A cool tree in Santiago, more from Valparaiso, and some more from Sam's parents' visit

Look at this cool tree we found in Pueblito Los Dominicos in Santiago: 

Look closer, isn't this cool with all the spikes?

And now back to Valparaiso.  There was a street art with mosaics, and some of the pieces were mirror.  It took multiple tries, but I finally got a picture of me reflected in the mosaic:

I really like this one:

And here's a nice view down one of the streets towards one of the hills in Valpo:

Another one I really like.  I think this one is supposed to be a view of the city:

Jerry giving the giant lips a kiss:

A notable thing in Valpo is how many power lines there are, to the point of looking absurd:

Jerry really liked this building because it looks like someone plopped a shiny new glass building inside of a historical building's outside:

Here's a video of us taking the ascensor in Valpo up Cerro Alegre:

The ascensores are very old elevators that take you up and down the hills in Valpo.  They are a little scary, but really fun!  And here we are after lunch in Valpo.  Check out the great view, and try not to notice how weird my hair looks:

Dismembered body parts, red giraffes and nearly nude dancers: Santiago goes all out for culture in January

I have been LOVING Santiago lately. Caroline and I had a great time showing our family and friends the highlights of the city, and I think that helped us appreciate how many cool things Santiago has. Then, just as I was starting to really appreciate it, things kicked into high gear.

This was just as magical as it looks in the picture, and so much more than what I expected going in.

Santiago a Mil

We'd been seeing banners and posters around the city for more than a month, but I still hadn't paid much attention to Santiago a Mil. I knew that it was some sort of arts/theater/culture festival for the month of January, but I figured that just meant a few extra shows and plays, all of which would be in Spanish and probably expensive.

Boy was I wrong.

Have you ever been going about your business in a city, and all of a sudden you discover there is some cool parade, live exhibition, performance, or something, right in the middle of your otherwise perfectly normal city? Santiago a Mil is pretty much like that, for the whole month, spread throughout the entire metropolitan area of Santiago. And we are lucky enough to live very near the heart of the city.

So far we've had three great experiences, and we'll be seeking out more. I'll post about each one of them.

Human Body Parts

I stumbled onto my first public art piece on Monday while helping out on a Bicicleta Verde tour. We had a pretty large group that day, and the tour had just arrived to our penultimate stop in the Plaza de Armas, the very old central plaza of government buildings and the old cathedral. There's always a crowd of people here, but on this day we encountered something a bit more unusual:

Imagine running into these guys when you aren't expecting it, just going about your business!

This was SO COOL! The Plaza had been taken over by giant dismembered body parts hopping around. There was a hand, a foot, a nose and an eye, but the most dramatic one was the giant pacman-like mouth (shown above). People would crowd around taking pictures, and then all of a sudden the mouth would stick out its tongue and make a charge for the crowd. People shrieked and fell back, stumbling over each other, but then they came right back to crowd around again.

If people seem to be ignoring the eye, it's probably because the mouth was nearby. Also, do you think that is a kid or a midget inside?

Working with another tour guide, we had to guard the bikes because the mob of people was coming closer and we were worried that people would stumble back and trip on the bikes. I just stood there with my hands out shouting "Cuidado! Cuidado!" and we mostly prevented anyone from tripping into the bikes.

The mouth drew the most attention. Some little kids were pretty freaked out and crying, and I can sort of see why.

After this crazy and amazing experience, I had to find out about more! I searched the website and found another free outdoor event in our area, called Las Jirafas (the giraffes). So on Wednesday evening, Caroline and I walked over to Parque Bustamante to check it out....read all about it in the next post!

Have you ever discovered a public performance by surprise? They can be so memorable when they are unexpected. Leave a comment to tell about it!

Getting to Iguazu Falls – and the worst cab ride we’ve ever had

Iguazu falls is one of those rare sites that cannot be overhyped. I really believe that no matter how great you expect it to be, it will still exceed your expectations. The waterfalls are just so huge, the environment is so green and lush…it adds up to a beautiful and amazing experience. I had even seen the falls before, when I was here in 2008, but seeing them again was still just as fantastic.

However, our trip to the town of Iguazu did not start auspiciously. Our cab from the airport passed many beautiful looking hotels right near the falls and near the center of town, then kept going, then kept going, then turned down a few dark empty streets and arrived at our hotel, which turned out to be more of a hostel. It was pretty nice as hostels go, but the first impression was a bit…disappointing.

We decided to make the best of it, and we took a cab to a nice restaurant that was a bit of a tourist trap, but hey what can you do. Pretty much the entire town of Puerto Iguazu exists to be a tourist trap near the falls. Oh well.

This band was playing, and while they were not exactly authentic – they played the Fritos Banditos song – they were quite talented. The guy in the black shirt played some really crazy fast parts in a spanish guitar style. The dinner was pretty good, and helped relax everyone after the bummer of a hostel…but then the real fun began.

We had the restaurant call us a cab back to the hostel, and I told the driver the name of our hostel and tried to show him on a little map that he should follow the main street and then turn on Avenida Brasil. Well, you might be able to guess what happened next, if you already knew that the town of Iguazu is right on the border between Argentina and Brazil.

We’re driving along and while it’s pitch black, things don’t look exactly like the way we came. I start to ask him about how much it will cost, and he says 200 pesos. We had only paid 20 on the way there, so in my pretty terrible spanish, I basically say “whoa that’s way too much, pull over immediately.” He stops, and points straight ahead to what we now realize is a border crossing and passport control. We had been just about to try and cross into Brazil. Whoops.

So, we get things cleared up, we all laugh about the confusion a little, and he agrees that 20 pesos is enough to get us only to the hostel. Unfortunately, the craziness of this cab ride wasn’t over yet. Turns out the cab driver has no idea where our hostel is, even when we give him the address. This is especially bizarre because the entire town is like 30 streets, so how can a cab driver not know where our street is.

We’re driving along, trying to figure out where to go, and as we’re going through an intersection, my dad in the front seat all of a sudden shouts and points and the cab driver slams on the brakes, just barely missing a collision with another car coming through the intersection.

Needless to say, this cab drive has been more than crazy enough for all of our tastes. When we finally managed to direct him back to our hostel, I think we were ready to just call it a night. Suddenly the mosquitoes in our room and the falling apart toilet seat didn’t seem to matter too much.

We woke up the next morning to a much better situation. The weather looked great for going to the falls and the hostel had a pretty decent breakfast, including some amazingly delicious pastries. You can see people are looking pretty happy!

 
In case you’re wondering about the long sleeves and long pants, it was going to nearly 100F that day, but Caroline and I had not gotten our yellow fever immunizations and we were trying to be extra careful about mosquito bites. And in case you’re wondering, no, neither of us got yellow fever.

Coming up next, we will tell all about our trip to the falls and share some pictures of amazing flora, fauna and falls.

We totally did NOT get lost in Cajon del Maipo

 
For a long time, I’ve been interested in checking out Cajon del Maipo, the canyon of the river Maipo. I had heard that it was a beautiful natural area up in the mountains just an hour outside of Santiago. Many Chileans had recommended it to me. So even though I started to run a 100F fever while my parents were visiting, I wasn’t about to let that stop me from doing a hike in Cajon del Maipo!

I was very grateful to my dad and Caroline, because the two of them took on the burden of planning the day and this let me just be sick and not worry about anything else. We had a long transportation journey to get to the location of the hike – metro to metro connection, then a cab, then a bus. Whew! But we had started early and we finally arrived ready to hike.

We decided to go without a guide, so my dad and Caroline took a map and led the way.

We started by entering this gate and crossing a bridge across the river. This was the only way in, and the lady at the desk told us it was VERY important that we don’t lose the key to this gate.

We had some beautiful views throughout the hike, and they kept getting better as we went higher and higher up the mountain. You can see the ridge lines in this mountain showing the layers of rock that were pushed up by two tectonic plates coming together to form the Andes mountains.

We made it up to see this very cool waterfall. This was only about an hour of hiking. The guide had told us that we could do either the waterfall (1 hour) or go up to a plateau for a beautiful view (about 3 hours round trip). She did warn us that the longer hike had some steep parts, but she said that was only the first 30 minutes or so.

At the waterfall we ate some lunch that we had packed, then set off to do the longer hike. It turned out to be pretty tough going in parts, but the whole group really stayed positive and powered through. Eventually, it started to seem like we had been going up the steep part for way too long. I also noticed that my dad and Caroline seemed to be having more frequent stops to check the map…and we also hadn’t seen any signs in a long time. My mom commented that she really hoped we weren’t coming back down the same way, because it was steep enough that going down seemed pretty difficult.

After an hour, I was started to get a little worried that we had lost the path. I secretly whispered to Caroline “How sure are you guys that we are going the right way?” and she whispered back “Not that sure…”
But finally, we turned up for yet another switchback, and there was a signpost! We were still on the trail! And if we kept going, we should be able to get down a different (and hopefully easier) way. My dad and Caroline did a big high five at this point, since I think they had gotten a little worried too :)

However, our struggles weren’t quite over yet. The map said that we had to go around a small barn to get back down. We found the barn, and some cows, but we couldn’t figure out how to get around the fenced in pastures. Every way we went, we kept running into fences. Finally, we found a local man looking over his cows and we asked him the way. We were a little worried that we were intruding on private property and he might be mad, but he just pointed us back towards the path.

We made it back down safely, and I think we all felt very accomplished – but also like we had done a bit more hiking than we had really intended. Fortunately, the next day we would pretty much just be sitting in airports and airplanes, so we’d have a chance to relax a little (and I’d have a chance to get healthy!) before we went to Iguazu Falls.

Coming next, our adventures at the falls – they were absolutely spectacular and we can’t wait to tell you all about it!

Valparaiso – gritty and artsy

This post is a little late. We went to Valparaiso on Sunday, December 16, so mentally go back in time before you read this :) This is when my parents were still visiting.

Valparaiso is a port city with a lot of history, located just under two hours away from Santiago. Back in the days of Spanish explorers and conquerors, Valparaiso was a crucial port located mid-way up the west coast of South America. Before the Panama Canal was built, ships that wanted to reach the west coast of North America needed to go around the long way, through the Straights of Magellan in southern Argentina. Valparaiso was the first major port that a ship would encounter when it started heading north.

As you might expect for a port city, it is a little on the dirty and seedy side. However, it has a lot of history (it is a designated World Heritage Site) and also has become a very artsy and bohemian city in recent times.

Our first stop was a hill called Cerro Polanco. It was a very poor and run-down neighborhood, but it had recently been the site of an international street art festival, where graffiti artists from all over came to paint the buildings. Caroline and I had actually been in Valparaiso on the first day of this festival, so we had seen the paintings in their very early stages. It was super cool to come back and see the finished results. There were so many beautiful and original paintings; here are photos of a few.






There were many more. I highly recommend checking out Cerro Polanco if you come to Valparaiso (and it’s free, too!).

Once we finished there, we walked through a very rough-around-the-edges flea market, and then caught a bus across the city to the famous Cerro Concepcion. This is the part of Valparaiso that is a world heritage site, and the hill is filled with twisting streets and passageways, where just around every corner you might find a hidden gallery, a beautiful old building, or a stunning view down to the port.

Caroline and I had made reservations at a restaurant that was supposed to have a great view. It didn’t disappoint!

The food was pretty excellent too. I would definitely recommend the place (the restaurant in the Fauna hotel). After this, we thought our day was pretty much over, but we found one more little surprise. Cerro Concepcion has about a dozen elevators and cable cars, and they all look and run like antiques. You pay the operator 100 pesos (about $0.25), and ride up or down the hill in a contraption that looks straight out of an Indiana Jones movie. In the small photos below, you can see the winch, the view looking down from the top, and then the view back up once we reached the bottom…since yes, we did reach the bottom safely :)

With a great day behind us, we caught a bus back to Santiago. We have so many more adventures to share, so look for upcoming posts. However, we are super lucky to have wonderful friends coming to visit us tomorrow, so we probably won’t be doing a lot of blogging this next week. Hopefully we can catch up in January!

Happy New Year! Feliz Año Nuevo!

Best wishes for 2013! Happy New Year from the Pals!

Seeing Santiago with Sam's Parents

We’ve had a bit of a lull in activity on the blog, but it’s only because we have had such a flurry of activity in our travels (speaking of flurries, are any of you guys getting snow for a white Christmas? We are most definitely not!). I am currently writing this from a very small airport in Iguazu, Argentina, home to one of the most spectacular waterfalls in the world. We have TONS of pictures from that, and I will post about that soon. For now, let’s go back in time by 10 days to my parents’ arrival in Santiago.

On Monday 12/10, they arrived at the airport very late at night. Caroline and I went to meet them at the airport, and it was so wonderful to see some familiar faces! They are staying in another apartment in our same building that we were able to rent by the day, which has made things very convenient.

Tuesday

Their first day in Santiago, we went to visit Caroline’s workplace, the Museo Interactivo Mirador. I will post pictures from this later (my parents have them), but it was really fun! We saw tons of little school kids playing on the exhibits, and Caroline helped steer us towards the best ones. My favorite was the new Earthquake exhibit, called “The Earth…and it moves!” Caroline has written about this before – it has a cool model of the inside of the Earth that uses heat lamps so you feel how the core is very hot. There is a Tsunami wave generator. There was a cool animation of how the tectonic plates have shifted over geological history to shape the continents.

(Did you know that the Indian subcontinent broke off from the landmass of Antarctica and moved VERY quickly to ram into the south of Asia? We saw it fly across the ocean waaaay faster than anything else moved in the animation. I guess that explains why the Himilayas are such a huge and tall mountain range.)

That evening, we went out to the nightlife area to a restaurant called Like Water for Chocolate. It had been highly recommended to us by another American friend, and the place looked beautiful. In the end, it was fine but I don’t think we’d go back there.

After spending only 1 day with us, my parents went right back to the airport and flew to the north of Chile to visit the Atacama desert. Caroline and I went back to our normal routine for a few more days – she was working at the museum, and I finished up my last few tutoring sessions before my students went to summer break.

Friday

My parents arrived back to Santiago, and we had a very nice Friday night dinner and Hanukah on the roof of our building.





 

Saturday

The next morning, my dad and I woke up early and went to synagogue at a place that I had been to before. We had a really nice time. The people were friendly and many spoke English. There was a lunch after services with some pretty good vegetarian food too!

From there, we met up with the ladies at an area in Las Condes called Pueblito Los Dominicos, an area of crafts shops. It was a perfect beautiful day, and we had an excellent time checking out all the little stores. I would definitely recommend it to anyone in Santiago, and I think we will go back there. It’s located near an old church that looked gorgeous in the nice summer weather.



Lunch was a bit of a hassle – first I suggested we go to a metro stop which turned out to have very few restaurant options, then we tried to go to a sushi place we knew but it was closed. We were pretty tired out by the end of the whole day, so that evening for dinner we went to a favorite restaurant called El Huerto. It’s a vegetarian place and has big portions. Check out my delicious mexican platter in this picture!



Coming up next with my parents: our visit to Valparaiso, more time in Santiago, then off to Iguazu to see the falls. More posts coming soon. We are so glad that my parents decided to make a trip down here, and can’t wait for the pals to come visit next week.

Anyone else have fun plans for the holidays? Any vacations to new places? Getting together with friends? We love hearing what’s going on with all of you! Send an email or leave a comment to keep in touch.