Santiago!!

I´ve arrived in Santiago!  Wooohooo! I´ve already had a crazy 24 hours.  In fact, I was lucky to even get here...

The day before I was due to fly I attempted to check into my flight online.  It didn´t work for some reason so I thought I´d just check in at the airport desk.  Luckily, my father convinced me to call the airline and try to check in to beat the queues.... I called up to find that the flight had been cancelled.  And no one had told me!  The next 4 hours involved frantically calling people at Iberia to try and sort it out....fortunately I managed to book on a different flight, but it was touch and go at one point.

Anyway, I got here in the end, so it´s all good!

The weather is ridiculously beautiful - I stepped off the plane to find blue skies and 28 degree sunshine. So far I am yet to see a cloud....I could get used to this.  Santiago is a very laid back city.  Everyone spends their time sitting in cafes or bars chatting away to eachother.  I got to the hostel at 10am, dropped my bag and joined a walking tour.  There isn´t really a huge amount to see in the way of sights in the city - we walked past various government buildings and it was all a bit average.  The highlight for me was "Cafe con Piernas" (coffee with legs), which is a rather strange concept.  You basically drink coffee that is served by girls with long legs.  It´s a cross between a cafe and a strip club - ridiculous!

I spent the rest of the afternoon drinking beer with some people who I met on the walking tour and watching the world go by.  At 4ish I went back to the hostel to check into my room - I walked in, introduced myself to the people in the room. They invited me to go swimming with them so I went straight out again!  We got a taxi to the top of a mountain, where the pool is, to find that we were 4 minutes late and it was closed.  We found a great spot overlooking the city and drank some beer, swapping stories.  This city really is beautiful - Santiago is surrounded by Andean mountains that are snow-capped all year round.

In the evening it was BBQ time at the hostel.  Huge slabs of meat - my kind of BBQ! The usual drinking games applied and we all ended up in a club until 5am.  The locals know how to party! The club didn´t even get busy until 3am and I ended up speaking to a nurse and an air traffic controller, who were both working the next morning (glad I found that out after I´d landed).

Right, I better continue trying to get over this huge hangover.  The hostel breakfast of 3 different kinds of egg has not helped.... Next time I will post something more interesting!