp
-Eaten tofu
-Consumed high fructose corn syrup
-Driven a car
-Worked
-Vacuumed
-Used a drier
-Taken a test
-Done a math equation

Counting Sheep

Traffic was at a stand still en route to Punta Arenas...

Stay Tuned

I have made a resolution to write at least two entries per week in my blog. This is a huge increase over what I have been doing. I also would like to do some more interactive blogging where people leave responses to questions, etc so if you have any questions for me about my experiences, Argentina or anything else leave a comment on one of my posts and I’ll try to answer them in future blog posts. I’ve also given my blog a slightly new look. Keep checking in!

Books

I watch movies and television in Spanish and I speak Spanish all day long but I have one guilty “English-speaking” pleasure and that’s reading in English. Since my parents brought me books from the United States I have read:
-Stubborn Twig the Oregon Reads book about a Japanese American family in Hood River.
-The Road by Cormac McCarthy
-The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Right now I’m reading On The Road by Jack Kerouac and then I’ll read either Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey or Lion in the White House: The Life of Theodore Roosevelt by Aidan Donald. After that I’ll be out of books in English.

Wishing and Waiting...

So it looks like I'm spending 3 weeks of March in Santiago, Chile. Roundtrip airfare from Punta Arenas (3 hours from Rio Gallegos) to Santiago, Chile? 160$ USD. The only tricky part is we have to buy the tickets in Chile, which means a 3 hour drive to Punta Arenas.

I'm also trying to snag a Radiohead ticket for the 26th in Santiago.

0 tickets down, 2 to go.