Caroline y Sam en E! Entertainment!

We had a lot of real fun on our fake bike tour :)

This post was originally from Saturday, Sept. 29, but I didn't get around to finishing it until today. So even though it's written in the present tense, remember that it took place a couple weeks ago.

What an exhausting day today! My day started early, since I got up at 8am to go volunteer at La Bicicleta Verde. Even though I'm not getting paid, I really enjoy going to work there. The people are great, and I'm learning a lot - both about bikes and spanish.

After that, Caroline met me at LBV and we went together to La Vega, the major open-air market of the city. We bought a lot of fruits and vegetables, and discovered that they are also booths that sell lots of other things: books, hardware, underwear and socks, bike parts and more. We also tried to go to the food booths and get something very authentic to eat, but the menus were very difficult to understand. It seemed like it was barely even spanish, I could only find a handful of words that were familiar. In the end, we skipped it for today.

Well, after that, we had a fun opportunity. Peter, the owner of La Bicicleta Verde, had asked Caroline and me to come be part of a fake tour that would be filmed for a tourism show on E! Entertainment that is featuring Santiago. We showed up around 5pm, and there was a small film crew and a guy with a microphone acting as the host. The other fake tourists were a mix of nationalities: Chileans, Brazilians and another American.

We got going on the "tour" and it was pretty fun. We didn't actually get much explanation from the tour guide. We just biked around to different photogenic parts of the city, and often had to bike up to a spot repeatedly so that the camera guy could get the shot. They also did a lot of in-motion shots, by having the camera guy ride on the back part of a tandem bicycle (a bicycle built for two, as they say).

Below are a bunch of photos from the fake tour:

This is the fine arts musuem, called Bellas Artes. We haven't been yet, but it's free on Sunday so I'm sure we'll go at some point.

This is a cool ceiling at a cultural center called GAM. The building was constructed during the dictatorship as a seat of government, but in 2006 was re-built and opened as a cultural center.

Another view of GAM

This view of GAM sort of shows the old and the new. On the right is the big concrete pillar from the '70s original construction. On the left is a very modern metal facade that is part of the 2006 reconstruction.

The guy in the green shirt is our tour guide.

Not sure what this is, but kind of cool looking.

We have a tradition of posing in front of sculptures imitating the pose.

I think Caroline did a better job :)

The Bellas Artes museum again.

What a fun day!